Forbidden Fruit

Richard Ford, who was raised in Mississippi and has spent a lot of time in Montana, where the standard obituary often ends, “and he was an avid hunter and fisherman,” has hunted all his life.

“Only the hunter, who imitates the permanent vigilance of wild animals, is capable of seeing everything,” he quotes philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in a Le Monde essay published in 1996, when Fordwas honored by the French cultural ministry for his work just before being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel “Independence Day.” In the 10 cautionary tales in his third collection of short stories, “A Multitude of Sins,” Ford brings a hunter’s steady, subtle and precise observation to an exploration of the commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.” All senses alert, the writer tracks the behaviors of America’s wandering unfaithful through the motels and hotels and bars where they come to grips with their passions.

Although many of the narrators show kinship with Frank Bascombe, the self-absorbed divorced father of Ford’s novels “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day,” these new stories are marked by a growing richness and maturity of voice. Ford’s observations are more rooted in the complex realm of the past, where actions have ongoing reverberations, than in the immediate sensual world. As in his 1997 collection, “Women With Men,” his focus here is on relationships--on cheating husbands and wives, on parents who run off and leave their yearning children behind. But in this case the settings are not Paris and Montana but American cities like New Orleans, Chicago and New York.

His couples are relatively straightforward in desire. Nothing kinky here; one senses that most of them simply want to find out how it feels to spend time with someone new. But there is more to these stories than near-supernatural perceptions. In Ford’s particularly American universe, marital transgressions have consequences ranging from impending malaise to sudden death. Hell is following through on the impulse to stray--and then having second thoughts.

In “Reunion,” a man has a chance encounter in Grand Central Station with the husband of a woman he had been involved with a year or so before. His recollection of their relationship puts the moral in a nutshell: “At any distance but the close range I saw it from, it was an ordinary adultery--spirited, thrilling, and then, after a brief while, after we had crossed the continent several times and caused as many people as possible unhappiness, embarrassment and heartache, it became disappointing and ignoble and finally almost disastrous to those same people.”

“Privacy,” the least of these stories, is the most solipsistic of the lot. The narrator thinks back to the time when his marriage was still happy. Even then, he would wait until his wife was asleep and watch a neighbor woman undress and dance in the nude. “It was all arousal and secrecy and illicitness and really nothing else,” he recalls. And in no time, the thrill was gone.

In “Calling,” a New Orleans lawyer leaves his wife and son for a man but returns one last time to initiate his son, home from military school over Christmas break, into the masculine ritual of duck hunting. The son, now grown, recalls, “ ... my father did only what pleased him, and believed that doing so permitted others the equal freedom to do what they wanted. Only that isn’t how the world works, as my mother’s life and mine were living proof. Other people affect you. It’s really no more complicated than that.”

The story brings to mind an earlier first-person coming-of-age tale, “Great Falls,” from Ford’s 1987 collection, “Rock Springs,” in which a boy and his father return home from duck hunting to discover a young airman with the mother. The father sends her packing. The next day she arranges to see her son one last time before leaving town. With the grave wisdom of a teenager absorbing life’s deepest blows for the first time, the boy senses that his life has changed. “As I walked toward school, I thought to myself that my life had turned suddenly, and that I might not know exactly how or which way for possibly a long time. Maybe, in fact, I might never know.” It is a measure of Ford’s artistic maturity--how far he has come as a writer and observer--that the older narrator in “Calling” has the self-awareness to flush out a more complicated and resigned, if bleaker insight than that of the boy in “Great Falls”: “I am not interested in the whys and wherefores of what [my father] did and didn’t do, or in causing that day to seem life-changing for me, because it surely wasn’t. Life had already changed. That morning represented just the first working out of particulars I would evermore observe. Like my father, I am a lawyer. And the law is a calling which teaches you that most of life is about adjustments, the seatings and re-seatings we perform to accommodate events occurring outside our control ... so that when I am tempted ... to let myself become preoccupied and angry with my father ... I try to realize again that it is best to just offer myself release and to realize I am feeling anger all alone, and that there is no redress.”

“Abyss,” the novella-length finale to the collection, is a marvel, a shimmering mirage of a story that starts in Mystic, Conn., and shifts into the glare of the Arizona desert. In supple, lyrical language, Ford gives us a dark and specific emotional analysis of an affair that begins with a “large, instinctual carnal attraction” between Frances and Howard, who meet at a real estate industry awards banquet, where they were named Connecticut Residential Agents of the Year.

The attraction was the kind, Frances thought, “animals probably feel all the time, and that made their lives much more bearable.” Risking the loss of their jobs as well as their marriages, the two arrange clandestine meetings at motels like a Howard Johnson under the interstate near Mystic and decide to reconvene at a sales conference in Phoenix. There, Frances impulsively invites Howard to drive with her to the Grand Canyon for what she expects to be a mystical experience. On the road, familiarity quickly breeds irritation.

Ford presents the brief crescendo and lengthy diminuendo of their liaison as a tragicomic duet, shifting with breathtaking fluidity from his point of view (“She was hateful, he thought. Flattening a rabbit [on the highway] wouldn’t be the half of it. It was probably how she sold houses: a steam-roller, never relenting”) to hers (“And now he was beginning to ruin things, just the way she’d feared but had promised herself not to let him.... She felt willing to push him right out the door onto the road, using her foot”).

Hell, Howard decides, is a spot in the desert that is “dry, empty, bright, chilly, alien, and difficult to breathe in,” a stone’s throw from an Indian casino and a crummy little chapel with a wooden sign reading “Chris Died for Your Sins.” At their destination, Frances is blissful; he is petulant (the canyon is, he thinks, the opposite of real estate: big but empty). She insists upon a personalized snapshot. Her fierce will, like the grandmother’s in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” brings her a brutal sort of grace. And Howard learns an awful lesson: “What you did definitely changed things.” Forever.

There are other echoes of O’Connor here, in the harsh wit and preoccupation with good and evil, in the author’s willingness to let characters seem shallow, even despicable. But Ford has moved beyond the small-town South to encompass the comedy and pathos and wit of our dislocated times, the rhythms of the workaday world and the emptiness that comes at the end of the day to the lobbyist, the lawyer, the retired cop who dreams of starting over again in East Whatever, Maine.

Whether it’s with the broad canvas of “Independence Day,” or with “A Multitude of Sins,” which reminds us how powerful short stories can be, Ford delivers a piercing look at the ways men and women deceive and disappoint each other.

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Jane Ciabattari is the author of the forthcoming short story collection “Stealing the Fire” and a contributing editor to Parade magazine.