Volume 49, Number 12 · July 18, 2002
After You've Gone
By Thomas R. Edwards
A Multitude of Sins
by Richard Ford
Knopf, 286 pp., $25.00
A Multitude of Sins, a new collection of short stories, is Richard Ford's eighth book of fiction, and it prompts some reflections on his literary career. His first two novels were powerful and promising, no less so for the evident literary influences at work in them. Ford has never been reluctant to acknowledge debts to Faulkner, Robert Stone, Raymond Carver, Walker Percy, John Barth, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, and many others.[*] A Piece of My Heart (1976), a tale of fatal desire and violence in rural Mississippi, is distinctly Faulknerian, not least in its moments of fine vernacular comedy. Ford, born (in 1944) and raised in Mississippi himself, sensibly chose not to become just another regional novelist, and he next wrote The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), a noir thriller about gringos caught up in Mexican drug trafficking, which owes something to the early Robert Stone.
Review, 3199 words
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