Richard Ford’s Short Fiction: a New Yorker Sampler

by FLF on Mar 12th, 2008

American author Richard Ford, who will attend the FLF this May, was the first to win the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction – literary accolades with a prestige similar to that of the Man Booker Prize – in the same year. This was 1995, when the second book in his acclaimed Bascombe series, Independence Day, was published.

The first in the series is the piece of writing for which Ford is perhaps best-known, The Sportswriter; and the third, The Lay of the Land was a New York Times book of the year in 2006.

Despite his success as a novelist, however, Ford’s most avid followers quite possibly derive from readers of his short fiction. He is a prolific short story writer, one who invites comparison to Nadine Gordimer in his ability to conjure memorable scenes with just a few sentences, seemingly out of thin air.

The New Yorker magazine is a stalwart publisher of Ford’s short fiction – his latest story, set in post-Katrina New Orleans, appearing in the 3 March 08 edition. Luckily for South African readers, it’s been made available online:

Leaving for Kenosha

It was the anniversary of the disaster. Walter Hobbes was on his way uptown to pick up his daughter, Louise, at Trinity. She had the dentist at four. Then the two of them were going for a hilariously early dinner at the place Louise liked—Papa Andre’s—out on the Chef Highway, a roadhouse on stilts that the flood had missed. Then they were going back to his condo for her homework and a Bill Murray movie. This was New Orleans.

It was their day. Betsy, Louise’s mother, was driving out to appraise some subdivision plats in Mississippi, then was staying at Mitch Daigle’s, across the lake. Which meant double whiskey sours and maybe a joint and some boiled shrimp. Walter and Betsy had been divorced for a year. Betsy had fallen in love with Mitch while she was showing him a house—a present he had planned for his wife for their twentieth anniversary. An anniversary that didn’t quite come off. Now and then Walter saw Mitch’s ex-wife, Hasty, at the Whole Foods. Hasty was once a great, auburn-haired stunner, from someplace in north Alabama—a former Miss Something at U.A.B. Now she’d grown a little sturdy in the middle. In the Whole Foods she always glared at Walter, as if he’d dispatched Betsy into her life to commit espionage on her perfect marriage.