Product Description

Richard Ford's Independence Day--his sequel to The Sportswriter, and an international bestseller--is the only novel ever to have received both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Now, with Women With Men, he reaffirms his mastery of shorter fiction with his first collection since the widely acclaimed Rock Springs, published a decade ago.

The landscape of Women with Men ranges from the northern plains of Montana to the streets of Paris and the suburbs of Chicago, where Mr. Ford's various characters experience the consolations and complications that prevail in matters of passion, romance and love. A seventeen-year-old boy starting adulthood in the shadow of his parents' estrangement, a survivor of three marriages now struggling with cancer, an ostensibly devoted salesman in early middle age, an aspiring writer, a woman scandalously betrayed by her husband--they each of them contend with the vast distances that exist between those who are closest together. Whether alone, long married or newly met, they confront the obscure difference between privacy and intimacy, the fine distinction of pleasing another as opposed to oneself, and a need for reliance that is tempered by fearful vulnerability.

In three long stories, Richard Ford captures men and women at this complex and essential moment of truth--in the course of everyday life, or during a bleak Thanksgiving journey, seismic arguments, Christmas abroad, the sudden disappearance of a child, even a barroom shooting. And with peerless emotional nuance and authority he once again demonstrates, as Elizabeth Hardwick has written, "a talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #152958 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-28
• Released on: 1998-04-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Library Journal
This audiobook features an unabridged story taken from author Ford's recent collection, Women with Men. As narrator, Ford's voice is melancholic and perfect for evoking the downbeat tone of the work. In brief, a tangle of jealousy erupts among a Montana family, leading directly to the unnecessary death of a total stranger. The telling of the story is enhanced by the program's production values: effective music, good sound quality, and an appropriately somber pace. The story is so subtle that listeners may need to hear it twice to catch a single line in the narrative that is critical for insight into the real cause of the tragic event, never admitted or even spoken by the character responsible for it. A wholly absorbing work for adults.?Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, N.C.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Ford's novel, Independence Day (1995), won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and there is no question that he is a gifted storyteller, albeit a morose and relentlessly precise one. Here, in three powerful long stories, he explores precarious and complicated relationships between men and women. Each tale revolves around the fractured emotions aroused by the dissolution of a marriage: feelings of failure and the dizzying sense of spinning unsteadily and off course through life, like a wheel without an axle. In "The Womanizer," a man who believes he still loves his wife goes to Paris alone on a business trip and becomes obsessed with a Frenchwoman, an awkward and futile pursuit with a near-disastrous denouement. In "Jealousy," set in a bleak little Montana town, a 17-year-old finds himself skewered on the sharp psyches of his unhappily separated parents and lonely aunt Doris (a wonderful character with a taste for schnapps, a pink Cadillac, and a red dress). Ford returns to Paris in "Occidentals," rendering the city intolerably gray and extremely dangerous to the mental health of its fuzzy-minded American visitors. All of Ford's magnetic characters seem permanently jet-lagged, woozy with displacement and disappointment, and their troubles escalate accordingly, with surreal and sickening inevitability. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
A reader meeting Ford via these three pieces might wonder why laurels of the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner kind have befallen this (The Sportswriter, 1986; Independence Day, 1995) particular writer. He here offers two grinding tales of distasteful Americans in Paris and one clone-of-Hemingway story about a boyhood in Montana. In ``The Womanizer,'' Martin Austin, married but childless, becomes interested in a Frenchwoman named Josephine when he's in Paris on business. The difficulty is--for Austin and for the reader--that he seems not to know what he wants either with her or from her, with the result that Ford offers page after page of clunky vacuity as if simply to put something between start and the end of the story (``He wasn't looking for a better life. He wasn't looking for anything. He loved his wife, and he hoped to present to Josephine Belliard a different human perspective from the ones she might be used to''). More revelatory in this unrelenting non-tale is what Ford says of Austin later--that ``very little pleased him much at all.'' The main character in ``Occidentals'' is, if anything, even more dreary than Austin. Ex-academic Charley Matthews has written a novel about his divorce and is now quite joylessly in Paris--with mistress Helen--to meet his French publisher and translator. Trouble is, as he quickly discovers, both are out of town for a few days, so he'll have to wait. Helen--a lively ex-dancer who's suffering from cancer--tries to cheer him up; he grows only more hatefully dour, though, until she takes things--perhaps believably to some--into her own hands. ``Jealousy'' makes for a breath of fresh air with its Montana landscape and Hemingway-esque economies--as a boy, accompanied by his attractive young aunt, witnesses a saloon killing on a snowy night before catching a train to Seattle. Scraps and leavings, seemingly, caught between the labored and the imitated. (First printing of 75,000) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Take Two
I think this is one of Richard Ford's best along with Wildlife, Rock Springs, and The Ultimate Good Luck. The subject matter and setting are quite different from the Americana we've come to expect from him, yet the depth of insight is there in maybe even more intensity than in any other works. I rank the first story, The Womanizer, up there with more obvious and less subtle works by Camus concerning "the human condition" While some reviwers found the protagonist lacking direction and substance, I felt that this was precisely WHY this story was so good. Ford has managed to portray a character who is non-commital and self-deceptive to the point of ridiculousness. He is an onion skin of lies and apathy floating back and forth between Paris and the US under the illusion that he is having an affair with a woman that he really doesn't care about. There are so many great scenes in here from the one where he imagines himself in court with his wife to when he presents the little boy with a gift. Ford undermines him with irony from start to finish and presents us with incredible detail and insight a character who is fundementally vague and doesn't even know himself let alone others. A classic of the short novel which should be ranked with the best of Peter Handke in this genre. There is a little of this protagonist in all of us. Well done.

Portraits of Depression
Richard Ford's Women with Men is a collection of three short stories. The first and third seem closely related. They focus on two men from the Midwest, both entering middle age, and both profoundly confused and clueless. The city of Paris features prominently in both stories. The third, story, much shorter and sandwiched between the Paris tales is a sort of coming of age tale of a teenage boy in Montana. It seems somewhat out of place.

In the first story, "The Womanizer", Martin Austin a supposedly happily married man, has traveled to Paris for a business trip where he finds himself intrigued by a somber, enigmatic woman undergoing a painful divorce. The story chronicles what happens when Austin becomes unaccountably obsessed with her. In the other Paris story, "Occidentals", Charley Matthews, whose wife has recently abandoned him, is visiting Paris on business, accompanied by his lover, Helen. I found both stories painful and dreary but was struck by how congruent Ford's writing style was with the psyche of the characters. Both the characters and the writing are ponderous, and humorless and grim. The result is an unusually intense portrayal of unconscious grief, depression, and delusion and quiet despair among men (and the women in their lives) who are groping for meaning and purpose in a soul-dead existence, and who are floundering for human connection without the slightest capacity for autheticity or intimacy.

A required read for Ford fans
This collection of stories extends a major theme in Ford's work: women sans men do just fine. Drop a male or two into the picture, and the problems start to pile up. This collection throws this thematic cream pie in your face. It's not a subtle message; the title's obvious poke at Hemingway gives it away before Page One. Fortunately, its thematic constructs do not overshadow the absolute quality of the work. Ford is a premier American writer, and this volume upholds his lofty standing, although it may not raise it to the next level (whatever that may be). Still, there are nits to pick. To the well initiated, these stories may well read like highly developed drafts of finer works to come. While the characters are true and well-developed, they lack a certain depth of those in other Ford works. And the internal dialogs, for which Ford is famous, sometimes border on whining, particularly in the third story, Occidentals. If you're not a Ford fan, these shortcomings may leave you searching for a more engaging read. Still, anyone interested in serious American literature, should check out Women with Men.