‘Women With Men’ explores the colder side of relationships
BOOK:Author Richard Ford traces love and loss through three
stories
By Nerissa Pacio
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Love is pink laced hearts on Valentine’s Day, swooning romantics
on a hot August afternoon, and gondola rides with no particular
destination except a gaze between lovers.
But in "Women With Men," Richard Ford writes of the
diametrically opposite end of the spectrum of love: the side that
aches like a cold stare or empty embrace, that stings like a punch
in a bar room brawl or that lingers like the stench of a cancerous
death.
In three lengthy stories, Ford, the only writer to have won both
the Pulitzer prize and PEN/Faulkner award, unravels volatile
relationships between the sexes. With backdrops stretching from the
suburbs of the Midwest to the streets of Paris, Ford details the
psychological misgivings, self-examinations and regrets of three
male characters who have loved and lost (or at least witnessed the
loss) of the women in their lives.
In "The Womanizer," the first of Ford’s short story trilogy,
Martin Austin, a married Chicago salesman, travels to Paris on
business. There he meets the mysteriously sensual Joséphine
Belliard at a cocktail party. This soon to be divorced French
woman, whose life is overturned when her husband writes a tell-all
novel of her adulterous nature, captures Austin’s attention at that
point of his identity crisis.
Austin contemplates an extramarital affair as an anchor to mark
how "the next twenty-five years of his life might be as eventful
and important as the previous twenty-five." Austin loses both his
wife and his potential mistress as a result of his mental limbo
about who he belongs with. Ultimately, this question is answered
for him as both women walk away and he ends up alone.
Ford’s selective details and tempered prose appear immediately
in "The Womanizer." As if peering through a frosted glass window
into the narrator’s life observing a hazy distorted version of the
truth, Ford’s narrator vacillates between questioning and
requestioning, answering and doubting, wondering and knowing
simultaneously who he is and who he wants to be.
Themes of intimacy’s façade and love’s fantasy are
prevalent throughout the novel. For example, though he professes
love and loyalty to the women in his life, Joséphine responds
with a disconnected attitude after Austin returns to Paris to be
with her while Austin’s wife explodes after seeming to be
completely sedate on the telephone. Austin creates his own
illusions and is therefore a victim of his own self-shattering
reality.
In Ford’s second story, "Jealous," a drunken woman named Doris,
whose husband mysteriously disappeared in the past, takes her
nephew, Larry, on a haphazard trip. They head from Montana to
Seattle where his mother, now divorced from his father, lives.
On his way, Larry learns lessons on life and love  from
his Aunt’s confession that she always thought his father married
"the wrong sister," to the shock witnessing a barroom shootout
between a criminal and the law. Larry is thrown into a whirlwind of
other people’s realities that inevitably become his own.
Larry recalls his father saying, "Love’s just what two people
do, Larry. It’s not a religion." Young Larry’s ideas of love are
shaped through the shattered experiences of fleeting romances in
his father and aunt’s lives, two people who themselves may have
once been involved.
While Ford reveals a keen ability to describe sensory images
such as the smell of sweat in Doris’ hair, the noisy commotion in
the bar and the sight of farm lights shone upon a snowy barricade,
his eloquence falls short when it comes to character descriptions.
Ford renders few descriptions of physical appearance or character
background leaving readers with little on which to base opinions or
connections to them. Events are disconnected and episodic, the
shallowness reminding the reader that such observations must be
pure fiction.
"Occidentals," the last of Ford’s stories, is perhaps his most
captivating. While he still clings to a disconnected style of
character description, Ford reveals the story of Helen, a woman of
several previous marriages now roaming Paris in a final effort to
drown the pain of her cancer. Narrated by her lover Charley
Matthews, a writer waiting to be published in French translation
after his failure in the States, he analyzes what love is, wanting
to hold Helen yet run from her, never looking back.
Matthews searches for meaning in thoughts of his own failed
marriage that resulted in a child he rarely sees. Even at the brink
of death, Helen brings reality and true meaning to his writer’s
world of fabricated words, exaggerated images and overanalyzation
of his own importance. Even dying of cancer, she dresses with
lavish gaudiness, flourishing into a room, encompassing as a human
metaphor the entirety of pure contradiction that occurs in each
story. She seems unreal, larger than life in garish clothing and
sweeping movements, and yet it is Helen who reminds Charley of
reality:
"Do you love Paris now? Do you feel like you’re the center of
everything? Because you’re certainly not."
Ford’s prose falls somewhere in between the extreme of Tolstoy’s
precise detail-oriented descriptions and Faulkner’s disjointed
stream of consciousness. However, his style remains uniquely cool
and clean, simple yet loaded with meaning in memory, forethought
and conclusion. Though some points of the stories reach contrived
and unrealistic barriers, the themes of "Women With Men" are
undying and universal, as eternal as the trials and tribulations
between the sexes.