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Review by James William Brown
The women in "Women With Men," Richard Ford's collection of three long stories, do not fare well in their lives. Take Helen Carmichael in "Occidentals." Her lover, Charlie Matthews, thinks of her as having a "bigger-than-life quality . . . though not necessarily bigger and better."
Helen also has terminal cancer but she's making the best of a few days in Paris with Charlie who's her former teacher and a writer, there to meet with his French publisher. Paris is no more than a thinly described backdrop but as Helen says, "When you think about Paris, you don't have to think about yourself and what might be wrong with you."
The last brave day of her life is spent in their seedy hotel room, while Charlie ponders his own life as he wanders around the city he described entirely from guide books in his single published novel. Paris is seen in virtually the same way by Martin Austin, an American salesman, in "The Womanizer." He also wanders those Parisian streets, pondering a possible affair with Josephine, a Frenchwoman met at a publisher's party.
In the course of his deliberations, Martin manages to do unintentional damage both to his American wife, Barbara, and to Josephine, whose son he carelessly loses in a park. He wonders finally, "How could you regulate life, do little harm and still be attached to others?"
It's a good question -- one of the hard ones -- and in it and others raised by these two similar stories lies their strength. The portraits here of damaged women are less compelling than the issues sparked by their collisions with Ford's relentlessly pondering men. Like Frank Bascombe in "The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day," Martin Austin and Charlie Matthews frequently lose their footing and try to regain it in their own kind of hesitation waltz.
The most moving of the three stories is "Jealous," in which 17-year-old Larry, along with his Aunt Doris, witnesses a brutal shootout in a bar. The incident occurs partway through a journey to visit Larry's mother. But it suggests Larry's larger journey, as he starts to take on his own life, away from the problems of his separated parents and his schnapps-tippling Aunt Doris.
She looks out of her own chaotic life into Larry's new one and is tempted, but pulls back. Larry, looking ahead, has the feeling ". . . that you're suffocating and your life is running out." But he understands that he can control this; it's all up to him.
"Jealous" is a fine story, a caught moment in the evolution of a young man making his way through the disaster-strewn lives of adults around him. All three stories in "Women with Men" look at the consequences of change and the likelihood of damage control. Responsiblity for both, it seems, remains in the hands of the individual, where it's been all along.
James William Brown is a writer in Massachusetts.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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