Sorry For Your Trouble
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
'The god of small stories … A set of polished gems from a master craftsman' Sunday Times
'He writes about human beings and their disappointments with unfailing insight' Observer
'Finely crafted' Mail on Sunday
'American master' Daily Telegraph
A woman and man, parted a quarter of a century, reunite in a bar in New Orleans as the St Patrick's Day parade goes by. A divorced suburban dad helps his daughter pick out a card for her friend who's moving away. A group of friends in late middle age, all once promising, reunite for dinner when one of their number loses her husband, but the gathering splinters when bitter revelations about their shared past emerge. Two teenage boys sit in a drive-in, the air thick with the scent of gin and popcorn and longing.
A visionary collection of luminous landscapes, of great moments in small lives, of the people we carry with us long after they are gone, Sorry for Your Trouble takes disappointment, ageing, grief, love and marriage and silhouettes them against the heady backdrop of Irish America in the past and present. Earthily humane and profoundly wise, the collection reconfirms its author as the master of contemporary American fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winner Ford's middling collection (after Let Me Be Frank with You) showcases men experiencing glimmers of epiphanies amid the process of mourning. In "The Run of Yourself," a lawyer from New Orleans lives a quiet existence in Maine after his wife's untimely death, and a chance meeting in a bar with a younger woman leads to a platonic sleepover and an eye-opening morning walk on the beach. In "Second Language," Jonathan, a widower who made his millions in Texas oil, begins a new life in New York City with a shaky marriage. After his new wife's mother dies, Jonathan comforts her while realizing they will never really understand each other. In the standout story, "Displaced," 16-year-old Henry reels from his father's death and lives in a rooming house with his mother in Jackson, Miss. Henry befriends Niall, an Irish-American teenager; after they get drunk, Henry lets Niall kiss him, and though he's open to being comforted, he's unwilling to explore a sexual relationship. Ford's unrelenting exploration of life's bleakness and sadness makes these stories enervating, particularly compared to his previous work, though his clear, nuanced prose continues to impress. Ford is a supremely gifted writer, but he's not at his best here.
Customer Reviews
Nobody does it better
Author
American novelist and short story writer now in his late 70s. His novel Independence Day (1995), the second of four volumes about the life and times of disenchanted sports writer Frank Bascombe, won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year. Ford has been compared to, and ranked with, John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and Raymond Carver. Disclaimer: I am an unashamed fan-boi who buys anything Mr Ford publishes sight, and reviews, unseen.
Summary
Nine stories, a couple of novella length, which are not linked although the characters cover similar emotional territory. Settings include Maine, New Orleans and Ireland. Major themes are ambivalence and lost illusions associated with ageing. The mood is often melancholy but never lachrymose, the prose lyrical, but precise. My favourite was 'Displaced.'
Bottom line
If you're not familiar with Mr Ford's work, you might not marvel, as I do, at his ability to generate tension from quotidian subject matter by having characters who have anguished over decisions attempt to follow through on those decisions. To which I say, tough. In the immortal words of Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager, "Nobody does it better."