Women with Men by Richard Ford Harvill, 255pp, £14.99 in UK
There are novelists whose work dazzles the reader with the brilliance of its surfaces, so that one seems not to read but absorb the text, as the eye will absorb the scattering lights of a handful of precious stones. In this context, "precious" is an ambiguous adjective. Passages in Nabokov or Updike can positively blur the sight. Such work demands to be re-read, and re-re-read, before it will give up its multi-faceted meanings. There is another kind of writer, who seems to speak out plainly and directly, but whose effects are no less luminous than those of their more incandescent colleagues. One of the finest exemplars in the latter category is the American, Richard Ford.
Ford is the author of five novels, at least two of which - The Sportswriter, and its even finer sequel, Independence Day - are modern masterpieces. He has also produced, in Rock Springs, a superb collection of short stories. Now comes Women with Men, a trio of novellas, two set in Paris and one in the more familiar Ford territory of small-town Montana. Together, they form the finest work of American fiction likely to appear this year, and perhaps for a good many years to come.
The three tales do not look like much. It is Ford's peculiar gift to seem to be ambling about with no particular point in view, only to arrive suddenly at the place where, with hindsight, we realise he has been heading all along. His trademark is the crystallising moment of upheaval, physical or spiritual, recounted with a dreamy matter-of-factness. One of his pivotal paragraphs can be far more effective than many pages of gaudy, tough-guy stridency.
Ford is a master of what might be called significant inconsequence. His prose is a seamless weave, so that it is impossible to say just how he manages to bring off the aesthetic detonations that light up every page. As one of his characters remarks, "Of course it's not what happens, it's what you do with what happens." Here is a scene from the second story, "Jealous", narrated by a teenage boy being taken to Seattle by his aunt, to visit his mother. They stop at a bar, and talk to an Indian called Barney. Later, the law arrives, looking for Barney; there is gunfire, and Barney is killed.
"Okay," I heard Barney say to the policeman in a loud, odd voice. "I'm all shot up now. You shot me up. You shot me. I don't feel good now."
Two other deputies, ones who hadn't shot, ran into the little hallway, right in front of Doris and me, though a third one knelt beside the man who'd held the flashlight. "I'm all right," that man said. "I'm not shot." His white hat was on the floor. I heard the bartender say, "Oh, my heavens," though I couldn't see her.
Then Barney - it must've been him - said, "How are you?" almost in a casual voice, then he yelled, "Ohhhhhh," and then he said, "Stop that! Stop that!" And then he was quiet.
"Jealous" is the most laconic of the three pieces, and the one that most strikingly echoes Hemingway, in a collection with what is surely a direct reference to Hemingway in its title. Ford's Paris, however, is no moveable feast, but an almost hallucinatory city of rainy, jet-lagged afternoons and inexplicable gunshots in the night. In the first tale, "The Womanizer", Martin Austin, a Chicago businessman, on one of his regular visits to Paris, has the shaky beginnings of an affair with an enigmatic and seemingly unhappy Frenchwoman whose estranged husband has publicly disgraced her by publishing a novel containing a lightly fictionalised, intimate portrait of her. Returned to Chicago, Austin gets into a bitter argument with his wife, who walks out on him. He returns immediately to Paris, and tries to get the affair going with the Frenchwoman, but all turns grotesquely wrong, when he manages to lose her young son in the Luxembourg Gardens; the boy is found, but the possibility of love is lost. At the close, Austin wonders: "How could you regulate life, do little harm and still be attached to others?" It is the question that all Ford's perplexed, harassed, emotionally damaged protagonists ask, in one form or another.
The final, and longest, piece in the book, "Occidentals", is one of the three finest American short stories since the war (the other two are Tobias Woolf's "Hunters in the Snow" and William Gass's "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country"). Charley Matthews is a hapless academic (he drifted into teaching Afro-American fiction not through any enthusiasm for the genre, but because a vacancy came up) and the author of a single, small novel. He has come to Paris to meet his French translator. He is in the process of being divorced by his wife, and has brought with him on the trip his friend - one could not put it stronger than that - Helen Carmichael, a 45-year-old "big, pushy blonde" (her own formulation), who is intent on "doing" Paris: she wants to climb the Eiffel Tower, walk up the Champs Elyssee, and find a perfect restaurant where they will enjoy an "incomparable meal".
Helen is a marvellous creation. Ford's portrayal of her, in all her loudness, enthusiasm, and, finally, pathos, will surely put to rest mutterings that he is a "man's writer" and incapable of drawing a convincing female character. From her first entrance, rain-wet and bubbling tourist French, she is so vividly present that poor Charley practically fades off the page. " `You're already happier'," she tells him. " `I've translated you into being happy. We'll have you singing in no time." But Helen is nursing a cancer, and in the end it will be Charley the writer who survives, while her incomparable meal - steak-and-potatoes in a brash expat restaurant where the native French would not be seen dead - turns to ashes in her mouth.
"Occidentals" is at once funny and heartbreaking, as Ford's work usually is. The portrait of the American businessman Rex and his ageing hippie wife - she bears the incongruous yet somehow perfect nickname, "Cuddles" - is horribly comic. In this tale, too, he plumbs new, deeper depths of sorrow than ever before. The steely way in which Austin, for all his haplessness, secures himself against ordinary human hopes and hungers, as personified by poor, dying Helen, is chilling, yet curiously moving. The lightness of touch with which Ford achieves this effect, and so many others in this wonderfully varied book, is one of the measures of his art. This is fiction at its finest.
John Banville is Literary Editor of The Irish Times