Insistent and exquisite, Ford gives us a meditation on a theme. Using adultery as a filter, he examines the range of everyday sins that accompany lives unrealized and disconnected. Adultery is the frozen tip, making the movement under the water visible.

This is not the book to look to for big events. The drama largely happens off stage. The moments of violence are dulled-- killing time more than killing each other. It makes for the kind of sinning that you may not expect, but is probably more real to the real lives of people than the more Hollywood variety.

I can understand the criticism of the book, both here and elsewhere. Ford is so interested in the problem that he explores it from every angle and there is a sameness to many of these stories as they seem to conceptually pick up where the others left off. I was fascinated, bored, impatient and finally fascinated again by the project.

I can think of very few writers who are more skilled than Ford. I would recommend this book to virtually anyone who enjoys good prose. Honestly, the novels (Independence Day is my favorite) are probably easier to read, and may serve as a good introduction to the way that the author handles his subject matter.

excellent stories, but what else is new.....Ford is the man in in the new century---walker percy and Phillip roth in one lean and mean passage---but I really want one more ralph bascombe novel....please, please please

This book is excelent!
The ascetic and precise use of the words is perfect to me.
The empathy to express so different and vivids charla tres

Richard Ford never disappoints.

Not Ford's best. Many of the stories feel the same and labored. The theme of infidelity ranks high on the frequency meter.

I have never liked short stories. I started reading these bc it was a coffee table book when staying at friends house. First few were good. Enjoyed about 50% of the stories but, remember, I'm not a fan of short stories.

Richard Ford has two writing modes, the brutal,stark Hemingway mode (Rock Springs, Wildlife) and the cutesy, prissy mode (Independence Day, A Multitude of Sins). He is a good writer in either mode but I prefer the Hemingway mode.
Unfortunately for me he uses the cutesy, prissy mode in A Multitude of Sins. In this mode he knows a little too much about women's clothes, furniture, paintings, foreign languages, and makes too many references to books nobody has ever read. How many people do you know who have read The Inferno? Give me a break.( We get it, Richard, you're no longer a Mississippi hick) I certainly don't believe you have to be an effin bullfighter to be a man, but these prissy characters just don't interest me. I read the first three stories and I chunked A Multitude of Sins in the garbage. I'm sure my garbage man will enjoy it.

Richard Ford is a brilliant writer. The "techniques" of writing he has definitely mastered: dramatic tension, foreshadowing, incisive dialogue, et al. But I still recall the remark of a high school physics teacher who said: "I know people who can speak three languages, and have nothing to say in any of them." Ford is NOT one of those. He has the narrative skills, but more importantly, he has so much to say, particularly on the relationship between men and women. Sometimes noble; but all too often, ignoble. Just like in real life. Often there may be that experience that you believe has only occurred to you... and there it is, much more "universal" than you thought, in black and white, described by Ford. I've read most of Ford's works: Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy (2),The Sports Writer,Rock Springs The Ultimate Good Luck,Wildlife, and Women with Men : Three Stories. There are elements of each of these books in this one, but the subject matter covered most nearly resembles "Women with Men," and "Rock Springs."

This volume is comprised of ten short stories, or, if you will, nine, with the novella, "Abyss." For some reason the publisher started with the weakest, and shortest story, "Privacy," a brief look at the voyeurism fantasy. "Quality Time" concerns an affair with an older, rich woman in the Drake Hotel, in Chicago. "Calling" is primarily set in New Orleans, and involves a duck hunting trip, and the relationship between a coming-of-age son, and his now out-of-the-closet gay father. "Reunion" involves another affair, set in St. Louis, and the subsequent meeting of the husband and lover in Grand Central Station in NYC. "Puppy" is also set in New Orleans, and how an abandoned puppy might threaten a marriage. Doing a "Robert Frost" could become incorporated in your vocabulary after this story. "Crèche" depicts a highly dysfunctional family on a ski trip in upper Michigan, and involves the only story which alludes to a non-consensual consummation of a relationship. "Dominion" is set in Canada; another affair, and a very different twist in the denouement. "Charity" involves a married couple, an ex-police officer and his public defender wife vacationing in Maine, and covers the "mid-life" crisis contemplating how a change in locale might alter their lives. "Abyss" is yet another affair, between a couple married to others. They are both in real estate, a touchstone of Ford in "Independence Day." The "abyss" is the Grand Canyon, which they decide to visit. Metaphorically, of course, the "abyss" is so much more.

Bons Mots? Of course there are more than a few. Consider: "Everyone gets to think he wins, though no one does. That was extremely lawyerly." Or, "Possibilities would diminish. Life would cease to be an open, flat plain upon which you walked with a chosen other, and become instead cluttered, impassable." Or, "It was her doing, she thought; she'd invented him, turned him into someone she had a use for. His real intelligence was not to resist." And, Canada, eh: "It seemed very Canadian. Canada, in so many ways, seemed superior to America anyway. Canada was saner, more tolerant, friendlier, safer, less litigious."

A marvelous, penetrating examination of the complex emotional issues surrounding the transient, or more permanent liaisons among men and women. Richard Ford is one of the very best chroniclers of American life today. 5-stars plus.