Adrift in the male doldrums
Anita Brookner
WOMEN WITH MEN by Richard Ford Harvill, f14.99, pp. 255 Richard Ford's heroes, markedly _unheroic, live through a series of glum but sweet-natured intentions, with only one half-realised desire, 'not to be the centre of things'. In this they succeed. In The Sportswriter, Ford's finest novel, Frank Bas- combe was propelled through life by a puz- zled and vulnerable desire to get it right: he at least did succeed, but in Independence Day he was further immobilised by middle- aged accretions, as was the novel. Cut adrift by more decisive women, Bascombe's latter-day avatars, Martin Austin and Charley Matthews, have reached a place where 'events, reliances, just began to work out not right for seemingly no reason, then life began to descend into disastrous straits'. Their predicament (Matthews has even written a novel called The Predica- ment) makes these three long short stories a strangely exhausting and comfortless experience. Nor is this accidental. This is what happens to the unheroic hero, who, we feel, should be doing a little more on our behalf, should make more of an effort, or at least buy a decent map. For Austin and Matthews are in Paris, the Paris known to the unskilled tourist, a Paris of chilly down-market hotels, cold winds, and can- celled appointments. If it weren't for the women they have fixed their sights on, but in a remarkably half-hearted manner, we could leave them there, eternally ponder- ing whether to give up their American lives in order to inaugurate a new 'era'. Since they are almost entirely without volition this seems unlikely.
Martin Austin, a salesman of fine quality paper, is in Paris, which he somehow expected to be in the centre of France. He is attracted by a woman called Josephine Belliard, and for no very good reason apart from impatience and the author's preoccu- pation, decides to move there and make a life with Josephine. Their courtship con- sists of the two of them sitting mutely in her car. She is bad-tempered, ill-mannered, and as a character altogether fully realised; she pays him little attention, and this lack of attention speaks directly to his rumina- tive and absent-minded temperament. Since she has to see her lawyer to sign divorce papers he offers to look after her four-year-old son, shuts the door to her flat, to which he has no key, and takes the child to the Luxembourg Gardens where he loses him. Unable to speak French, and having no sense of direction, he eventually finds the child naked in the undergrowth. This of course is the end of the affair. But the shocking event, arrived at dreamily, with a complete lack of affect, merely inducts Austin into a further set of reflec- tions. He is still in Paris, alone, and won- dering about his wife Barbara, who has described him as 'detached, unreachable'. `Could you become that?' He promises himself that he will think about it, and assuredly he will, since this is the psychic state which Richard Ford obviously consid- ers appropriate for a man who has no decided views on any subject, a state which may or may not convince the reader. Or take Charley Matthews, who has come to Paris to meet the translator of his novel, only to find that she is absent and that his publisher is about to take off for the Indian Ocean. Charley is travelling with his mistress, Helen, who is ill, but otherwise droll, jolly and determined. Leaving a note for Helen in their freezing hotel room, Charley sets out on an indeterminate stroll. He is hungry, has had nothing to eat since the previous evening, when Helen talked him into dining with two friends of hers in a terrible restaurant, but if he stops for lunch he will not be back in time for Helen. Helen, however, has staged a non-appear- ance of her own. Again, a shocking event fails to penetrate Charley's remote self- translator. These stories have inadequate titles: The Womaniser', 'Occidentals'. Whether irony is involved is uncertain. The second of the three stories — 'Jeal- ousy' — is an unwitting exposure of the banality at the heart of Dirty Realism. A 17-year-old boy is travelling with his aunt Doris to Seattle where he is to stay with his mother. They stop off at a bar for a drink, or at least Doris does, and again there is an almost unmotivated incident, after which the boy feels 'calm'. All three stories end on a dying fall, as if material has been put before the reader on which the protago- nists can reflect. In this the reader and the protagonists may not be as one. Richard Ford, a writer of considerable eminence, has earned his reputation by taking a masterly overview of the ordinary man's vicissitudes. At least that was what he did in The Sportswriter, and, to a lesser extent, in Independence Day. Here the vicis- situdes are endured not so much for their own sake but as a rite of passage into the unknown, in which characters will thankful- ly lose their bearings. This will be seen as a risk worth taking, although — and this is a weak point — the risks will be endured at several removes by the slightly fed-up women with whom the men have become embroiled. The women are more sharply realised than their partners, and can sud- denly express hatred and walk out, leaving husbands or lovers even more bemused. If the unexamined life is not worth living, the examined life, in these three stories, can also be frustrating. Dare I say it of one so celebrated? A disappointment.
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