STASIS OF GRACE

IN RICHARD FORD'S QUIET STORIES OF LITTLE REGRETS, MUCH OF LIFE IS LIVED BETWEEN OCCURRENCES

Author: By Gail Caldwell, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, June 22, 1997

Page: N15

Section: Books

The three stories in ``Women with Men'' echo these strains. Two of them take place in Paris, while the center story, ``Jealous,'' is set in the lonely bluster of Montana. Their individual allure is subtle but deep, and mostly protects them from that common feeling that you're reading the same story again and again. I suspect some of this has to do with Ford's confidence as a writer: He doesn't insist on something happening, even in a short story, since he seems to grasp that most of life is lived in between occurrences. More important, when something does happen -- when the world foists itself upon you, when death or love or some other form of suffering invades a placid existence -- it doesn't necessarily mean that anything will change. This interminable truth is part of the good news about Ford's work -- its endemically literary quality -- and the bad news, of course, for his characters. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and mostly you wake up still being you.

Certainly that's the trap in which Martin Austin finds himself in ``The Womanizer,'' where his main problem seems to be a kind of weightlessness, a going soft at the center that he treats with minor infidelities. On business in Paris when the story opens, he's a 44-year-old married sales rep from Chicago. Like Frank Bascombe, he's depressed but doesn't know it; like many of Ford's fallible heroes, he has a penchant for impatient, shorthand profundities: his certainty that ``everybody had his life entirely in his hands and was required to live with his own terrors and mistakes, etc.'' It's that et cetera that gives away his game. Austin is smart but bored with his own intelligence, and maybe with everybody else's. He loves his wife of 25 years, but he's afraid of the bone-deep intimacy -- the place where nothing happens that such intimacy entails. When he meets an editor in Paris, a self-involved woman in the midst of a divorce, he begins to dabble in the minefield of high-gloss flirting: a whispered endearment, a breathless intent, all celibately safe, he thinks (what men usually call harmless distractions) until he slips off the path that has been, until now, his life.

The situation of ``The Womanizer'' is commonplace territory, rendered here with an irony that recognizes every one of Austin's self-delusional idiocies. Consequences are what matter most to Austin -- such is the credo he pretends to live by -- but it's his fate to learn that most consequences are realized only when they're already in place. ``What does one want in the world?'' thinks Austin late one night, aware somewhat later that ``the crucial linkages'' that make up the grand plan can disappear without a moment's notice. This is the centerpiece sadness of Richard Ford's work, and it makes his Bascombes and Austins as memorable for their bruises as for their flawed understanding.

The boy at the center of ``Jealous'' is more fortunate, or at least has a running start: He's 17 when he tastes of consequence, and in this tale it belongs to somebody else. Told with a couple of decades of hindsight, ``Jealous'' is straight from the world of Ford's only other story collection, ``Rock Springs.'' This story takes place in 1975 near the town of Great Falls, Mont., where most of the earlier book was set. A young man is leaving the insular life he's lived with his father on a little piece of land outside Dutton, where they've spent their time reading in the evenings and training bird dogs in the field. Headed for a train to Seattle to visit his mother, Lawrence is the temporary charge of his half-wild aunt, Doris, but the caretaking is really the other way around -- she's the one drinking schnapps on the drive to the station, fooling around with loose cannons she meets in the town bar. Adrift with the kind of alienated seriousness that belongs so dearly to the young, Lawrence is trying just to do life rather than to understand it. As he flounders at the controls of what feels like a runaway existence, the boy meets his fear head-on: ``Only then you remember it's you who's causing it, and you who has to stop it.'' That same coming-of-age autonomy belonged to Ford's ``Wildlife,'' and here, tucked between two older Americans in Paris, it gives off an ache as broad as the Great Plains.

All of ``Women with Men'' lays bare the traveler's cliches, capturing the old fool's paradise with witty sendups: Austin's failed marital reconcilation takes place in a Polynesian restaurant in Skokie called the Hai-Nun, while the dismal protagonist of ``Occidentals'' finds himself in an Americans-abroad chow house in Paris -- Clancy's! -- that serves big ol' steaks and martinis for the homesick crowd. The women given such star billing in Ford's title are delivered with more narrative distance than the men (only ``Jealous'' is told in the first person), but they're also made of what you might call stronger character -- imbued with crusty wisdom, while the men stumble about their hunting grounds, enchanted by their own wounds.

That's particularly true in ``Occidentals,'' wherein a first-time novelist has traveled to Paris with casual girlfriend in tow -- he's trying to meet with his editor and translator of the French edition of his roman a clef, and she just wants to see the Eiffel Tower. This story is far darker than the other two: Despite having tired of his own company, Charley Matthews is pretty much lost to solipsism, whereas Helen is fighting cancer. But the narrative also goes after the failure of fiction. ``Real people were always harder,'' Charley admits to himself, then endures his translator's amused assessment of his unreliable, maybe silly narrator. At one of the defining moments of Helen's life, she insists to her weaker lover that this is no metaphor. Sometimes even art can't protect you from the worst times, what Charley recalls as ``an indecipherable muddle of lost days and squandered experiences.''

There's occasionally something breathtaking about Richard Ford's tender candor in the face of such bitterness; no contemporary has quite the same delicacy of vision in capturing the little regrets of our internal living rooms. His men are often hapless fools with one more chance at something better; they are bearable -- sometimes likable -- not because of their self-awareness, but in spite of it. It ought to be said that this is Ford's post-Pulitzer book -- when somebody wins a big prize, as he did last year with ``Independence Day,'' the publishers tend to rush the next book to print to take advantage of the market. Fair enough, but that's commerce, not art. ``The Womanizer'' and ``Jealous'' were published previously in Granta and The New Yorker, respectively; their inclusion here, with the new ``Occidentals,'' constitutes a minor collection but certainly a respectable one. ``Women with Men'' is sumptuous and quietly realized, and it's signature Ford.

RICHARD FORD

From ``The Womanizer,'' in ``Women with Men''