Some books leave such a lasting impression that you can remember where you were and what you were doing when you read them.

I was sitting in my bathtub when I read the opening chapter of "Jaws." (No kidding!)

I was sitting in the back row of my senior high English honors class, teetering on that border between adolescence and adulthood, when I turned the first pages of my first John Updike novel, "Rabbit, Run." (A novel, by the way, that would scare me away from the grim world of adults for at least a few more months.)

And when I first read "Rock Springs," a collection of 10 short stories by Richard Ford nearly 15 years ago, I was standing in the Public Library of Livingston, Montana. I’d come to the library that night not knowing what I’d walk out with, but I knew I wanted to read a great piece of literature--one that would make my heart pound, my palms sweat and the little hairs on the backs of my hands stand up. At the time, I was married, the father of two, a reporter for the town newspaper and living paycheck-to-paycheck. Our budget was so lean, Jack Sprat looked like a glutton. To conserve gas, I walked to work, head down and collar up as the harsh winds of south-central Montana scoured the streets. We were so broke, my wife and I thought of co-authoring a cookbook: "101 Things To Do With Macaroni-and-Cheese." Of course, buying books was out of the question. That’s why I was at the public library that night, looking for a piece of writing that would take me out of my struggling, lower-middle-class life.

Little did I know I was a character straight out of Ford’s stories.

I can remember standing there in that library in Livingston, opening this collection of short stories at random and reading the following words: "This is not a happy story. I warn you." They were the first two lines from the story "Great Falls." The words were like an opera aria and this is what the diva was singing in my ear: "This writer knows you." The hairs on the backs of my hands rustled.

Indeed, Richard Ford (whom I’d never even heard of prior to that night in that library) does know all about me—and, I’d venture to say, a lot about you. Ford has made it his business to delve deep into the mysteries of human behavior. His characters are flawed, occasionally hopeless, but always hopeful. In fact, one of the finest stories in "Rock Springs" is called "Optimists" and it starts like this:

"All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back. The year, in other words, when life changed for all of us and forever—ended, really in a way none of us could ever have imagined in our most brilliant dreams of life."

Ford writes of shattered marriages, distrust between fathers and sons, life’s gamblers on the perpetual losing streak—and all of this set in the bleak, wind-swept plains of Wyoming and Montana (that’s right, not only was Ford writing about me, he’d also set his stories in the very place where I lived at the time!). Characters struggle to come to grips with their situations and, more often than not, end up regretting the paths their lives take.

All of this may sound pretty depressing, but in the hands of a talented prose artist like Ford, the hard realities of life become, somehow, mysteries that shimmer and sparkle. There’s much to think about in these stories, but he manages to slip in the messages with concrete, riveting language that is deceptively simple and unadorned. Here’s another example (this one’s from "Children"): "When you are older, nothing you did when you were young matters at all. I know that now, though I didn’t know it then. We were simply young."

With "Rock Springs," Ford joined the ranks of the great short story writers like Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver (who, by the way, was a close friend of Ford’s). He’s written several novels ("The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day" among them), but it’s the shorter form where he really gets the most mileage out of his words. His poignant descriptions of character and place are dead-on accurate. I know; I was one of his characters in that place and time.



Recommended: Yes