Repeated Theme in A multitude of Sins by Richard Ford

I don’t believe the past can be repaired, only exceeded,” a man says as he re-encounters someone he knew for a brief but emotional time. Most of the solitary souls who populate Richard Ford’s A Multitude of Sins, whether they’ve sinned or been sinned against, ceaselessly interrogate their lives in the hope that they can indeed be improved.

The “multitude” of sins in these 10 stories are really variations of one sin—adultery—and Ford never treads the same ground. The perfectly sequenced collection alternates settings, points of view and styles with superb and surprising results. A woman vacationing with her philandering husband on the coast of Maine finds that his midlife crisis is more desperate than she imagined. A lobbyist from Washington, D.C., carries on an affair in cities around the world until a man who may or may not be his lover’s husband accosts him in Montreal. A New Orleans boy is forced to spend a day duck-hunting with his estranged father, who recently left his wife for a man.

Ford’s stories render small moments in scrupulous, obsessive detail. Their endings are usually ambiguous, relentlessly human. Along the way Ford glides back and forth between present and past, probing not just his characters’ thoughts but, more important, their thought processes.

In “Reunion,” a man approaches his ex-lover’s ex-husband from across New York’s Grand Central Terminal, each step forward giving way to a mental leap backward. The narrator lets himself believe that even though he’s looking for an “unreverberant moment,” the significance of his affair will somehow be revealed. It’s “as if this later time was all that really mattered, whereas the previous, briefly passionate, linked but now-distant moments were merely preliminary.” But after a bizarre, nearly affectless conversation with the man he once wronged, the narrator realizes the meaning of his dalliance isn’t going to present itself at a train station at rush hour. The ending is incomplete but realistic. These lives will go on.

This lack of direct confrontation is a signature element. Most pieces open, long after the initial sin, with a tenuous stasis resulting from the affair or breakup. The drama lies in the characters’ minds, in their attempts to understand what’s come before and to move on.

“Puppy” shows Ford at his existential best. In trying to find a home for a dog left in their backyard, a professional couple in New Orleans is prompted to consider the role chance plays in their lives, and thus to challenge the basis of their marriage.