Book Review: Rock Springs by Richard Ford

By Chris Stokum

At the conclusion of “Rock Springs,” the title story from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford’s 1987 collection, the narrator is utterly lost. Frantically trying to regain his bearings, he looks to the east -- to the con-man’s life he’s anxious to escape -- to the dull motel that his girlfriend and daughter sleep in, to the car he’s considering stealing. And finally, in desperation, he turns his eyes to the reader. And the reader chokes.

Ford’s protagonists are tired, tragic and deeply flawed, yet the reader sympathizes with them from the stories’ opening lines. Herein lies Ford’s talent for capturing the humanity of the downtrodden and overlooked: men and women and children whose lives are defined by struggle. And these are no Horatio Alger knock-offs in which the pauper becomes the prince. Ford is much too realistic for that kind of dreaming. Some of the happiest endings that he offers involve the protagonist becoming aware of his own mistakes and character flaws.

That is not to say that Ford’s protagonists never break even. But their gains are made more in terms of wisdom and experience than in material objects. In “Going to the Dogs,” the protagonist is robbed by a woman while her friend lies side-by-side with him in the other room, presumably to ease his loneliness. While he loses his money, he reflects upon himself and upon his plot in life for what seems to be the first time.

The other stories in Rock Springs follow similar emotional lines. In “Children,” two young boys entertain one of their father’s mistresses, a girl not much older than them, for an afternoon and struggle to treat her humanely. In “Sweet Hearts,” a man drives his wife’s ex-husband to jail and is torn between acting sympathetically toward the convict and loyally toward his wife. “Empire,” the longest story in the collection, presents a detached, meandering portrait of a married man’s various experiences that approach, but never reach infidelity. His curiosity draws him into a number of questionable situations, though his intentions hardly seem impure. The difficulties in his life result less from his actions than from how those actions are interpreted by others.

Richard Ford’s Rock Springs is initially as sparse as its Midwestern setting, yet life and heart lie just below the book’s surface. Ford’s authorial voice blends regional dialect with true lyricism, and Rock Springs is, in Joyce Carol Oates’ words, “the very poetry of realism.” Though Rock Springs is at times dark, gritty and somewhat depressing, it is gripping in a way that makes it difficult to put down.