Trajectories Rock Springs

By Paul Gray

"This is not a happy story. I warn you." So begins one of the ten taut, laconic tales that make up Rock Springs, and the same admonition could serve equally well for the other nine. All of them concern characters who suspect that they may be helpless spectators of their own lives. They move about, theoretically of their own volition, but the trajectories they plot sink inexorably downward, beyond their control. Muses one of them: "There was always a gap between my plan and what happened, and I only responded to things as they came along and hoped I wouldn't get in trouble."

Such self-knowledge raises these stories well above the level of the merely unhappy. Author Richard Ford, 43, has the ability to convey the drama of aimless, drifting, passive people, the suspense entailed in waiting each day to see what new misfortunes the world has in store. In Sweethearts, a man named Russell drives his girlfriend's ex-husband Bobby off to jail to serve a sentence for robbery and passing bad checks. Russell does not think he will ever stumble into a similar fate, but he tries to understand what happened to Bobby: "Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never be in, and you did not know what was important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over."

The characters' sense of insignificance is reinforced by their surroundings. The locales in Rock Springs are almost entirely Montana and environs, a vast landscape where mountains appear in the distance "maybe 50 miles away or maybe a hundred." Such vistas seem intended to make humans feel puny, to mock the notion that individuals can make an impression on so much immensity. In Children, two teenage boys spend a day with a girl who is passing through, running away from home. That night, after putting her on a bus, they wonder what the future holds for them: "Outside was a place that seemed not even to exist, an empty place you could stay in for a long time and never find a thing you admired or loved or hoped to keep. And we were unnoticeable in it -- both of us."

Yet Ford's people are not entirely immune to the stark beauty around them. One man, driving a stolen Mercedes and hoping to get far away from Montana, still takes time to appreciate the setting sun: "Just as it touched the rim of the horizon, it all at once fired the air into jewels and red sequins the precise likes of which I had never seen before and haven't seen since." In Communist, a boy is taken hunting by his mother's lover and, in the process, shown the sights and sounds of something marvelous: "It was a thing to see, I will tell you now. Five thousand white geese all in the air around you, making a noise like you have never heard before. And I thought to myself then: this is something I will never see again. I will never forget this. And I was right."

Such language is both purposefully prosaic and incandescent. The Sportswriter (1986), Ford's highly acclaimed third novel, established a glittering reputation. The stories in Rock Springs confirm it. P.G.