Rock Springs
By Richard Ford
Vintage Books
1988 (paperback edition)
Condition: Used; wear on front cover; pages dog-eared.
Why I keep it: intellectual, emotional [*]
I’m not sure if I own a short story collection that surpasses the importance or the teachability of Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs.” Some would argue my point, but I’ll stand by Ford’s collection as it has stood by me.
A reader who calls himself Grouch writes in an online review:
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.[1]
I had a similar moment, the first time I read the collection in its entirety. I thought, Ford knows my people. Somehow, he knows the men and women I grew up with in my working class family–the dreamers, the down-on-their-luck schemers, the work-hardened people who said they’d given up on hope for good (but who kept a little wellspring of it on tap for emergencies), the smoke-roughened women, the leathery-palmed men. I may not have grown up in Montana or Wyoming, but it doesn’t matter because Ford understands the archetypal working class, even as he extends his characters and his stories beyond the stereotypes and one-dimensionality of the archetype.
Ford’s style is sometimes called “dirty realism[2],” a term that better describes the state of the characters in his stories than the writing style itself. His concern, in this collection, does not revolve around the wealthy or the privileged. His vision sharpens around inequities and slights. He understands how desperation can lead to the worst choices. He does for the American short story what Woody Guthrie did for folk songs.
Thus, when I assign a Ford story to a classroom of students, I know the working class students will fall in love, as I did, and the wealthier students will be forced to face their own preconceptions. Most importantly, Ford’s work allows me to start a conversation about the necessity of fiction in our day-to-day lives.
I say, “How many of you know people like these people?”
Usually one or two kids raise their hands. They are still ashamed of their people. (I want to tell them this impulse will pass, but they won’t believe me. Not now. It’s too soon.) For now, Ford has broken down their barriers, put them at ease.
Then I say, “For those of you who don’t know people like this, what do you think of these characters?”
Usually a pretty female student will raise her hand, wrinkle her nose and say, “They are losers (or some variation thereof).”
Or the kid, who cornered me on the first day of class and informed me with some aggression that he’s a Republican and that he hopes my class won’t be one of those where I try to shove my liberal ideas down his throat, says he thinks these people had better pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get some work and become productive members of society, dammit, because that’s what’s wrong with America.
Someone else will speak up and defend these imaginary people, say that it’s kind of hard not to be a loser when there’s no work and no future and no way out. And our conversation, in which we discuss how important fiction is in a democracy, in our daily lives, in the press and fold of a nation’s progress, will unfold.
I tell my students they are not required to love these stories or even to like them, but they are required to read them deeply and with an honest heart. I tell them that’s the least they can do since that was how these stories were written. But I secretly hope, every time, that they will love these stories as much as I do, that they will treasure Ford’s rhythms and his eccentricities. I hope they will recognize the thread that binds all of these pieces together, the thread of our common humanity.
I like to end that class by reading aloud portions of my favorite story, “Communist.” It has been anthologized often but not as often as the title story “Rock Springs” or “Great Falls.” The title, “Communist,” a term they’ve been taught to hate, throws them off, of course, but the opening which is rather mundane quiets them: “My mother once had a boyfriend named Glen Baxter. This was in 1961.”
I read key lines aloud to them, and we discuss point of view and point of telling. We talk about how narrators can look back or forward in time and what those choices mean. When they are fully contemplative, I read aloud the entire last movement of the story which begins with the lines:
A light can go out in the heart. All of this happened years ago, but I still can feel now how sad and remote the world was to me.
Perhaps its because a little of the light in my heart has gone out as life’s many disappointments have piled up or perhaps its because I know what time will do to the hearts of my students…I don’t know.
What I do know is that I find it increasingly difficult, as the seasons pass, to read those lines aloud to my students without my voice cracking under the weight of their enormity.
Tomorrow: “The Point and Other Stories” by Charles D’Ambrosio
Further reading:
The Stubborn Truth: If we’ve learned anything, it’s that we should never elect a rich guy who says he hates government but can’t wait to ‘fix’ it. (The Guardian, Jan. 17, 2009)
Richard Ford On The Work Of Writing. (CBS News, July 6, 2008)
California Literary Review interview
Salon.com interview (September 2008)
Powell’s Books interview
1 A Short Story Masterpiece. http://www.epinions.com/review/Rock_Springs_by_Richard_Ford/book-review-1FEE-107CB128-383510D8-bd1 Accessed Feb. 28, 2010.
2 Dirty realism has been described as “the fiction of a new generation of American authors. They write about the belly-side of contemporary life – a deserted husband, an unwed mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict – but they write about it with a disturbing detachment, at times verging on comedy. Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate, these stories constitute a new voice in fiction…‘These writers,’ Tobias Wolff has observed, ‘while not necessarily a school, nevertheless form a new voice. They are able to speak to us about the things that matter.” Granta 8: Dirty Realism. (Summer 1983) http://www.granta.com/Magazine/8 Accessed Feb. 28, 2010.