Sorry for Your Trouble: Stories is a collection of short fiction by Richard Ford published in 2020 by Ecco Press.
The nine stories in the volume deal largely with death and divorce among aging middle-class Americans, and the interior narratives of regret and disappointment that preoccupy them.Law, 2020: "Death, divorce, ageing and the whiff of disappointment of lives lived and misunderstood stalk the pages of Richard Ford's new short story collection."Linforth, 2021: "Regret and discontentment figure heavily in the stories and often manifest in deaths and divorces and past affairs, and in the people who have vanished along the way."Cooper, 2020: "His new story collection features people taking the measure of old regrets, and sampling rancors that have lost their bitterness with time."
Stories "Nothing to Declare" "Happy" "Displaced" "Crossing" "The Run of Yourself" "Jimmy Green - 1992" "Leaving for Kenosha" "A Free Day" "Second Language"
Reception Literary critic Rand Richards Cooper in the New York Times praises the stories for their "trenchant and at times thrillingly downbeat realism." Cooper defends Ford against those reviewers who would disparage his work as merely "well-crafted, writing-class" stories. He extols the stories for their "acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions."Cooper, 2020
Literary critic Erica Wagner, writing for The Guardian, describes the quality of the collection as "uneven," and faults Ford for "a laziness of observation which mars" most of the stories.Wagner, 2020: "'Second Language' is the strongest piece in this uneven book, yet there is still a laziness of observation which also mars" the other stories.
Wagner reserves praise for exactly one of the stories, "the one that's worth waiting for" at the end of the volume: "Second Language."Wagner, 2020: "Second Language"..."is the one that's worth waiting for." From a feminist perspective, the reviewer detects a weakness for "slack" character portraits, particularly in Ford's treatment of his female protagonists.Wagner, 2020: "Women fare worse when it comes to this kind of slack description." Wagner laments that Ford, whose work "has always been distinguished by the precision of his observation and his thoughtful dissection of American life" is here largely limited to examining the "tribulations" of aging middle-class males, in treatments devoid of "wisdom and sensitivity."Wagner, 2020: "Most of these narratives concern the tribulations of middle-aged, middle-class men who find that life hasn't quite worked out as they'd planned...In earlier books Ford has painted these kinds of lives with wisdom and sensitivity; here, the characters' resistance to emotional depth leaks out into the narrative."
Writing in The Southern Review of Books, critic Christopher Linforth calls the stories "dazzling" in their in "theme and variation", placing these works in the realm of those written by Irish novelist William Trevor, but in Ford's treatment generating a "greater sense of irony and disenchantment, that the characters' lives could have been more."Linforth, 2021; "Indeed, the collection conveys a sense that Ford...is masterfully playing with theme and variation."
Locating the volume's themes in "Death, divorce, ageing and the whiff of disappointment of lives lived and misunderstood" critic Katie Law at The Standard offers this decisive approbation:
Style Literary critic Rand Richards Cooper notes the influence of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Ford's "sparkling" prose and "nimble interior monologues."Cooper, 2020
From the first story in the collection, "Nothing to Declare," Cooper cites this "Hemingwayesque" passage:
From the same story, Cooper detects an echo from Fitzgerald:
Cooper declares that Ford is among the last of that generation of American writers directly influenced by the great post-World War I American literary stylists.Cooper, 2020: "At 76, Ford is of the last generation of writers to have grown up directly under the Papa-and-Scott dispensation..."
Sources Cooper, Rand Richards. 2020. "In Richard Ford's New Stories, Ambivalence Is the Default Condition." New York Times, May 12, 2020. Richard Ford. 2020. Sorry for Your Trouble. Ecco Press, an imprint of Harper Collins, New York. Law, Katie. 2020. Book review: "Sorry For Your Trouble by Richard Ford." The Standard, May 14, 2020. Linforth, Christopher. 2021. "Missed Chances and What-Ifs in "Sorry for Your Troubles"Southern Review of Books, May 10, 2021. Wagner, Erica. 2020. "Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford review – stories of discontent." The Guardian, May 27, 2020.
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