The American Wife (Michigan Literary Fiction Awards) | 
| Author: Elaine Ford
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $18.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 825454
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.5
ISBN: 0472116207
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780472116201
ASIN: 0472116207
Publication Date: October 15, 2007
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
“Elaine Ford’s collection roams the territory between the intellect and the heart. She writes of the human condition with precision, in language that is both grave and conversational. Her characters step out of the real world onto the page, where she develops them quietly, but with compassionate fullness. This writer grips the reader with her keen knowledge of the psyche of individuals-—their motives and secrets—and also with the surprising things that happen to them.”
—Laura Kasischke, judge, Michigan Literary Fiction Awards Of Elaine Ford’s novel, Missed Connections, the Washington Post wrote that it is a work “of small episodes, of precise sentences, of unusual clarity.” That same clarity proves an unsettling force in Ford’s stories, where precision of prose often belies uncertainties hidden beneath. In the title piece, an American woman in England, embroiled in a relationship doomed to fail, discovers how little she understands about her own desires and impulses. In another story, another American wife, abandoned in Greece by her archaeologist husband, struggles to solve a crime no one else believes to have been committed. Throughout her stories Ford touches on the mysteries that make up our lives. Each story in itself is a masterpiece of such detail and power as to transform the way we see the world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 Not Alone May 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Elaine Ford's "The American Wife" rings her signal changes on experience. Whether a first- or third- person speaker, the narrator in these stories is never noisy, nor ostentatious. In some cases, as in "The Scow," the story of a woman emptying her parents' modest cluttered house after both have died, the voice is depressed and a reader yearns to be relieved of this sad situation and the sad obligations that sooner or later claim most of us. We are as surprised as the narrator is, however, when she discovers that both of her parents may have chosen suicide as a quiet way out; a way, in fact, that will sound noisily in the narrator's consciousness for the rest of her life.
In other stories, a voice which begins by seeming somehow too attenuated, too oppressed by situation, becomes more interesting by means of the speaker's refusal, precisely, to "get better," to straighten up, to soldier on. In the stunning "Changeling"(a story that any mother who has faced life with an infant will relate to easily) the isolation of the wife of an academic in Greece seems as first, as it does to her busy, stimulated husband exaggerated. Sandy, his wife, is intelligent and utterly compromised (she does not speak Greek, she is left with no resources except her own two legs, which can and do get her out of the house, but beyond this she has nothing). Who is to say, really -- who, that is, but the reader -- if her baby has been taken from its carriage, as she avers, and another one left in its place, or whether the pressures of loneliness, solitude, and the essential misapprehension that spell the failure of a marriage have affected her mind to the extent of paranoia?
This story is rooted in earlier decades as are several in the book. We readers know that Sandy's situation -- stay home, mind baby, have no other relations at all -- is farfetched for an educated woman of today in a world of internet, instantly available translation and automatic (if superficial) "friends"; but what still holds true is that the parenting of infants is an utterly demanding enterprise and to do it in alone, with no support of spouse or friend, is at best an oddly outer-space experience in which the parent-alone floats and floats, longing for any kind of ballast.
In Elaine Ford's novels -- "The Playhouse" and "Ivory Bright" among my favorites -- she has dealt with what Frank O'Connor called submerged populations, the essential denizens, for him, of the short story. But Ford managed in her novels to broaden the landscapes of those populations and still to reveal their utter peculiarities. In the stories in "The American Wife" she has gone back to the even smaller grid: a wife-mother abroad, married to the wrong man, lives in two of the tales; in another a speaker returned home to visit a cousin dying, finds that she dislikes the sufferer just as much as she did decades earlier when, healthy, the cousin had stolen her boyfriend; the icy visit recorded in "Levitation," involves a mother and daughter who both (the young woman about 20, perhaps, the mother in her early fifties) assert their rights to feelings and resentments about a marriage gone bad, neither of them yielding even an inch.
One reads Ford for her terse prose and her singular ability to sneak up on one. In the small incidents, looks, and gestures she records are our lives. The young woman in "Levitation," for example, reaches high above her head to practice -- with utter concentration, and immediately after the very painful visit with her mother -- lifting herself off the floor by intention alone. This seems ridiculous and yet reinforces the power the daughter has asserted to make her own life. In "Reaping Tares," one of the funny stories in a collection more grave than not, another young woman, an attorney, finds a very specific way, right under her professional nose, to boot away a rival for her husband's attention.
Ford doesn't shrink from describing the smallness of lives. However we may rue that smallness in reality, it is always a distinct pleasure to recognize it in fiction. In "The American Wife" we find ourselves mirrored. We are, as it turns out, not alone.
 Wonderful short stories February 12, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Elaine Ford is a gifted writer. Her characters come alive; her descriptions of places and events bring smiles and sighs of recognition. Her stories are satisfying.
I hope there are more short stories in Ford's future. I liked these so much I read them twice.
Five Stars! January 18, 2008
This marvelous collection of 5 star short stories will grab any reader's interest. Each tale resonates with a flavor of place and era and also introduces a rich array of characters.
I recommend Ms. Ford's superb book for all discerning book lovers.
Amy Sterinbach
Stories with bite January 1, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Life is stranger than fiction, which is why so many authors try to create plots that are probable and characters who are recognizable. Not so Elaine Ford, whose stories are as unpredictable as New England weather and whose characters are as quirky as we all might be if we stopped worrying about what other people might think. No two of her stories are alike; no characters are cliched. In "Cousins," the narrator explains: "In her old age, Edie's mother has largely dispensed with politeness, in what Edie thinks of as a conservation-of-energy move. Or possibly, because of her mother's poor eyestight, the dismayed expressions of others no longer register. She's free to do as she pleases." That description could stand for how Ford handles characters - they are free to do as they please. Likewise with the shape of the stories. As an elderly professor counsels: "Cara Cecilia, . . . In making poems, as in living, non c'e trucco. There is no trick, no secret, no shorcut. You must find your way yourself. That is what your friend had to learn, as we all must."
If you're looking for more than just a good read, try this book.
 Prose as rich as dark chocolate December 25, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
In these keenly observed stories, Elaine Ford depicts the travails and lives of all of us. Her prose is rich, enabling her characters to come to life, even at times of despair. I recommend these stories, as I do her novels for their originality and keen understanding of the human condition. The sense of place--whether it be the UK, Annapolis, New York, Maine, Somerville, or Greece--is remarkable.
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