Rock Springs
Stories of men on the American margins. Ford writes about failure with the dignity it rarely receives.
Two middle entries, ‘Sweethearts’ and ‘Winterkill,’ get called out as nearly interchangeable, a man losing his wife to a new boyfriend replayed with different names, and readers note the first-person narrators “all his characters start to sound like the same old sot” story to story. The collection reads as relentlessly male to some, nearly every voice a man processing failure in what one reader calls “extremely male voice written.” “He never gives you room to get your hopes up about anything,” one reader writes, and another simply found it “too incredibly sad to enjoy.” A few wanted more space inside individual stories, feeling cut off just as they were getting to know a character.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
