Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

Is it that time of the month already? Here's our favorite sportswriter, Frank Bascombe, with another batch of book reviews. This time out, he's reviewing the new book by Richard Ford, the author who made Bascombe famous in the exceptional novel THE SPORTSWRITER. As always, it's a joy to get one of Frank's e-mails. I'm just sorry it showed up while I was in Montreal and it took me until this morning to share it with you.

IT’S NOT A SECRET IF I DON’T TELL ANYONE.

By Frank Bascombe

A MULTITUDE OF SINS by Richard Ford

Finally after years and years of mediocrity, it happens, and you’re wondering where the time went... right? At last you get hold of something juicy and delicious that kicks ass. You’ve slogged through the lumpy bestsellers, stumbled through the forests of glossy thrillers, and finally come across a true clearing in the muck. Just when you thought it was over, and the written word was dead, you find Richard Ford waiting for you out in these woods of life, smiling, and wanting only to give you direction. He’s one of a select few that can see the forest for the trees.

Many years ago, while stomping through southern Europe, I found an old beat-up copy of WHERE I’M CALLING FROM sitting alongside an equally worn out copy of WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE. I turned both books over and over in my hands, examining the picture of the author on the back in stoic black and white, eyes glaring forward, straight through me. You know what you’re in for if you’ve ever read Raymond Carver. He’s the guy that started it all, and he’s the one person that can truly beat you down with his stories. If you can can read more than three of his stories in one sitting, you’re a better person than I. After reading A SMALL GOOD THING, I could hardly force a smile for a week. I dreamt about the characters in that masterpeice for days to come, and I'll admit that the story packs such emotional power I nearly wept upon finishing it. Years flipped forward faster and faster, and Robert Altman made SHORT CUTS, which nearly embodies Carver’s brilliance, but not quite; he got the boozing down and self destruction, but something was lost in the translation as usually happens from book to screen. Somehow you didn’t want to see an actor embody the characters you’d created for yourself while reading Carver’s stories. After devouring all of his work, I looked around for someone else that I could hold up next to Carver. Turns out he had students who’ve also gone on to write some of the most powerful stuff around. One of them is Richard Ford, and if you’ve never heard of him... well, you’re about to.

Early on in his career, Ford wrote a book of short stories that is as close to brilliant as one person can come without actually achieving it. ROCK SPRINGS is a tight, fast paced, detailed collection filled with some of the most interesting diverse characters you're likely to meet anywhere, either on page or in person. The title story of the collection has perhaps the finest paragraph ever written placed at the very end of it. Reciting it here would only spoil the resonance of the story; you’ve got to stop what you're doing right now, run to your local superstore, and even if you can’t afford the book, read that first story and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

People look to that story time and time again, mentioning in specific the last paragraph. Critics in general agree that it is one of the most incredible pieces of fiction around. Ford captures the plain simple quality of life, the regular problems faced by everyone, some things that you just can’t get away from. The solutions he seeks to the problems created are not simple solutions; they never are. Ford has manufactured a place that you know or may only remember, like the town you lived in for a few years as a kid, and you only remember one or two things about it but can’t seem to ever get it out of your mind. Sometimes life throws you into desperate situations or leaves you feeling like there is nothing left for you. Ford captures these emotions over and over again by delivering the straight facts. You don’t know why you took up with this single housewife, but you did. It felt good at the time, but now, burdened with her children and her dilapidated car, stuck in the middle of nowhere during a snow storm, you only want to turn and run. What would it take to do just that? Ford explores just those kinds of impulses, and what he finds is not so comfortable. By the time you’ve gone through the emotional battlefield of Ford’s people, you know you’ve gone through something real.

A MULTITUDE OF SINS is a collection of short stories that is almost impossible to get through. It’s so well written and diverse, covering so many themes, you’ve got to pace yourself to do it justice. Ford has attacked the novel form and shown off some of his flashier talents, THE SPORTSWRITER being his highlight reel, but nothing comes close to the suffering, depression, sorrow and horror of these stories. In these ten stories, Ford covers all the bases. He gets you into the houses and between the sheets of the lives of each character presented. Most of the people in these stories are cheating on their spouses and getting away with it famously, but what you give isn’t anything like what you get. In the longish opening story "The Abyss," Beth and Howard (not married to each other) travel to a real estate conference in Arizona. They’ve been all over each other for months, and now for the first time get to tear it off without looking over their shoulders. Beth finds she doesn’t like Howard as much as she did when this fling started. What Ford does best is spend time between the ears of each character, and form for them some truly painful thoughts. The guilt is so profoundly present you could cut it with a knife. Ford summons up a self-loathing in both Beth and Howard that is truly frightening. Beth is desperate for the attention, physical and otherwise, of a man. Her husband is slowly dying at home on the East Coast, and she just wants to get something real; anything will do. Beth comes up with the idea to see the Grand Canyon, and Howard agrees to go just to spend time with her. On the way they run over a rabbit, stay in a tee-pee motel, and have constant fears that someone they know will spot them. The game will be up, they’ll lose their jobs, which they seem more worried about than losing their marriages. Eventually the worst happens, and Howard is not even mildly prepared to deal with it. What a shock; you never are.

More acutely savage is a group of stories that covers the results of the cheating spouse -- "Issues," "Quality Time," and the most amazingly brief "Reunion." In the latter, Ford intertwines the paths of two men on the floor of Grand Central Station in New York City where they meet, reminding themselves of what the other has done to their own lives. Quickly the two men are separated, one cheated, and the other has to pay the price. With just a tight sentence or two, Ford delivers two totally different men, each at the opposite end of the relationship spectrum. The father waiting to meet his daughter, and the man who stole his wife. One is sorry about something, the other is just plain sorry. What happens to you when you’ve found out your wife or husband is in bed with someone else? How do you recover the wreckage left in wake? The embarrassment you feel when meeting the eye of the man whose wife you stole. She left you both, but you were the guy who made her do it. Take that extra step, do the thing she could only think about. How do you recover? Is there ever a time when things get better, and do you ever forget? In A MULTITUDE OF SINS you’re not likely to forget anything. This batch of stories by a truly accomplished writer is something to behold. Richard Ford proves once again that things change, but people never do, and by getting that second chance you only get to make the same mistake a second time.

FIRE by Sebastian Junger

In the spring of 1997, a little book bounced out of the local megastores and into the hands of almost everyone who could read, and even some of those who couldn’t. It didn’t take long for the story of the brave fisherman who battled the most intense storm in recent history to be the most talked about book of reportage to come along in years. Overnight, Sebastian Junger was a huge star. It seemed that he’d captured a moment in time that was truly unbelievable, a portrait of what men will do when pushed to the very limit of life. He captured all of this and more between the covers of a little piece of non-fiction called THE PERFECT STORM. The first time I saw him, he was dressed in a white suit that looked like he’d found it in the trash. He was about to walk into his first reading in Manhattan, and stood on the sidewalk with a look of pure daze on his face. Needless to say, the reading was SOR. The rest is history. Clooney and Walburg brought those characters who died so tragically to life, and now you don’t need to read the book; you only need to vegetate to the videocassette.

Years passed by, and people kept asking what he had up his sleeve. He was petrified by the sophomore slump. He did not want to whip something off just to have a second book, just to feed the machine so to speak, and rightly so. This guy is so into his work that he’s banked all of his royalty checks, and when he goes to the ATM to get money for a night of drinking with his pals, he’s got $80,000 in his checking account. Money means nothing to him. Along the way to writing his second book, he opened a trendy little “literature bar” in lower Manhattan. He’s a nice guy; everybody says so.

Still, Sebastian Junger the person is of no real importance to anyone; what impresses me is his writing. You feel something electric shifting through your bones when you pick up his latest book, FIRE. The cover is a blazing yellow image of a forest fire gone out of control. The jacket copy praises Junger to the hilt, and nothing should stop you from reading in awe this masterpeice of reportage. This was long-awaited and worth every minute. People ask me what I’m reading and I tell them that I’ve just finished this book, and they all want to know what it’s like. Junger starts off talking about cutting down trees for a living, and how incredibly dangerous it is. This is basically an introduction to what will be a harrowing rollercoaster ride for the reader. The book is chiseled into ten edge-of-your-seat stories. In the first two, dealing with the jobs of Smoke Jumpers and Forest Fire Fighters, Junger explains with a voice so true that you almost smell the smoke from the trees burning on the mountains of Idaho. Stories of men so disoriented when getting off the helicopters in the middle of fires that they walk right into the blades of the propellers. You come to learn that lighting starts most fires in the forests; dry lighting, it's called. “In 1998 alone, the whole country suffered through a brutally hot summer; Barges were running aground on the Mississippi River; railroad tracks were warping in New Jersey. The drought culminated in the fires at Yellowstone National Park. On August 20th alone – Black Saturday - seventy mile-per hour winds fanned three-hundred-foot flames through 165,000 acres.” When you learn what this is all about and how incredibly brutal and unforgiving these fires are, you’ll be far more appreciative the next time you watch it on the local news. What these guys go through, how they are prepared for anything, even letting a fire pass right over them while protected my a Teflon tent. Nothing prepares you for the size of these fires, and just how small and inconsequential they render man.

On the small island of Bequia in the south Caribbean lives a whaler named Athneal Ollivierre. He’s the last great whale hunter, and Junger has hunted him down for one of the most riveting stories in this book. You meet these men, and wonder how they got like this. Junger shows you how and shows you another way to live. Ollivierre is a physical mess; his body is brutalized and battered. He is in the middle of training his apprentice who will take over when he can no longer hunt whales. He tells a story of a whale slamming into his boat and knocking him unconscious. When he came to he realized that the harpoon is still in the whale and the rope is wrapped tightly around his leg. He did not want to cut the rope for fear of losing the whale, even though it had ripped through his skin down to the bone. Finally, a barnacle cut him loose and the boat returned to the shore. He walked up on the beach unassisted, his foot feeling like cement. Two men on the beach passed out when they saw the wound. Junger talks about modern society keeping everyone safe, having nothing happen at all. You are hardly ever at risk, and even if you feel the need to be, it’s almost impossible to get there. Adventure, a word that comes from the Latin adventura meaning “what must happen”. Men in these stories rarely seek adventure. Their jobs lead to the situations they find themselves in that are far more dangerous than you could ever imagine. Life for the normal person is without threat. Our safety is assured, and to find adventure we need to go out of our way.

If you can get the images presented by Junger out of your mind for even a second, you are beyond hope. On the surface, this book looks like it was thrown together and dashed off. You’d be making a huge mistake to think that. Junger takes you to places that you never knew existed, right to the edge, just to give you a sense of how incredible life can be.

MRS. PAINE’S GARAGE by Thomas Mallon

After all of these years, and the thousands upon thousands of theories on what happened the day Kennedy died, you’ve got to feel as though other than whacked out delusional theories, there cannot be any new light that could be shed on this, the darkest of days. Having been to the site where JFK merged with the infinite myself, I have to say that it sent a chill through me that was unlike anything I’ve ever felt. Standing behind the “white picket fence” which is covered in graffiti, looking out the windows of the Sixth Floor Museum, it’s all an incredible wave of emotions that wash over you, especially if you're one to think that something more sinister happened from that sixth floor. Being on the grassy knoll has a very sobering effect. Even today, you can see right up the street, smack down center to where it all happened, a perfect spot, much better than out an open window in the book depository.

Thomas Mallon, an accomplished writer in his own world, tackles a perspective that has to my knowledge never really been given its due. Ruth Paine is a God-fearing Quaker and a woman whom by most accounts was a self-proclaimed “do-gooder”. In the year or so preceding JFK’s assassination, she was on fairly good terms with Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina; actually, they were very good friends. Early in 1963, Ruth Paine meet Marina Oswald and her husband Lee at a party that was mostly attended by Russians. She wanted to learn the language, desperately in fact, and thought she could make a friend or two that would help her do that. Marina was a little shy at first, but began spending time with Ruth. The women shared several things other than the love of the Russian language. Ruth was in a dead end marriage, and Marina was in a marriage that turned out to be far worse than what she imagined when she met Lee in Russia. Turns out she was getting beatings from Lee and was constantly fighting with him and for her life. Ruth wanted at more than one occasion to have Marina move in with her and live in her house, especially after she admitted that she was pregnant. Marina did stay with Ruth, and at the same time her husband moved out. Lee got the job that would be his last on a recommendation from Ruth’s husband and left some things in Ruth’s garage for safekeeping. One particular piece was a rolled up blanket carrying the rifle he would use on that fateful day.

What this book does for anyone who has a slight interest in this fantastically rich subplot is give another perspective, one that will either debunk what you may think or cement what you already know. There are two types of people who are interested in the JFK assassination; CT’s and LN’s, or Conspiracy Theorists and Lone Nuts. Neither one needs explaining. On the day that Oswald was arrested and the authorities tracked down where his wife was and Ruth’s connection to him, they showed up at her door and were greeted by “We were expecting you!” This was something debated by the Warren Commission and Ruth Paine. She says she never said it. Some of this brilliant nonfiction really gets you thinking, and for me, offered something more than what I had developed through repeated viewing’s of Oliver Stone’s JFK. There is no smoking gun in this book, and Mallon irons almost everything out. Giving a full detailed report would leave you very little to discover yourself in this slim little gem, but wrap your mind around this. What if Ruth Paine and her husband were agents of the government, planted to befriend the Oswalds? What if Lee actually was a lone nut and someone who was planning something larger knew of him and decided to let him take the fall? What if Oswald never hit his target but got blamed for the whole shooting match? It was certainly a distraction from what came off the Grassy Knoll in a red-hot hurry. Mallon gets you thinking and takes you down a road that was in desperate need of discovery.