Rock Springs, by Richard Ford (Atlantic Monthly Press, 235 pp., $17.95)
The characters in Richard Ford’s new collection of short stories do a lot of hunting, a lot of fishing. In “Children,” three teenagers stand on a river bank in Montana; Claude has just caught a whitefish, and Lucy and George stand by watching him struggle with the dying fish as he tries to pry the hook from its mouth. “What a surprise that must be,” Lucy says. “For the fish. Everything just goes crazy at once. I wonder what it thinks.” Coming halfway through the book, the scene resonates—its image, really, is at the heart of Rock Springs. What one character or another experiences in each of the book’s ten stories is just that sudden, wild sensation of being caught, pulled completely without warning out of his accustomed life—and plunged suddenly into catastrophe. By the end of each story, something has “just gone crazy” for someone: he has been hooked and reeled in, struggling and gasping. Claude answers Lucy’s question: “They don’t. Fish don’t think.” But of course people do. And what they think in that moment of crazy helplessness, and the moments, days, and years that follow, is what Rock Springs is about.
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