I’m happy to report that I have new review in the world — of Richard Ford’s memoir from last year Between Them: Remembering My Parents — though to be honest, it’s an awfully long review, so perhaps this qualifies as one of those “review-essays” like the ones they run in the NYRB, a size and level of seriousness I’ve always coveted. Anyway, I was surprised to see Ford come out with a memoir for reasons I explain in my review, and so it was rewarding to do some full-contact chin-scratching over the book.

Typically, when I review a book, I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the author — what he or she might think of what I am writing. This is not to be callous to their feelings. It’s just that book reviews, and especially the kind of review-essays that I try to write when I can pull them off, are not directed at the authors themselves. As a piece of writing it’s not really for them even though it’s in dialogue with or is riffing off of something they have written. It’s instead, of course, for the strangers out there who didn’t write the book but who might read it, on the one hand, and on the other, it’s aimed toward the sidecar oeuvre of literature about literature. Though it seems less romantic in a movie kind of way, there is a thriving body of literary commentary, some of which is more rewarding than the primary sources it purports to explicate (see, e.g., my beloved Cynthia Ozick on almost anybody). And really, more than anything, this is the distant bucket I am trying to pitch my little critical ping pong ball into — my Grand Prize Game of literary commentary.

That being said, I did think momentarily of what Ford would make of my review because the memoir at hand seems to be so revealing, though not in ways one typically encounters in a contemporary memoir. There are no scandalous confessions of sordid family drama. This ain’t Mary Karr. This ain’t The Surrender. And yet it’s still revealing, again for reasons I explain in the review. And to level criticism at the book skates almost too closely to leveling criticism at him, which of course I didn’t intend to do in the review. It’s just: the book is personal.

Plus another reason I was more aware of Ford’s imagined reaction is that Ford has established a reputation for reacting strongly to negative reviews of his work. When Alice Hoffman wrote a negative review of his novel The Sportswriter, Ford’s wife took a copy of Hoffman’s latest work out back and shot a hole in it. And then Ford shot a hole in it. And then he mailed it to her. (“People make such a big deal out of it — shooting a book — it’s not like I shot her,” he’s said.) And then when Colson Whitehead wrote a negative review of Ford’s story collection A Multitude of Sins in the New York Times, Ford spit on him at a subsequent literary party, calling Whitehead “a kid.”

One might — might — chalk this up to a more youthful impatience with public judgment (if one were being so charitable as to pull one’s back out), but then in 2017 Ford published an essay in Esquire where he both recounted these incidents and said he feels the same way now that he did then: “I realize that how I feel about my bad treatment is only one compass point among several legitimate ones. But I can tell you that, as of today, I don’t feel any different about Mr. Whitehead, or his review, or my response.”

Furthermore, and even more damning, he expresses a total misunderstanding of the function of criticism:

Whenever I think about reviews of my books, I usually only think about the bad ones — the ones, again, that drive readers away, take bread out of my children’s mouths, devalue half a decade of honest effort, steal money out of my pocket, and cast a dark shadow over my future … I wonder if those bad-review writers would do it if they knew the chain reaction they’d set in motion. If they would, then they deserve what they get both here and beyond. I wouldn’t want to know too much about these people’s personal habits — how they treat their spouses and pets. I know, I’m way too sensitive.

Aside from being simply wrong, this is amusing because I don’t think Ford has any children. He has boasted on several occasions of choosing not to have any. (Sample quotation: “I hate children.”)

For a more detailed analysis of why his opinions about book reviewing are wrong, read Steve Donoghue’s take.

The literary feud info isn’t really in the purview of my review of his memoir, which is why it’s not included there, and why I am riffing on it here in this little note. I’m not interested in adjudicating every author’s interpersonal failing — casting stones in glass houses and all that — but this behavior is shameful, both morally and intellectually. All of which is to say: I don’t think Ford would like my review very much, though of course it’s much gentler than many others he’s received. That is, I don’t think my review is spit-worthy.

Despite all this, Ford still has composed many interesting textual documents, one of which is his essay “In the Face,” which was originally published in the New Yorker way back in 1996. It was subsequently reprinted in the following year’s Best American Essays, where I first encountered it. I wish I had a copy at hand because it seemed like such an interesting explication and exemplification of a mode of male thought vis-a-vis violence. Would it shed light on this feud stuff? Perhaps, but I’d have to locate my New Yorker subscription log-in credentials to find out for sure.

Another piece of nonfiction by Ford, which I’ve just now discovered in assembling this note, is an essay that appeared in the New York Times Magazine eons ago, where he chronicled his trip down the Mississippi River with Stanley Crouch, the novelist and jazz critic — yet another person who also hates bad reviews of his work. (He slapped his reviewer Dale Peck after coming face to face in a restaurant. What is it with these people?) Anyway, I have printed it out to read over the weekend, like the fogey I am. It’s pitched as a modern-day reenactment of Huck Finn, which sounds like one of those ideas only a roomful of trapped magazine editors would love. But given the two participants, it’s worth investigating. Here is the Crouch essay. And here, just now discovered (the internet really is amazing) is a letter-to-the-editor in response to both pieces by none other that Pat Conroy. Whoo-boy.

Finally, being a Jackson, MS, native who has returned to live in the city here in middle age, I got a tremendous kick out of a particular portion of the Ford memoir. When he was a teenager, Ford’s father got the itch for life in the suburbs. This being the 1950s in Jackson, they cruised north of town to look at the treeless scrub brush of new lots and barely finished houses down by a crook in the Pearl River. They looked at houses in neighborhoods with dubious names such as Sherwood Forest, Audubon Park, etc. I enjoyed this immensely because I live in Sherwood Forest. In fact it’s the neighborhood I grew up in, or one of them at least. And what to Ford back in the ’50s was a backwater, almost the country, to me in the mid ’90s was an old neighborhood, with established oak trees that rained down their terror of leaves each autumn. Now, when I take my kids north of the city, out past Madison, to visit friends, those are the houses with small, leafless trees and new un-moldy brick facades and yards still carpeted in their original layer of sod. At the end of the cul-de-sacs one’s sure to find the raw red clay of some radiologist’s future dream home. But I live “in the city.” So the burbs are just as contingent on time as anything else. Wait around long enough in any one spot and you become established.