SOURCE: Walker, Elinor Ann. “Crossing the Divide in Women with Men.” In Richard Ford, pp. 177-200. New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000.

In the following essay, Walker explores the ways in which the three stories included in Women with Men incorporate as a theme the condition of loneliness and its perpetuation.

Richard Ford's Women with Men (1997) is a collection of three long stories: “The Womanizer,” first published in Granta in 1990; “Jealous,” first published in the New Yorker in 1992; and “Occidentals.” It is Ford's first collection of work since the publication of Rock Springs in 1987. Like those earlier stories, these works target their subjects unflinchingly, bringing into sharp focus the moments when the lived life seems most diffuse. Appropriately, the characters profiled in these stories seem poised between past and future at some pivotal time when their decisions assume great significance. These choices, however, often fail to render their lives into...