SOURCE: Herd, David. “Nailing People.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5139 (28 September 2001): 24.

In the following review, Herd provides a brief overview of the strengths of Ford's The Sportswriter and Independence Day, then discusses the theme of adultery in A Multitude of Sins concluding the latter volume ultimately offers a “limiting image” of life.

The Sportswriter was a great book. Not “great” great as in Moby-Dick, but great like, say, Don DeLillo's White Noise: a powerful, disturbing, darkly funny account of what it is like to live in part of modern America. It wasn't a book with a great deal of happiness in it, on the whole it made you feel worse about things, but worse in the way that comes of a hard-nosed look at the rhythms and routines of white-collar life. Certainly it was the novel in which Richard Ford came into his own. Before that, and especially in...