"Leaving for Kenosha" was recently published in the New Yorker. It's classic Richard Ford, a la Independence Day. You've got the significant anniversity (explicit in the first sentence), mini-road trip with child, divorce, and extra-perceptive narration - albeit in the third-person. Here's the beginning. Aside from the repetition of his older themes, I think it's wonderful:
"It was the anniversary of the disaster. Walter Hobbes was on his way uptown to pick up his daughter, Louise, at Trinity. She had the dentist at four. Then the two of them were going for a hilariously early dinner at the place Louise liked—Papa Andre’s—out on the Chef Highway, a roadhouse on stilts that the flood had missed. Then they were going back to his condo for her homework and a Bill Murray movie. This was New Orleans.
"It was their day. Betsy, Louise’s mother, was driving out to appraise some subdivision plats in Mississippi, then was staying at Mitch Daigle’s, across the lake. Which meant double whiskey sours and maybe a joint and some boiled shrimp. Walter and Betsy had been divorced for a year. Betsy had fallen in love with Mitch while she was showing him a house—a present he had planned for his wife for their twentieth anniversary. An anniversary that didn’t quite come off...."
Showing posts with label Richard Ford. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Ford. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
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