Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions


The American Wife: Stories
Elaine Ford, 2007
192 pp.

In Brief
Of Elaine Ford’s novel, Missed Connections, the Washington Post wrote that it is a work “of small episodes, of precise sentences, of unusual clarity.” That same clarity proves an unsettling force in Ford’s stories, where precision of prose often belies uncertainties hidden beneath.

In the title piece, an American woman in England, embroiled in a relationship doomed to fail, discovers how little she understands about her own desires and impulses. In another story, another American wife, abandoned in Greece by her archaeologist husband, struggles to solve a crime no one else believes to have been committed.

Throughout her stories Ford touches on the mysteries that make up our lives. Each story in itself is a masterpiece of such detail and power as to transform the way we see the world. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author

Elaine Ford is the author of five novels. For her fiction she has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Maine, where she taught creative writing and literature. She lives in Harpswell, Maine. (From the publisher.)

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Critics Say. . .
Miss Ford makes every inch of her fictional territory count.
New York Times Book Review



Ford's prose has a poised, finely tuned quality that doesn't scream because it doesn't need to . . . Her keen grasp of the inescapable and convoluted effects of family ties is one of the finest achievements of the book.
Harper's



Elaine Ford’s collection roams the territory between the intellect and the heart. She writes of the human condition with precision, in language that is both grave and conversational. Her characters step out of the real world onto the page, where she develops them quietly, but with compassionate fullness. This writer grips the reader with her keen knowledge of the psyche of individuals-—their motives and secrets—and also with the surprising things that happen to them.”
Laura Kasischke - Michigan Literary Fiction Awards


Readers Say . . .
(Occasionally, when there is a shortage of reviews, we try to include helpful ones from Amazon customers.)

Not Alone : Elaine Ford's "The American Wife" rings her signal changes on experience. Whether a first- or third-person speaker, the narrator in these stories is never noisy, nor ostentatious. In some cases, as in "The Scow," the story of a woman emptying her parents' modest cluttered house after both have died, the voice is depressed and a reader yearns to be relieved of this sad situation and the sad obligations that sooner or later claim most of us.

In other stories, a voice which begins by seeming somehow too attenuated, too oppressed by situation, becomes more interesting by means of the speaker's refusal, precisely, to "get better," to straighten up, to soldier on. In the stunning "Changeling"(a story that any mother who has faced life with an infant will relate to easily) the isolation of the wife of an academic in Greece seems at first, as it does to her busy, stimulated husband, exaggerated. Sandy, his wife, is intelligent and utterly compromised (she does not speak Greek, she is left with no resources except her own two legs, which can and do get her out of the house, but beyond this she has nothing). Who is to say, really—who, that is, but the reader—if her baby has been taken from its carriage, as she avers, and another one left in its place, or whether the pressures of loneliness, solitude, and the essential misapprehension that spell the failure of a marriage have affected her mind to the extent of paranoia?

This story is rooted in earlier decades as are several in the book. We readers know that Sandy's situation—stay home, mind baby, have no other relations at all—is farfetched for an educated woman of today in a world of internet, instantly available translation and automatic (if superficial) "friends"; but what still holds true is that the parenting of infants is an utterly demanding enterprise and to do it in alone, with no support of spouse or friend, is at best an oddly outer-space experience in which the parent-alone floats and floats, longing for any kind of ballast.

In Elaine Ford's novels—"The Playhouse" and "Ivory Bright" among my favorites—she has dealt with what Frank O'Connor called "submerged populations," the essential denizens of the short story. But Ford manages in her novels to broaden the landscapes of those populations and still to reveal their utter peculiarities. In the stories in "The American Wife," she has gone back to the even smaller grid: a wife-mother abroad, married to the wrong man, lives in two of the tales; in another a speaker returned home to visit a cousin dying, finds that she dislikes the sufferer just as much as she did decades earlier when, healthy, the cousin had stolen her boyfriend; the icy visit recorded in "Levitation," involves a mother and daughter who both (the young woman about 20, perhaps, the mother in her early fifties) assert their rights to feelings and resentments about a marriage gone bad, neither of them yielding even an inch....

In "Reaping Tares," one of the funny stories in a collection more grave than not, another young woman, an attorney, finds a very specific way, right under her professional nose, to boot away a rival for her husband's attention.

Ford doesn't shrink from describing the smallness of lives. However we may rue that smallness in reality, it is always a distinct pleasure to recognize it in fiction. In "The American Wife" we find ourselves mirrored. We are, as it turns out, not alone.
Reviewer - C.J. Corkery, Massachusetts, USA, 5/3/08



Stories with bite : Life is stranger than fiction, which is why so many authors try to create plots that are probable and characters who are recognizable. Not so Elaine Ford, whose stories are as unpredictable as New England weather and whose characters are as quirky as we all might be if we stopped worrying about what other people might think. No two of her stories are alike; no characters are cliched.... If you're looking for more than just a good read, try this book.
Reviewer - Madge L. Manfred, Connecticut, USA, 1/1/08



Excellent Short Fiction : This splendid book is novelist Elaine Ford's first collection of short fiction, and it demonstrates that she is an accomplished master of the form.... The author has an extraordinary ability to evoke place; I felt almost as though I were there with the characters in Athens or the Ticino or suburban New Jersey or Somerville, Mass. As a collection these stories are disinguished by emotional complexity, understated economy of style, and a wry sense of humor.
Reviewer - JGil, 12/24/07

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Book Club Discussion Questions

Sorry—the publisher has not made any questions available for this book.

But don't despair. Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

   • Generic Discussion Questions
   • Read-Think-Talk About a Book

Also, try these LitLovers talking points for several of the stories to help get a discussion started:

1. In the "Garage Artist," what is the significance of Daniel's snowscapes? Why is it the only thing he paints?

2. In "The Changeling," can you personally relate to Sandy's fear that her infant has been replaced by another? Do you believe that's actually what has happened here? How might her fear be emblematic of a troubled marriage?

3. Talk about the relationship of the young woman and her mother in "Levitation." How does the title of the story relate to the protagonist's attempt to establish independence from her mother and lead a life of her own making?

4. Talk about the humor—or pathos—in "Cousins" regarding Edie's mother, who "has largely dispensed with politeness." Edie sees this as a "conservation-of-energy move." Also, in what way does this story illuminate obligations to family and kin?

5. In "The Scow," how does the protagonist come to believe that her parents may have ended their own lives? How does such a discovery affect the way she views her own life?

6. In the title story, what does the American wife come to learn about herself while living in England? What prompts her self-discovery?

8. In what way does "Since You've Been Gone" explore the dangers of interracial relationships?

9. How do many (or all) of Elaine Ford's short stories explore this thematic idea: "In making poems, as in living, non c'e trucco. There is no trick, no secret, no shorcut. You must find your way yourself. That is what...we all must [learn]"?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)