fwriction

Richard Ford’s stories have been a popular story of the day pick for me, mostly because when I’m done reading his fiction, I need at least the remainder of the day to think on it. “Pretty Boy” is no exception. 

Robert Lindstrom is another one of those iconic Ford characters, one who’s flawed and at times irrational but ultimately magnetic for this reader. I’m also a sucker for great stories set in Paris. (This story reminds me somewhat of Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, if we were given the chance to glimp Phillip Dean grown up a bit.)

Please enjoy this short story from one of my favorite writers. Every time I read Ford, I learn something new about brilliant writing. I love that process.

(This story is spilt up into two parts on The Guardian’s site. Make sure to continue reading “Pretty Boy, part 2”.)

from “Pretty Boy”:

In Paris, it was autumn, and he found a tiny, clean flat through a friend who knew a woman who did such things. It was light but noisy, so he was often out. He attended a beginners’ conversation class at the American Library, visited the American bookshop near where he rented in Rue Cassette. He read (for some reason) Thorstein Veblen and Karl Popper, but seemed to meet no one French. He declined dinner with the young business types from his class. He tried to speak, but found that if he spoke French to French men, they would answer him in English, which they wanted to practice.

He went to the opera and the ballet, visited the monuments and the cemeteries, the Marché aux Puces, walked and walked and walked until he felt lighter.You could be in Paris, he thought, the way you would be anywhere, even the Cities - not really absorbed. It was very easy to be part of no scene. You could travel about, buy vegetables, bread, fish, cheese, newspapers, magazines, have clothes cleaned, go to movies, the post office, eat lunch. And nothing could result. You could get bored.

He had yet to try to paint anything or write. He sat in the Luxembourg several afternoons on a rented chair and sketched the line of clay tennis courts against the trees. He had made a few notes about his father’s difficulties as a dairyman, his mother’s tendency to depression. Possibly a more difficult, less accommodating city would be better. Cairo or Istanbul. He had money. He had his flat rented until Christmas. He would reappraise things then, before the winter took hold.