GatesyRead

The title ‘Sorry for Your Troubles’ suggests something Irish, and indeed it seems as though Richard Ford wishes the reader to follow him over the seas and back (though I, for one, feel he is strongest when the work is grounded among ordinary men and women of the United States). While I'd rather avoid sounding like a critic who likes the old stuff, the rough-and-ready nature of various strugglers in Rock Springs is hard to beat. Here there are lawyers and successful retirees (though, of course, troubles don’t stop with a solid safety-net, and lonely hearts are everywhere).  The first of the stories takes place in New Orleans. A middle-aged, married man Sandy McGuiness is out with business associates when he spies a slender woman in a brown dress, who returns his gaze with something like recognition. Ford switches to the past – thirty-five years earlier, when Sandy and Barbara (the slender woman in a brown dress) traveled together to Iceland. They’d bunked down in a rustic fishing h