Jeffrey Ford

Stand-alone novels:

The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque — (2002) Publisher: A fable, a nightmare, a vision, a mystery — superbly rich imaginative fiction at its best. New York, 1893, and society portrait painter Piero Piambo feels his artistic ambition waning, even while he immortalizes the city's nouveaux riches in oil paints. But then he receives a bizarre and lucrative commission, to paint the mysterious Mrs Charbuque. The catch is that he is not allowed to see her, and so Piambo sits before a screen as his sittertells him of her life, dreams, and fears — clues from which he must divine her visage. As he works, a series of murders plagues the city — deaths that at first seem accidental. And, as Piambo's masterpiece takes shape, his relationship with Mrs Charbuque grows ever more tangled... while her deranged husband becomes hellbent on some inexplicable vengeance.

The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque

The best thing about being my own master when it comes to choosing what I want to read is that when I read a book I really want to talk about I can without feeling like I have to put aside any other obligations, and I really want to talk about The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque.

Piero Piambo, a portrait artist in New York in 1893, is currently in fashion and as a result also in high demand. Despite the financial security it affords him, he begins to wonder if he has not lost his way in regards to his art, and when he receives a mysterious commission from the blind Watkins, servant of Mrs Charbuque, he accepts it with the absurd condition that he must paint her portrait without ever seeing her. The one concession that she does make is that Piero can visit for an hour Monday through Friday and ask her any questions he wants as long as they do not pertain to her appearance.

As she begins to tell her story the story transcends the normal to become fantastical. While she tells Piero of her childhood preserving snowflakes to divine the future with her father, the death of her mother, and her own years of fame as the sought after fortune teller the Sibyl, bodies begin to appear on the streets of New York weeping blood. Is it a plague brought into the city from abroad as the police suspect or something darker? And what of the supposedly late Mr Charbuque, who appears to threaten Piero to abandon the commission or meet a violent end? The more Mrs Charbuque tells Piero about herself, the more he begins to suspect that she is an unreliable narrator when it comes to her own life.

While Piero is initially interested in the job because it will allow him to take time off from portraits to pursue purer artistic visions, at the urging of his friend and fellow artist Shenz he attempts to try and rise to Mrs Charbuque’s challenge of drawing her accurately in order to attain three times the large amount he has already been promised. The more that Piero works at solving the mystery, the more obsessed he becomes both with Mrs Charbuque and with portraying her accurately, and it begins to cost him everything that he holds dear. It soon becomes apparent that the challenge will either reveal true genius as an artist or destroy him.

Jeffrey Ford takes a wonderful premise and executes it masterfully, pulling the reader deeper into the novel with each new breadcrumb of information. I couldn’t put the book down, and I read it all in a day as I had to know the answers to the mysteries that make up the novel. In typical Ford fashion he saves the biggest twist for the denouement and once again I was unable to see it coming. Despite the intricate plot the novel is essentially very human, as Piero’s obsession reveals all his flaws, as well as the thing he shares with many other artists, his god complex. I believe it is no coincidence that he finds himself at a church at the end of the novel.

I never have any reservations about recommending Ford’s work to people, he is a fantastic writer and always a joy to read. Highly recommended, particularly to those interested in art like myself, or people who have a fondness for America during the Victorian age. —Paul Charles Smith 
FanLit thanks Paul Charles Smith from Empty Your Heart of Its Mortal Dream for contributing this guest review.

The Girl in the Glass — (2005) Publisher: The Great Depression has bound a nation in despair — and only a privileged few have risen above it: the exorbitantly wealthy... and the hucksters who feed upon them. Diego, a seventeen-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant rescued from the depths of poverty, owes his salvation to Thomas Schell, spiritual medium and master grifter. At the knee of his loving — and beloved — surrogate father, Diego has learned the most honored tricks of the trade. Along with Schell's gruff and powerful partner, Antony Cleopatra, the three have sailed comfortably, so far, through hard times, scamming New York's grieving rich with elaborate, ingeniously staged séances. And with no lack of well-heeled true believers at their disposal, it appears the gravy train will chug along indefinitely — until an impossible occurrence in a grand mansion on Long Island's elegant Gold Coast changes everything. While "communing with spirits" in the opulent home of George Parks, Schell sees an image of a young girl in a pane of glass — the missing daughter of one of Parks's millionaire neighbors — silently entreating the con man to help. Though well aware that his otherworldly "powers" are a sham, Schell inexplicably offers his services, and those of his partners, to help find the lost child. He draws Diego and Antony into a tangled maze of deadly secrets, terrible experimentation, and dark hungers among the very wealthy and obscenely powerful. As each cardinal rule dividing the grift from the real is unceremoniously broken, Diego's education is advanced into areas he never considered before. And the mentor's sudden vulnerable humanity forces the student into the role of master to confront an abomination that will ultimately spawn the nightmare of the century.

The Shadow Year — (2008) Publisher: In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always-reassuring sameness — until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood. Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police — while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas... and, unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.

The Shadow Year

The Shadow Year is a charming coming-of-age tale about the 6th grade year of an average American boy (we never learn his name) growing up in the 1960s. This year isn’t average, though, because there are some strange things going on in his small town. As he navigates his way around mundane matters such as an alcoholic manic depressive mother, a father who holds down three jobs, live-in grandparents, and unpleasant teachers, he’s also concerned with a prowler, a classmate who disappeared, and a strange suspicious man who drives an eerie white car. Things get really creepy when he realizes that the weird things happening around town seem to be linked to the way his possibly-autistic / possibly-savant little sister moves the cars and people around in his older brother’s replica of their town which he works on in their basement.

The Shadow Year feels more like mainstream fiction — it’s mostly about coming of age, family relationships, and living in a small town. Except for the wonder at Mary’s abilities, the supernatural elements are down-played and don’t become obvious until the end. The novel reminds me very much of A Christmas Story — that classic movie about Ralphie who wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas ("You'll shoot your eye out!"). Similarly, Jeffrey Ford fills his story with over-the-top characters who are fun to read about but who you’re glad you don’t live with and who you have a hard time believing could all co-exist in the same small town.

Also similarly, most of the plot revolves around the day to day events in a 6th grade boy’s life: waiting for the ice cream man, trying to complete school assignments with a minimal amount of effort, getting picked on by older kids, skipping church, sneaking out of the house, and trying to keep up with his brave and reckless older brother. These little slices of life are funny, poignant, and so beautifully and vividly described that they often brought a smile to my face and occasionally brought tears to my eyes. Here’s a passage about the ice cream man:

Occasionally Mel would try to be pleasant, but I think the paper canoe of a hat he wore every day soured him. He also wore a blue bow tie, a white shirt, and white pants. His face was long and crooked, and at times, when the orders came to fast and the kids didn’t have the right change, the bottom half of his face would slowly melt — a sundae abandoned at the curb…. In a voice that came straight from his freezer, he called my sister, Mary, and all the other girls “sweetheart.”

The Shadow Year is worth reading simply for Jeffrey Ford’s excellent imagery and atmosphere, powerful prose, and razor-sharp descriptions of life we can relate to, but it’s also a good mystery with plenty of tension and suspense. The relationship we observe between the boy and his older brother and little sister is truly touching. I have to add, also, that our ability to engage with a character whose name we never know is surprising and indicates Ford’s confidence and courage.

Despite its subject material, The Shadow Year is not a book for kids because of the language and sexual content. I listened to Audible Frontier’s production of The Shadow Year which was read by Kevin T. Collins who has an astonishing range of voices at his command. His excellent narration definitely added to my reading enjoyment and I’ll be looking for his name in the future.

I’m already on to my second Jeffrey Ford novel. He’s now on my list of must-be-read authors.
—Kat Hooper 

The Drowned Life — (2008) Publisher: There is a town that brews a strange intoxicant from a rare fruit called the deathberry — and once a year a handful of citizens are selected to drink it... There is a life lived beneath the water — among rotted buildings and bloated corpses — by those so overburdened by the world's demands that they simply give up and go under... In this mesmerizing blend of the familiar and the fantastic, multiple award-winning New York Times notable author Jeffrey Ford creates true wonders and infuses the mundane with magic. In tales marked by his distinctive, dark imagery and fluid,exhilarating prose, he conjures up an annual gale that transforms the real into the impossible, invents astrange scribble that secretly unites a significant portion of society, and spins the myriad dreams of a restless astronaut and his alien lover. Bizarre, beautiful, unsettling, and sublime, The Drowned Life showcases the exceptional talents of one of contemporary fiction's most original artists.

The Drowned Life

Jeffrey Ford's The Drowned Life is as engrossing as his previous short story collections, immediately ensnaring the reader with his detailed prose and characterization. One noticeable trend is that while Ford dabbles in clear-cut fantasy with stories such as "The Manticore Spell" or "The Dismantled Invention of Fate," much of his work deals more with the mundane sprinkled with just the right amounts of magic and the surreal. The titular piece for example, "The Drowned Life," seems like the narrative of the common Joe, albeit one that utilizes Ford's excellent use of language and metaphor. However, it slowly steers itself into the territory of weirdness with its concept of an underwater afterlife but all this time, the reader isn't jolted from the experience.

What I particularly enjoy with Ford's writing is that the quality is consistent. Each and every story is rich, whether it's the minutiae of the descriptions or the complexity of its protagonists. As a longtime Ford fan, it's also noticeable to me that some stories feature recurring characters, and if there's any cosmology that he's revisited time and time again, it's that of real life (a quick reading of the detailed biography at the end corroborates this, especially in light of the story "What's Sure to Come").

I'm pretty much overwhelmed by all the stories in this collection but here are my top three: "Present from the Past" is an emotional rollercoaster as the author fully fleshes out the personalities and experiences of the protagonist's relatives. For example, there is a definitive impact when Ford uses the word "bullshit" as a description of the father's mentality towards the complaints of the various characters. This is also one of those stories that end at just the right moment, the type that brims with potential rather than a failed attempt at attaining ambiguity.

"The Way He Does It" is an almost whimsical narrative as Ford constantly teases the reader with revealing what "It" actually is. That it captured my attention as a reader for the entire length is a testament to Ford's skill, and this is one of those stories that's stronger because of the dialogue between the reader and the text rather than what the author explicitly includes.

"The Dreaming Wind" has been one of my favorites ever since I first read it in the anthology Coyote Road, and it still stands up to multiple re-readings thanks to Ford's usage of language, his manipulation of the expectations of both the characters and the reader, and his overall execution. It's not often that an entire town is an actual character yet that's the case here as the individual characters are merely parts of a bigger whole.

The extra material at the end is also invaluable, whether it's the longer-than-the-usual biography or an essay on "The Metaphysics of Fiction Writing." The Drowned Life is a very satisfying collection, easily one of the most memorable short story collections of 2008. —Charles Tan     
FanLit thanks Charles Tan from Bibliophile Stalker for contributing this guest review.

The Empire of Ice Cream — (2009) Publisher: Mixing the mundane with the metaphysical, the pairings of the everyday and the extraordinary in this collection of short fiction yield supernatural results — a young musician perceives another world while drinking coffee; a fairy chronicles his busy life in a sandcastle during the changing tide; a demonic 16th-century chess set shows up in a New Jersey bar; and Charon, the boatman of hell, takes a few days of vacation. Storylines both conventional and outlandish reveal humdrum routines as menacing and imaginary worlds as perfectly familiar. Allusions to authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne reinforce the fantasy tradition in these tales, while understated humor and moments of sadness add a quirky unpredictability. Each story is followed by a brief afterword that details its genesis, offering insight into the many autobiographical elements found within.

The Fantasy Writer's Assistant: And Other Stories — (2009) Publisher: At times literary, at other times surreal, this collection offers a diverse range of stories that deal with real-life conflicts, human values, and coming-of-age experiences, all placed within fantastical settings. An author’s search for an elusive Kafka story leads to a potentially cursed book in “Bright Morning,” while in the award-winning “Exo-Skeleton Town,” humans dress in protective exoskins conveying the personas of bygone Hollywood movie stars in order to barter old Earth movies for an alien aphrodisiac. A young boy comes to term with “Creation” when he molds a man out of the detritus of a nearby forest, and in the title story, a great fantasy writer loses touch with the world he has created and pleads with his young assistant to help him visualize the story’s end and enable him to complete his greatest novel ever. An eclectic offering, these witty and modern fables blend mundane surroundings with eerie situations.