The Drowned Life (a review of Jeff Ford’s fiction)-by Doug Lain
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Jeffrey Ford’s short story “The Drowned Life” is the story of a bailout gone wrong. It first appeared in the Night Shade Books anthology “Eclipse,” is now the title story of Ford’s 2008 collection, and it is a story that is firmly of its moment. The protagonist, an HMO bureaucrat named Hatch, is weary from enduring the “steady rain of increasing gas prices, grocery prices, medical costs…wars, AIDs, desperate millions in migration, …and stone-cold bullshit” and, at the outset, lets himself get pulled under. His bailing technique is rusty and he’s dragged under by a shark, a stainless-steel beauty named Financial Ruin. Hatch is pulled down to a town where bloated corpses frequent run down bars with wood paneling, broken pay-phones, and martinis with pellets of shit instead of olives.
This is a story for the end of the zero years. It may well be a story for the tens as well.
There isn’t anything in Jeffrey Ford’s story that wasn’t in your head already in 2007. Only an economist, broker, or congressman could reasonably claim to have been taken unaware by our collapse, and while Ford’s nightmare vision may be no worse than workaday reality, it is the expression of the vision, Ford’s clarity and commitment to following each metaphor to its conclusion, that makes the Drowned Life a fiction that is up to the task of interpreting and commenting on the bad news of our real lives.
An example:
Two gentlemen in suits swept by but didn’t return his greeting. A drowned mother and child, bulging eyes dissolving in trails of tiny bubbles, dressed in little more than rags, didn’t acknowlege him. One old woman stopped and said, “Hello.”
“I’m new here,” he told her.
“The less you think about it the better,” she said and drifted on her way.
This is the conversation I have almost every day on my commute, over the cubicle wall, or on my cellphone. buy cialis pharmacy This is America and our drowned life, and while we drift we might be better off it we refuse the advice of the old hands, better off if we ignore those who have online cytotec already rotted through.
“The less you think about it the better,” she said.
With the “Drowned Life” Ford proves that this sentiment is exactly wrong.