SOURCE: Levi, Jonathan. “Lost in Translation.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (13 July 1997): 2.

In the following review of Women with Men, Levi discusses Ford's treatment of the theme of men's alienation from, and misunderstanding of, women.

During the 1980s, when the Kmart Konvoy of that loose American school of writing called Dirty Realism was driving four abreast and turning the memory of 20th century literature into road kill, Richard Ford rode like a loner. He was American, all right, an all-American writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, after all, for resurrecting Frank Bascombe of The Sportswriter in Independence Day, an American's American, a suburban Joe with a set of dilemmas rich enough to give John Updike's Rabbit a run for his money.

But there was something mythic in Ford's best writing, something of a high plains drifter in the writer himself, that distanced him from the Tobias Wolffs...