SOURCE: Brookner, Anita. “Adrift in the Male Doldrums.” Spectator 279, no. 8824 (13 September 1997): 36-7.

In the following review, Brookner asserts that Ford's Women with Men is a disappointment after the successes of The Sportswriter and Independence Day.

Richard Ford's heroes, markedly unheroic, live through a series of glum but sweet-natured intentions, with only one half-realised desire, ‘not to be the centre of things’. In this they succeed. In The Sportswriter, Ford's finest novel, Frank Bascombe was propelled through life by a puzzled and vulnerable desire to get it right: he at least did succeed, but in Independence Day he was further immobilised by middle-aged accretions, as was the novel. Cut adrift by more decisive women, Bascombe's latter-day avatars, Martin Austin and Charley Matthews, have reached a place where ‘events, reliances, just began to work out not right for seemingly no reason, then life began to descend into disastrous straits’. Their...