Spitting on someone who's playing the snark game is the mark of an immature man, no matter how old he may be. And the Richard Ford-Colson Whitehead spat demonstrates that even a veteran can't always claim to have the Teflon coating.
But having reviewed the piece in question (as first located by Maud), I have to conclude that Whitehead was off base.
His opening criticism is that there's hardly "a multitude" of sins within the short story collection. But he misses the point of Ford's subtext. Ford's fiction is about how minor sins lead to major inconsequential behavior. And it never occurs to Whitehead's limited perspective that the very self-absorption of Ford's characters might be the sinful makeup that brings them down.
I can agree with Whitehead's point that the characters in A Multitude of Sins are largely indistinguishable, save the real estate agents in "Abyss," but only because this last story is novella-length. But I think this has more to do with Ford being a better novelist than a short story writer. He's one of those authors who needs a wide tableau to get inside his characters.
The children criticism is unfair, given that the two Bascombe novels (in particular, Independence Day) show Frank trying to balance divorced life with professional life and fatherhood. And in the second novel, Bascombe's son is presented as a delinquent and concentrates on desperate bond which Frank tries to form on a road trip. All this while trying to coordinate time with his girlfriend. Bascombe's doing the best he can, but ultimately his malaise has everything to do with his lack of initiative. He watches the transformation of his town, he keeps track of the town's residents, but he remains disturbingly passive.
And it is this passiveness which Ford is railing against in his work. Indeed, the passive behavior is so detailed and strong that
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