Half-Full or Otherwise
Who are optimists? Think about it. Think about your closest friends; yourself. Do you look at the glass half-full or vice versa? Probably most of us would like to think of ourselves as happy, invested beings, but really how can someone be happy all the time? There must be times when somebody cracks and lets out his anger. In Richard Ford’s Optimists, Frank, the narrator, witnesses his father crack. We go on a journey with Frank through about fifteen years of dread and separation from his parents based on one tragic event.
In Ford’s first sentence, probably the most compelling of the whole story, he draws the reader in to want to continue reading. His use of perspective captures the innocence of a young boy who has just witnessed a tragedy, and enables the reader to be carried along with him on this discovery. In Ford’s first sentence, “All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back (171). Ford goes right to the point in explaining everything that we are about to read; I felt like I was having a conversation with him. Frankly, I enjoyed that Ford decided to have his narrator “confess” his happenings because it was concise and a bit ironic that he was so honest with us despite the actions of his father. By listing the setting and the key plot points, I felt like I had a special insight to the story, “scoop”, if you will from Frank, the narrator. His voice was clear from the beginning.
Through Frank’s youthful, innocent eyes, his father looks like a maniacal creature when he arrives home from work with “his fists…clenched white, as if there was no blood in them at all (175). Frank’s background observations are interesting for the reader because it shows us how a teenage boy sees his father at a vulnerable and intense moment.
Maybe it is the year this story takes place, but I really enjoyed how perfect Frank’s mother made everything out to be — the ultimate stepford. But what is most intriguing is what lies beneath the façade, and when tragedy strikes, the length she goes to protect that image. The journey Ford puts her through, from married to divorced; to reuniting with her child makes me have some empathy for her. Although I cannot admit to fully forgiving her for not trying to make a connection with her child who ran away or implying a relationship with the man her husband murdered, I can rest with the thought that she and her son got to see each other, if only for a brief moment. That scene was intriguing because it flash-forwarded about thirty years later to a point when Frank’s mother seemed to have moved on. I can only imagine the unavoidable awkwardness between an estranged mother and son, and what they would even have to talk about. Ford portrays it really well by writing, “[She] held me for a moment that seemed like a long time before she turned away, finally, and left me there alone” (191). It seems like that is what Frank really wanted: to be alone; to not have to deal with all the complications of his family’s life, all because of his father’s horrible mistake. But by Frank’s mother implying that she was, in fact, in love with Boyd Mitchell, the man her husband had killed, she leaves her son in abandonment.
I think my favorite part about this whole story is Ford’s use of time. From directly saying the year, to the month (November), to the actual scene of the crime when Ford writes, ”All this had taken only five minutes” (181). His ability to expand time is effortless, and gives the reader a full sense of Frank’s perspective of his family throughout years. An interesting, introspective line from Ford about the passing of time:
The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all that’s happened and by all that could and will happen next…When you’re young, these things seem unforgettable and at the heart of everything. (187)
A daunting task to travel through a significant amount of time in fiction, a writer like Ford is truly successful. Optimists “works” in many ways, giving the reader plenty to grasp, characters to connect to, and lessons to be learned.
Things Hannah Writes 