cover image Life Designs

Life Designs

Elaine Ford. Zoland Books, $22.95 (180pp) ISBN 978-0-944072-80-6

Life has a way of canceling dreams in Ford's assured, bittersweet fifth novel (Monkey Bay). At the book's core is Meg, a sensitive teenager who is working at a Woolworth's when the story opens in 1962. Later, her powerful imagination is put to use as a writer of other people's resumes for the company Life Designs. In her own life, in contrast, Meg is pulled in various momentous directions with little conscious reflection. When her brother is killed in Vietnam, a grieving Meg tumbles into an affair with her graduate student instructor, Jim Mowbry, whom she marries after she becomes pregnant. Jim turns out to be a petty, self-involved academic and a rotten husband. Yet she stays with him and has another child, even after she meets the man of her dreams, Oxford scholar Peter Finesilver. By the time Meg learns that Jim has been chronically unfaithful, Peter has married someone else. Covering 33 years before closing in 1995, the narrative highlights the missed connections and accidental decisions that determine many fates. Ford relates her tale in brief vignettes, with a lightly ironic touch that encapsulates relationships in a few telling details. It is a tribute to her considerable skill that she is thus able to render the warp and woof of ordinary lives, and the complications that thwart even those intent on fulfilling their own life designs. (Oct.)