ON THE ROAD WITH DORIS

By R.Z. Sheppard

The novella is the orphan of contemporary fiction. Too lengthy for modern magazines and too short for penny-pinching publishers, this middle-distance literary form rarely gets hardbound as a single offering. Now the Pulitzer-prizewinning author Richard Ford has published three novellas in one volume.

Two of the long stories in Women with Men (Knopf; 255 pages; $23) are related by place and similar characters: a pair of befuddled middle-aged Americans in Paris. Both Martin Austin in The Womanizer and Charley Matthews in Occidentals are profoundly obtuse about females. But their lack of clear self-awareness would ensure trouble with either sex.

Austin, a specialty-paper salesman from Chicago, wants to stay married to the perceptive and unusually attractive Barbara while vigorously pursuing a dour and uncompliant Parisian named Josephine. Furious, Barbara refers to her straying mate as what could euphemistically be called the lowest part of the digestive system. Josephine calls her suitor a damned fool after he takes her young son to a park without permission. Unattended, little Leo wanders off and is stripped by older boys. Austin's humiliation is compounded by newspaper accounts alleging that he might be a child molester.

Charley Matthews is in Paris because he is a molester of sorts. He left his wife for a former chorus girl and then wrote a cheesy though popular novel that turned his ex-spouse into the injuring party. His French editor wants to publish the book, which the not-too-subtle translator says will be better in French.

Matthews is as hollow as his fiction. In fact, both he and Austin seem more like sounding boards than characters capable of making their own music. Not so 17-year-old Larry and his delightfully blowsy Aunt Doris in Jealous, a finely tuned 58-page tale that immediately reminds us that Ford is the gifted novelist who wrote The Sportswriter and Independence Day.

Jealous is a coming-of-age story told by Larry, a Montana boy who leaves his father's house near the Teton River to live with his mother in Seattle. On the road with his flirty aunt in her pink Cadillac, Larry seems a bit like Huck Finn rafting to new adventures. But Doris is no runaway Jim. Free in body and spirit, she drinks while driving, talks to dangerous characters in strange bars and dispenses seasoned opinions that underscore the title of the book. On why Larry's mom and dad separated: "They know too much about each other. They have to figure out what the hell difference that makes." On when they might get back together: "If they can hold out long enough to get lonely, then they'll probably do fine."

Unlike Austin and Matthews, Larry brings a fresh and unambivalent eye to experience. Unlike the other two novellas in this collection, Jealous never bogs down in the bottomless gender swamp. In fact, the trip with Aunt Doris reads like a first stop in what could have been (or might become) a rousing American road novel.

--By R.Z. Sheppard