“I don’t believe the past can be repaired, only exceeded,” a man says as he re-encounters someone he knew for a brief but emotional time. Most of the solitary souls who populate Richard Ford’s “A Multitude of Sins “(Knopf, 304 pages, $25), whether they’ve sinned or been sinned against, ceaselessly interrogate their lives in the hope that they can indeed be improved.

The “multitude” of sins in these 10 stories are really variations of one sin adultery and Ford never treads the same ground. The perfectly sequenced collection alternates settings, points of view and styles with superb and surprising results.

Author Richard Ford writes about adultery in his latest collection of short stories, A

A woman vacationing with her philandering husband on the coast of Maine finds that his midlife crisis is more desperate than she imagined. A lobbyist from Washington, D.C., carries on an affair in cities throughout the world until a man who may or may not be his lover’s husband accosts him in Montreal. A New Orleans boy is forced to spend a day duck-hunting with his estranged father, who recently left his wife for a man.

Transcending stories

Ford’s stories render small moments in scrupulous, obsessive detail. Their endings are usually ambiguous, relentlessly human. Along the way Ford glides back and forth between present and past, probing not just his characters’ thoughts but, more important, their thought processes.

In “Reunion,” a man approaches his ex-lover’s ex-husband from across New York’s Grand Central Terminal, each step forward giving way to a mental leap backward. The narrator lets himself believe that even though he’s looking for an “unreverberant moment,” the significance of his affair will somehow be revealed. It’s “as if this later time was all that really mattered, whereas the previous, briefly passionate, linked but now-distant moments were merely preliminary.”

But after a bizarre, nearly affectless conversation with the man he once wronged, the narrator realizes the meaning of his dalliance isn’t going to present itself at a train station at rush hour. The ending is incomplete but realistic. These lives will go on.

This lack of direct confrontation is a signature element. Most pieces open, long after the initial sin, with a tenuous stasis resulting from the affair or breakup. The drama lies in the characters’ minds, in their attempts to understand what’s come before and to move on.

“Puppy” shows Ford at his existential best. In trying to find a home for a dog left in their back yard, a professional couple in New Orleans are prompted to consider the role chance plays in their lives, and thus to challenge the basis of their marriage.

Bob, the narrator, sees his life as a series of choices that matter only insofar as they are made. The individual event is not important to him, and the puppy is just another episode that will be resolved. But his wife, Sallie, believes each choice is full of meaning and, with it, danger.

“I began thinking about that poor little puppy as an ill force that put everything in our life at a terrible risk,” Sallie confesses. It seems humorous, but the dog sparks Bob’s dreams about his wife’s past infidelity and suddenly all the events in his life don’t seem so equal.

Lost in the middle

Adultery is not the only common element here. Many of the stories are connected in one way or another to St. Louis. This seems coincidental until one character describes it as “the city lost in the middle … both the boyhood home of T.S. Eliot, and only 85 years before that, the starting point of westward expansion. It’s a place, I suppose, the world can’t get away from fast enough.”

Some of these characters are in an emotional St. Louis, a neutral place to examine their lives and then move forward. This may seem an odd device from an author who writes in the novel “Independence Day,” in a passage against nostalgia, “Place is nothing.” Here the specific place is indeed nothing the journey’s the thing.

Ford’s one disappointing story is, unfortunately, his longest. “Abyss” starts out powerfully, showing the allure but also the mental violence of an extramarital affair, dramatizing what happens when two people have only that sin in common.

“Adultery was the act that rid, erased, even erased itself once the performance was over,” the heroine, Frances, thinks as she becomes disenchanted with her lover. “Sometimes, she imagined, it must erase more than itself. And sometimes, surely, it erased everything around it.”

As the couple head toward the abyss, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel involved in the outcome. Frances begins to see her companion as a bore, and there seems no reason to feel otherwise, or to feel anything at all.

Ford at his best makes us care about what happens to his characters, even if it’s not obvious what they’ve learned or where they’re going. In “Quality Time,” a man who has just ended an affair stands on a Chicago street, unsure what to think. Later, Ford tells us, “he would feel a small release, an unburdening, the sensation of events being completed, so that over time he would think less and less about it until it all seemed, upon reflection, to be almost perfect.”

This sensation is not unlike reading Richard Ford.