Exceptional. Very different. I loved the dialogue. ( )

'Wildlife' is a short account of a failing marriage, told through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old boy who may, on the evidence of his clipped, dry answers to everything said to him, be on the autistic spectrum. This was a good read, the kind of miniature novel (yet more than just a novella) that hits harder than weightier tomes thanks to the concentrated focus on a single issue, and a short period of time. Captivating. ( )

Richard Ford is best known for his short stories and his three Frank Bascombe novels (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land). While I have not read those books, I may consider them because I found Wildlife (1990) to be an intense and interesting character study. It is set during the 1960 summer of rampant Montana forest fires which provide both background and metaphor for the flame-out of the narrator's home life.

The narrator is sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson whose family has recently moved to Great Falls, Montana. While Joe is trying to adapt to a new school and neighborhood his parent's marriage is slowly disintegrating. The decay of the marriage is exacerbated by Joe's father Jerry's loss of his job, after being falsely accused of theft, and his choice to become a firefighter; a decision that takes him away from his wife and son. Joe's mother is attracted to another man and this leads to situations that make Joe wonder about the meaning of his life and his relationship with his mother and father.

Joe is a thoughtful young man, but is confused by the changes he has been experiencing. They've left him a troubled and puzzling teenager on the border of maturity. With a spare, carefully shaped prose style that reflects the setting of the action and the quality of the problems and choices Joe faces, Ford creates a character and situations with which many young people can, no doubt, identify---Joe thinks to himself:
"I wondered if there was some pattern or an order to things in your life---not one you knew but that worked on you and made events when they happened seem correct, or made you confident about them or willing to accept them even if they seemed like wrong things. Or was everything just happening all the time, in a whirl without anything to stop it or cause it---the way we think of ants, or molecules under the microscope, or the way others would think of us, not knowing our difficulties, watching us from another planet?"(p 96)

While Wildlife is a coming of age story Ford uses the family relationships to provide it with a unique approach to a familiar form. Adding to the situation of the family is a growing intensity of thoughts and questions percolating in young Joe's head. The events slowly create a level of dramatic intensity that lead to a thought-provoking ending to the story of Joe and his family. This reader found the novel a sad but riveting tale reminiscent of Raymond Carver and Walker Percy in my experience. ( )

One of his earlier novels. You can experience the great writer he will become, but the characters reactions are odd and the novel is bleak. ( )

A turbulent coming of age tale told from the point of view of 16-year-old Joe who is forced to bear witness to the immolation of his parents’ marriage. Joe’s father, Jerry, loses his job, unfairly, as the golf pro at the local course and his ensuing despair triggers a caustic reaction from Joe’s mother, Jeanette. Jerry eventually seeks his salvation, or destruction, in joining a crew fighting a mighty forest fire to the west of their town of Great Falls, Montana. Jeanette takes his abandonment as something more and also rushes headlong to her own dark night of despair, all of this witnessed by Joe who both wants to be present and wants to run away. But all of the actors here seem caught in eddies of passion and circumstance well beyond their control. And all that any of them can do is hope to ride out the storm.

Ford’s first novel is firmly situated in the Montana of many of his short stories and of his late novel, Canada. The teenage narrator, looking back some years after the events being narrated, is wistful, almost laconic, perhaps as befits a prairie tale. Certainly Joe is in a strange place - a town he doesn’t know well, and a place in life he is also unfamiliar with (the naivety of this teenager is only plausible due to the 1960 setting). Joe seems emotionally stunted, conflicted — saying one thing but often meaning the opposite, and then reversing himself almost immediately, and largely helpless in the face of his parents’ marital strife. Only the quick pace of the tale (this is almost novella length) can keep Joe in the reader’s sympathy. Had it gone on much longer I think the reader would get frustrated with him. With his parents all we can do is shrug and shake our heads.

The writing is fully controlled but may at times feel overworked, which might not be surprising for a first novel. It would be hard not to imagine, had I read this back in 1990 when it was first published, that more and better would follow from the pen of Ford. And I would have been right. As for now, gently recommended for those who would like to pursue the early flourishing of Ford’s Montana-vein of storytelling. ( )