Wildlife

I've been a devoted fan of Richard Ford's writing since I read his incredible Frank Bascombe novels, THE SPORTSWRITER and INDEPENDENCE DAY. Those are easily two of the best books I've ever read. Ford is so skilled at creating damaged yet optimistic characters and making them interact in the world around them, that is just makes you want to cry with compassion and love for all of the ways that we as humans are screwed up, and yet able to mount another dream after the went before has turned into ashes. WILDLIFE is pure Richard Ford, though on a smaller scale than the Bascombe novels. In this novel, Ford writes from the perspective of a young boy growing up in rural 1950's Montana with amid his parents' troubled marriage. Ford is often compared to Hemingway, and the similarities are certainly visible in this novel. Ford's simple, understated, yet emotion-packed style is maybe at its most Hemingwayesque in this novel, but it's still uniquely Ford. The young boy finding the means around him to be a man is also similar to Hemingway's Nick Adams, but again, but, again, it never feels that Ford is just imitating Hemingway here. Richard Ford is his own man, and his own writer, and there's something very appealing about Ford's writing, that shines through in this novel, and makes you want to celebrate the beauty of life in all its painful twists and turns.If you've never read Richard Ford before, you're missing out on a great modern American writer.

Ford told me that this book, really a novella more than a novel, was his last attempt to get out of his system what he began in the Montana stories in his collection Rock Springs, although I would suggest that the Montana-based story in Women without Men which had not appeared then continues that. What is significant to me about these stories is not the Western setting which is nice and full and accurate, or the feelings for the times, but Ford's approach to the question of the myth of parenthood. In this book and the stories our characters are faced with the patriarchal myth of the father and the mother as people who can play such a superior role and guide the family safely through the maze of life in capitalism, always being someone to look up to by the child. Ford brings about explosions, sometimes big explosions--in Rock Springs dad kills a guy in one story and in another story the Dad and the son come and find good old mom and an Airman in the sack--sometimes small and this myth is blown away. The child discovers that the parent is a conflicted person with all the problems and humanity that we know, open to disaster, tragedy, and just plain bad luck. Whether from the parent's point of view, or the child's what we see is this myth receding and the acceptance of real humanity by both the child and the parent. Would that so many of this could have learned all this as wisely in life as Ford tells this in his fiction!

Having read several of Ford's other novels previously, I pretty much got what I had expected and had hoped for. No need for outrageous plot twists, chase scenes, or bawdry dialogues. The disintegration of this family showed me that people never stop growing, learning, and succumbing to not what is expected but what feels right at a particular point in one's life.

I read this book when it was first published in paperback and it hit me with the enormous force that happens only occassionly in life. Ford achieves an extraordinary sense of landscape as protagonist, that rates with the very best of American literature. I ached with understanding as I followed the narrator across his world. The summer I read that novel sometimes feels like the only real time in my life this past decade. Ford's style is clever artifice that manages to melt and become simply, a lived event. Go, Richard. I for one, follow Ford wherever he goes,novels, editing et al. He's yet to let me down.

This book is gripping from the first to the last word and I couldn't put it down. The story moves quickly and the feeling of impending disaster seems to build up until the climax toward the end. The characters feel intensely about life but don't seem to understand each other well. I particularly think of the scene where the boy is in the car watching his dad set fire to a house. I would rate this along with his short stories, Women with Men, and The Ultimate Good Luck as the best Ford has to offer. I'm not sure why The Sportswriter and Independence Day have received so much attention, as these books tend to be too long and pointless, although I realize that this was the intent, ie to construct an existential landscape of a man in mid-life searching for meaning. But I liked Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly more than Wild Strawberries, so there you go. More emotion, more gripping, yet similar underlying message.