Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Vintage (1991), Paperback, 192 pages
Description
A meticulously crafted portrait of the American nuclear family in crisis charts the rift that forms within a 1960s Montana household when the father and breadwinner abruptly departs to fight the forest fires raging nearby, leaving his restless wife and teenage son to pick up the pieces. A deeply human look at a woman's wayward journey toward self-fulfillment in the pre-women's liberation era and a sensitively observed, child's eye coming-of-age tale.
User reviews
LibraryThing member davidabrams
Montana is truly Big Sky Country. With its globe-spanning horizons and skyscraper cloud formations, the state has attracted its share of writers who try to capture its peak-and-plain landscape and salt-of-the-earth citizens. Ivan Doig, Rick Bass, William Kittredge and Thomas McGuane are just a few
But perched at the top of my list is Richard Ford. His short story collection Rock Springs was not just great literature, it was also "great Montana." Ford, who admits in interviews that he’s had more forwarding addresses than a rent-dodger, divides his time between homes in Montana, Louisiana and Mississippi. But it’s the Big Sky Country and its people that have really stuck with him. His best writing takes place in the Hi-Line railroad yards, the Great Falls bars and the battered trailer parks. Ford has been raised on the shoulders of the literary community and cheered for his novels The Sportswriter and Independence Day. While I thought they were good works, I didn’t think they were great.
When Ford turns his pen to Montana, however, he is beyond great. Nowhere is that more evident than in the slim but powerful novel Wildlife, published in 1990.
Set in the autumn of 1960, Wildlife is narrated by 16-year-old Joe Brinson who confronts his parents' frailties when his father loses his job and takes off to fight forest fires near the Canadian border. His mother, meanwhile, begins an affair with an older man. This not-so-simple love triangle plays out against a background of impending forest fires and brewing human jealousy. It’s all filtered through Joe’s perspective from that netherworld of neither child nor adult. The narrative beautifully captures the melancholy and pain of the spectacles he observes—grown-ups who behave like children and children who are forced to act like adults.
There is not a single false note in Wildlife. Character, plot and dialogue converge into the finest example of Ford’s writing to date. This is one of the few novels (John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany is another) that I wanted to re-read the minute I finished it.
Ford knows how to condense whole books of emotion and thought into the smallest of spaces. Here, for instance, is the very first paragraph of Wildlife:
"In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom, and my father had brought us there in the spring of that year from Lewiston, Idaho, in the belief that people—small people like him—were making money in Montana or soon would be, and he wanted a piece of that good luck before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind."
Ford’s stories are filled with "small people" chasing after "pieces of luck" and it’s that very quality of his writing that draws me to him, time after time. I know these luck-seeking characters because I’m one of them. Like his good friend Raymond Carver, Ford writes gripping, truthful stories of the Everyman in America. He’s at his best, however, when he’s inside the borders of Montana.
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of the best contemporary Montana authors.But perched at the top of my list is Richard Ford. His short story collection Rock Springs was not just great literature, it was also "great Montana." Ford, who admits in interviews that he’s had more forwarding addresses than a rent-dodger, divides his time between homes in Montana, Louisiana and Mississippi. But it’s the Big Sky Country and its people that have really stuck with him. His best writing takes place in the Hi-Line railroad yards, the Great Falls bars and the battered trailer parks. Ford has been raised on the shoulders of the literary community and cheered for his novels The Sportswriter and Independence Day. While I thought they were good works, I didn’t think they were great.
When Ford turns his pen to Montana, however, he is beyond great. Nowhere is that more evident than in the slim but powerful novel Wildlife, published in 1990.
Set in the autumn of 1960, Wildlife is narrated by 16-year-old Joe Brinson who confronts his parents' frailties when his father loses his job and takes off to fight forest fires near the Canadian border. His mother, meanwhile, begins an affair with an older man. This not-so-simple love triangle plays out against a background of impending forest fires and brewing human jealousy. It’s all filtered through Joe’s perspective from that netherworld of neither child nor adult. The narrative beautifully captures the melancholy and pain of the spectacles he observes—grown-ups who behave like children and children who are forced to act like adults.
There is not a single false note in Wildlife. Character, plot and dialogue converge into the finest example of Ford’s writing to date. This is one of the few novels (John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany is another) that I wanted to re-read the minute I finished it.
Ford knows how to condense whole books of emotion and thought into the smallest of spaces. Here, for instance, is the very first paragraph of Wildlife:
"In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him. This was in Great Falls, Montana, at the time of the Gypsy Basin oil boom, and my father had brought us there in the spring of that year from Lewiston, Idaho, in the belief that people—small people like him—were making money in Montana or soon would be, and he wanted a piece of that good luck before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind."
Ford’s stories are filled with "small people" chasing after "pieces of luck" and it’s that very quality of his writing that draws me to him, time after time. I know these luck-seeking characters because I’m one of them. Like his good friend Raymond Carver, Ford writes gripping, truthful stories of the Everyman in America. He’s at his best, however, when he’s inside the borders of Montana.
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LibraryThing member lkernagh
Ford writes with a straightforward, clean manner. He doesn't tangle this story with a bunch of elaborate prose or character shifts. We follow the events as they unfold through Joe's rather naive sixteen-year-old eyes. Eyes that are unsure of what they are seeing and wary of what it all means for
Overall, an alright coming of age story that feels dated.
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Joe's family and himself. It is a quick read and on one level, a rather simplistic one, but beneath the surface of Joe's story is a wealth of information and meaning for the reader to mine, if they choose to. The inside flyleaf of the copy I read explains this story better than I can: "Wildlife examines the limits of how fully we can know one another, no matter how close the bonds of passion or blood. And with compassionate intensity Richard Ford offers an abiding sense of family and love, and how both can suffer and yet somehow withstand the gravest uncertainties and sorrows. This story has a lot to offer, except any likeable characters. Joe comes across as overly naive for his age and his parents, well, they strike me as two loose cannons with put on facades that just come across as "fake, fake, fake". Overall, an alright coming of age story that feels dated.
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LibraryThing member AlRiske
This is the kind of novel where, if you're a writer, you think: I'd like to do something like that.
The voice and viewpoint of this one really are riveting.
The voice and viewpoint of this one really are riveting.
LibraryThing member Randall.Hansen
I enjoy Richard Ford's writing style and his accounts of ordinary families having strange adventures -- and like Canada -- this one told from the perspective of a boy in the midst of trying to understand life. Engaging.
LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe
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
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.
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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.
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LibraryThing member libsue
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.
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
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
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.
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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.
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LibraryThing member soylentgreen23
'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
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hits harder than weightier tomes thanks to the concentrated focus on a single issue, and a short period of time. Captivating. Show Less
LibraryThing member tgamble54
Exceptional. Very different. I loved the dialogue.
Language
Physical description
192 p.
ISBN
0679734473 / 9780679734475