Rating: 
Summary: Not-So-Wildlife
Review: At 163 pages, "Wildlife" is more of a novella than anything else and about as dry as the scorched Montana landscape. The biggest problem is not so much the story, but the way the story is told. In some cases, the impersonal first-person narrator works, as in "The Great Gatsby", but in others like "Wildlife" or "A Prayer for Owen Meaney", the narrator is such a nonentity that they don't add anything to the story and act only as a buffer that prevents the audience from really getting to know the other, more important characters.
The story, if you don't know, is that when narrator Joe's father loses his job as a golf instructor, he goes into the forest to help fight a wildfire. While he's gone, Joe's mother has a fling with an older local businessman, Warren Miller, but whether this was already going on before Joe finds out is unclear. When Joe's father returns from the fire, his mother moves out for a while. And that's it.
In this case Joe (complete with dull name) has no friends, no ambitions, and few (if any) opinions to share. He's no one I could ever care about, because his only function seems to be as a recording device to report the activities of his parents to us readers. The parents, as though aware of this, speak in an unnatural way to always indicate to us what they are feeling or thinking. It's the problem I've had with all of Ford's books, including the Pulitzer-winning "Independence Day". Some writers are able to write convincing dialogue and others (like Ford) are not.
It's hard to say much about "Wildlife" because there's so little to it. There's not a lot of action, drama, or passion and the story itself isn't much that we haven't already seen before. Again, the story told through Joe the buffer keeps us from really learning anything about the characters and that prevents us from feeling sympathetic towards their plight. It's hard to feel sorry even for poor Joe, because he's so without distinguishing features to his personality.
I've said this before about similar cases of first-person stories using a bland narrator--which always prompts other people to reach for the "Not Helpful" button--and that is that the story would have been more interesting either in first-person focusing on one of the parents or in third-person and focusing on both, so that we weren't so buffered from everything. What makes Ford's Bascombe novels "The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day" so much better than his other novels is that we learn just about everything about Frank Bascombe and he is the center of all the action of the story, so that even if he is emotionally detached, it's easier to feel sympathetic towards him as a reader. This can't be said for this dry little book.
If I hadn't bought this book for about as little as you can realistically pay without stealing it and if it were longer, then I would give it 1-star for wasting my time and money. But I'll give it a bonus star for not wasting either one. Now go reach for the Not Helpful button, I command you!
Rating: 
Summary: Lyrical Portrait of the Destruction of the American Family
Review: Best known for Independence Day and The Sportswriter, Richard Ford has perhaps earned a reputation for a satirist, but here, in Wildlife, he demonstrates a keen understanding of human emotions and vividly presents a family on the brink of destruction and dissolution as they search to fulfill the American Dream.
Rating: 
Summary: Wise, enjoyable, culimination of a larger project
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Train Wreck
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Train Wreck
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Mundane
Review: I am a well-read student who was assigned this book to assess the family structure of the characters. I was so upset with this book I almost didn't write the paper. A horrible novel about about a boy listening to his parents incessant whining during thier own mid-life crisises. With unbelievable actions and dialogue, and no redeming aspects. Do yourself a favor and dont read this, I lost two hours of my life that I can never get back.
Rating:
Summary: A sad confusion
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Richard Ford's masterpiece
Review: I think this is really a great novel. It's something in between the short, shocking stories of Rock Springs and the wonderful sague of Frank Bascombe. Like in a greek tragedy you can feel since the early pages that is going to happen something that will definitely change the lives of the characters. And when you reach the heart of the book, facts are really astonishing. How thin is the border between the freedom of a man and a woman and their life together? This dangerous and unknown field is dramatically explored by their seventeen years old son, who at the end will definitely learn something about life.
Rating:
Summary: What the fire leaves behind...
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: What the fire leaves behind...
Review: 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.
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