Wildlife
By Richard Ford
3.5/5
()
About this ebook
When Joe Brinson was sixteen, his father moved the family to Great Falls, Montana. But the new start didn’t go quite as planned. Jerry Brinson is a golf pro to rich country club members, but then loses the job. In reaction, he joins a firefighting crew working in the mountains—as his wife becomes entangled in an affair with one of the businessmen from the club.
Told from the point of view of Joe as a grown man looking back on those days in 1960, Wildlife is a “heartbreaking and compelling” novel about love, family, and the forces that test them to the breaking point by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Canada and The Sportswriter (Philadelphia Inquirer).
The basis for a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, Wildlife is “a wise, humane, and disarmingly simple novel of domestic distress” (Entertainment Weekly).
“There is at the heart of this novel a deep nostalgia for that moment when a person recognizes a true perfection in the way things once were, before the onset of ruin and great change.”—The New York Times Book Review
Richard Ford
Richard Ford (Jackson, Mississippi, 1944) es Premio Princesa de Asturias de las Letras 2016 y ha publicado las novelas Un trozo de mi corazón, La última oportunidad, Incendios, Canadáy la serie protagonizada por Frank Bascombe: El periodista deportivo, El Día de la Independencia (premios Pulitzer y PEN/Faulkner), Acción de Gracias, Francamente, Frank y Sé mía; cuatro libros de narraciones, Rock Springs, De mujeres con hombres, Pecados sin cuento y Lamento lo ocurrido, y los volúmenes memorialísticos Mi madre, Flores en las grietas y Entre ellos, editados todos en Anagrama y que le han confirmado como uno de los mejores escritores norteamericanos de su generación: «El mejor escritor en activo de este país» (Raymond Carver); «Un crítico norteamericano ha dicho que Ford se inscribía en la tradición de Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck... Se está convirtiendo tranquilamente en el mejor escritor norteamericano» (Bernard Géniès, Le Nouvel Observateur); «Richard Ford nos habla de un mundo que nos pertenece, como una canción de Tom Waits o –sirva como paradigma iconográfico– el film de Wim Wenders Paris-Texas» (J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip, El País).
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Reviews for Wildlife
110 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Exceptional. Very different. I loved the dialogue.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5'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.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Montana 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 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5One of his earlier novels. You can experience the great writer he will become, but the characters reactions are odd and the novel is bleak.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The tag "short stories" on LT put me off reading this book for awhile. It is not a book of short stories as is obvious once you read it and the dust jacket calls it a novel multiple times.The protagonist is Joe the 16 year old only son of Jean and Jerry who have all just moved to Great Falls, Montana. Over the span of a few days Joe watches his parents' relationship fall apart. I was drawn in by Ford's simplistic prose and the dramatic setting of a forest fire burning a few towns away from the characters' home. Unfortunately for me, I identified with Joe on a few levels as I am experiencing many of the same things with my parents currently. The book almost hit a little too close to home for me. I think it says a lot about Ford's writing that I can identify with a teenage boy since I am not that demographic. Without giving too much away, I want to say that I appreciate how Ford handles the dynamic between the husband and wife in the book as neither character is flawless and Ford certainly doesn't paint either in a perfect light or clearly lay the blame on either side. I can see how readers could come away from Wildlife with multiple interpretations on what was going on in the parents' relationship. Despite the overall melancholy nature of the book, the pages flew by for me and I read it in almost one sitting. I recommend it.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Richard 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I 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.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ford 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 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.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Joe is an only child, and up until this particular time, his life has been pretty good. His dad is not the most steady character, and although he is able to provide for his family, they don't have a lot of money and they move a lot. They arrive in Great Falls seeking opportunities related to the oil industry boom. A wildfire breaks out in the mountains nearby which affects the local economy and Joe's dad loses his job. The smoldering discontent under the surface of his parents' marriage bursts into flame. Joe has a front row seat, and Ford beautifully describes the way a teenager might attempt to come to terms with the failures and frailties of his parents. This was a quick and easy read. It is beautifully written and desperately sad. Since I like short stories, and I love Montana, I will probably try Rock Springs next.
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Book preview
Wildlife - Richard Ford
Praise for Wildlife:
Ford is a writer who creates believable, appealing characters who find themselves on the wrong side of luck. . . . Ford’s gift is to be able to portray the full dimensions of the suburbs and small towns of America with deep compassion, moving us in the process. He shows us everything special in what no one takes to be special at all.
—San Francisco Chronicle
A wise, humane, and disarmingly simple novel of domestic distress.
—Entertainment Weekly
"Ford tells the story of Joe’s forced coming of age in controlled, simple language that is all the more heartfelt for its precision. . . . Wildlife is a moving story."
—Orlando Sentinel
"Wildlife is chockablock with niceness . . . and with intellect: the tone is deadpan, the spin ironic."
—USA Today
"Richard Ford has refined and polished his art to such a degree that it succumbs to its own brilliance. Wildlife is a virtuoso work. . . . Ford gives us a work of dazzling technique."
—The Seattle Times
There is at the heart of this novel a deep nostalgia for that moment when a person recognizes a true perfection in the way things once were, before the onset of ruin and great change. . . . Joe has an immense capacity for reflection, and it is in his thoughts that one discovers much of the substance of the story.
—The New York Times Book Review
A subtly powerful evocation of family life.
—People
This wise and masterful book is the story of a marriage at the flashpoint. . . . Joe is a compelling and compassionate narrator. . . . Something is expressed here that I find truly admirable, particularly now, in this era of high-tech fiction and jumbo sagas propelled by automatic weapons and cocaine schemes. I have to call it love.
—San Jose Mercury News
The writing is at once stylish and suggestive of memory compressed and rendered all the more intense by time’s passing. The reader’s commitment to the boy’s story is immediate.
—The Washington Times
"Ford’s ending is a masterful stroke in a novel that explores a tricky terrain without one false step. . . . Ford has the lyric touch: his passages of natural description are superb. And he manages to mould his lyricism to the emotional growth his young protagonist is experiencing . . . This is, in all likelihood, the finest novel of coming of age since The Catcher in the Rye.
— The Star-Ledger (Newark)
"With a finely shaped, spare prose style that reflects the terrain of the setting and the quality of problems, choices and changes Joe faces, Richard Ford has produced in Wildlife yet another powerful. . . work that further attests to his position in the top ranks of contemporary novelists, both here and abroad."
— The Times Picayune (New Orleans)
That Ford’s western stories won’t travel east is testimony to his power of conveying a unique imaginative experience. . . . What takes the novel out of the ordinary . . . is Ford’s gift for conveying mood and texture in a carefully wrought language that creates an almost unbearable tension, with a resulting desire on the reader’s part to know what happens next.
—The Miami Herald
Ford is a painstaking realist who captures the way people talk—what they leave out and the curiously revealing things they leave in. He wisely avoids the temptation to overdramatize his material, and he does not fall into the opposite trap of underplaying the dramatic and emotional potential of the situation. The balance he strikes makes this an eminently believable novel.
—Christian Science Monitor
"As heartbreaking and compelling as any story I’ve read in a long time. It is a story of the sad West. . . . Richard Ford seems to still be growing, still finding new elements of what is one of the strongest and richest veins of talent around. Wildlife is ample—and welcome—evidence of this. It just may be this wonderful, still-young writer’s best book."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Ford’s writing is like a country music song without the whining. He captures the great strengths that enable the down-and-out drifters of the world to keep their heads above water. He dissects their emotions and, without falling victim to showiness, he manages to convey their tragic grace and meditations on life, and the thin line that divides the cheerful from the doomed. . . . There is no way to describe Wildlife in a way that does it justice."
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
"[Wildlife] burns with conviction and with the intensity of the narrator’s observations. . . . It’s Joe’s charitable and impartial view of his parents’ mistakes that gives the book its power."
—Duluth News-Tribune
One of Mr. Ford’s greatest gifts is the compassion he evokes within the reader for his troubled characters. . . . Mr. Ford’s clean, spare prose is often punctuated by gems of description and insight.
—The Dallas Morning News
"It’s incredibly difficult to write such an unadorned yet evocative prose, while illustrating life’s important questions as posed by the teen-aged mind. . . . There are words that can talk about . . . impossible situations fully furnished with sadness, and it seems to me that Richard Ford knows these words and has made full use of them in Wildlife, a novel that is beautifully written and wise."
—St. Petersburg Times
"Richard Ford has shown himself to be one of the truly great American writers of our time. . . . Quiet yet intense, like a fire barely held in check, Wildlife is Richard Ford at his best."
—L.A. Reader
"Everything form the gentle treatment of the main characters to the nostalgic tone succeeds. . . . Joe’s character seems on the mark, and several scenes . . . will touch readers. Wildlife . . . is a rewarding novel."
—South Bend Tribune
Ford’s stories are remarkable. . . . He is one of those uncommon writers with the brilliant ability to evoke sympathy for his characters with a few spare words. . . . Ford seizes the reader and won’t let go until the end.
—The Daily Herald
Books by
RICHARD FORD
A Piece of My Heart
The Ultimate Good Luck
The Sportswriter
Rock Springs
Wildlife
Independence Day
Wildlife
Wildlife
RICHARD FORD
Copyright © 1990 by Richard Ford
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4459-1
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
10 11 12 13 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
I wish to thank my friends Carl Navarre and Gary Taylor, whose special generosities helped me write this book.— RF
Kristina
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.
My father was a golfer. A teaching pro. He had been to college though not to the war. And since 1944, the year when I was born and two years after he married my mother, he had worked at that—at golf—at the small country clubs and public courses in the towns near where he’d grown up, around Colfax and the Palouse Hills of eastern Washington State. And during that time, the years when I was growing up, we had lived in Coeur d’Alene and McCall, Idaho, and in Endicott and Pasco and Walla Walla, where both he and my mother had gone to college and where they had met and gotten married.
My father was a natural athlete. His own father had owned a clothing store in Colfax and made a good living, and he had learned to play golf on the kinds of courses he taught on. He could play every sport—basketball and ice hockey and throw horseshoes, and he had played baseball in college. But he loved the game of golf because it was a game other people found difficult and that was easy for him. He was a smiling, handsome man with dark hair—not tall but with delicate hands and a short fluid swing that was wonderful to see but never strong enough to move him into the higher competition of the game. He was good at teaching people to play golf, though. He knew how to discuss the game patiently, in ways to make you think you had a talent for it, and people liked being around him. Sometimes he and my mother would play together and I would go along with them and pull their cart, and I knew he knew how they looked—good-looking, young, happy. My father was soft-spoken and good-natured and optimistic—not slick in the way someone might think. And though it is not a usual life to be a golfer, to make your living at it the way anyone does who is a salesman or a doctor, my father was in a sense not a usual kind of man: he was innocent and he was honest, and it is possible he was suited perfectly for the life he had made.
In Great Falls my father took a job two days a week at the air base, at the course there, and worked the rest of the time at the club for-members-only, across the river. The Wheatland Club that was called. He worked extra because, he said, in good times people wanted to learn a game like golf, and good times rarely lasted long enough. He was thirty-nine then, and I think he hoped he’d meet someone there, someone who’d give him a tip, or let him in on a good deal in the oil boom, or offer him a better job, a chance that would lead him and my mother and me to something better.
We rented a house on Eighth Street North in an older neighborhood of single-story, brick-and-frame houses. Ours was yellow and had a low, paled fence across the front of it and a weeping birch tree in the side yard. Those streets are not far from the train tracks and are across the river from the refinery where a bright flame burned at all hours from the stack above the metal tank buildings. I could hear the shift whistles blow in the morning when I woke up, and late at night the loud whooshing of machinery processing crude oil from the wildcat fields north of us.
My mother did not have a job in Great Falls. She had worked as a bookkeeper for a dairy company in Lewiston, and in the other towns where we had lived she had been a substitute teacher in math and science—the subjects she enjoyed. She was a pretty, small woman who had a good sense for a joke and who could make you laugh. She was two years younger than my father, and had met him in college in 1941 and liked him, and simply left with him when he’d taken a job in Spokane. I don’t know what she thought my father’s reasons were for leaving his job in Lewiston and coming to Great Falls. Maybe she noticed something about him—that it was an odd time in his life when his future had begun to seem different to him, as if he couldn’t rely on it just to take care of itself as it had up until then. Or maybe there were other reasons, and because she loved him she went along with him. But I do not think she ever wanted to come to Montana. She liked eastern Washington, liked the better weather there, where she had been a girl. She thought it would be too cold and lonely in Great Falls, and people would not be easy to meet. Yet she must’ve believed at the time that this was a normal life she was living, moving, and working when she could, having a husband and a son, and that it was fine.
The summer of that year was a time of forest fires. Great Falls is where the plains begin, but south and west and east of there are mountains. You could see mountains on clear days from the streets of town—sixty miles away the high eastern front of the Rocky Mountains themselves, blue and clear-cut, running to Canada. In early July, fires started in the timber canyons beyond Augusta and Choteau, towns that were insignificant to me but that were endangered. Fires began by mysterious causes. They burned on and on through July and August and into September when it was thought that an early fall would bring rains and possibly snow, though that is not what happened.
Spring had been a dry season and lasted dry into summer. I was a city boy and knew nothing about crops or timber, but we all heard that farmers believed dryness forecasted dryness, and read in the paper that standing timber was drier than wood put in a kiln, and that if farmers were smart they would cut their wheat early to save losses. Even the Missouri River dropped to a low stage, and fish died, and dry mud flats opened between the banks and the slow stream, and no one boated there.
My father taught golf every day to groups of airmen and their girlfriends, and at the Wheatland Club he played foursomes with ranchers and oilmen and bankers and their wives, whose games he was paid to improve upon and tried to. In the evenings through that summer he would sit at the kitchen table after work, listening to a ball game from the East and drinking a beer, and read the paper while my mother fixed dinner and I did school work in the living room. He would talk about people at the club. They’re all good enough fellows,
he said to my mother. We won’t get rich working for rich men, but we might get lucky hanging around them.
He laughed about that. He liked Great Falls. He thought it was wide open and undiscovered, and no one had time to hold you back, and that it was a good time to live there. I don’t know what his ideas for himself were then, but he was a man, more than most, who liked to be happy. And it must’ve seemed as though, just for that time, he had finally come to his right place.
By the first of August the timber fires to the west of us had not been put out, and a haze was in the air so that you could sometimes not see the mountains or where the land met the sky. It was a haze you wouldn’t detect if you were inside of it, only if you were on a mountain or in an airplane and could see Great Falls from above. At