Good as the short stories are, “Wildlife” marshals Ford’s themes, symbols and characters with particular grace and force. In a short season, Joe, the 16-year-old, watches his family unravel. Joe’s father, Jerry, loses his job as the pro at the Great Falls golf club. Just over the horizon, a forest fire ignites, then rages out of control. “Twice I even dreamed our house had caught fire,” Joe tells us-and in a sense it has. As Jerry seems unable to reclaim control of his life, Joe’s mother, Jeanette, becomes restive; when Jerry goes to fight the fire, Jeanette takes a lover. Joe’s parents take on conflagrations they can’t handle; they know they can’t cope, but they do it anyway. “People do everything eventually, I guess,” Jeanette says, and the lover, an older, wealthy businessman, agrees: “Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing just to know you’re alive.”
“Wildlife” isn’t short of commentary: it’s a peculiarity of Ford’s characters that they analyze what they do as they do it. In less skillful hands, this would be an irritation, but the search for understanding is the point of Ford’s story. Joe must grow up quickly; he must learn to cope with life’s fragility. What you learn, he I concludes, is that “your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned.” When your supports are knocked away, you I can still survive, and it does I no good to judge others because at times “there was no I right thing to know, just as there were times when there : was no right thing to do.” In his landscape, his characters, his stoicism-and in the I elegance of his declarative I prose-Ford brings the early Hemingway to mind. Not many writers can survive the comparison. Ford can. “Wildlife” has the look of permanence about it.
