We've met them before, the handsome young man and the attractive woman who breezed through early life on looks and luck. He, a natural athlete for whom every sport is easy but who lacks the size and the drive to be a professional; she, the beauty who expects her romantic dreams not only to come true but to last.
What is different about "Wildlife," which details the ultimate disillusionment of unearned expectations, is the narrator. He is the young couple's 16-year-old son, an only child who loves his parents but is instinctively wiser than they will ever be.A major motif of Richard Ford's elegantly simple story is the pervasive loneliness that bedevils social outsiders, a loneliness compounded, in this case, by the expansiveness of the land around them.
Joe Brinson's parents have moved to Great Falls, Mont., with high hopes and expectations. It is 1960 and there is a local oil boom with the prospect of easy money. But Joe's father is a golf pro and his luck depends upon the largess of those who have the money and hold the power. When he falls out of favor - it is never clear whether he is unjustly accused of stealing - his fortunes, and those of his family, change drastically.
Through Joe's innocent but all-seeing eyes, we watch the tensions build as his mother becomes restless and depressed, and as Joe's father grows distant and distracted, aimlessly waiting for something to happen, something to change his luck.
When Joe's father does decide to act, he does so impulsively, choosing something completely inappropriate for his soft ways and delicate skills - he joins the men in the nearby mountains who are fighting a large and dangerous forest fire.
This decision precipitates an even more daring misadventure by Joe's mother, one that shatters the family emotionally, even though ultimately the fragments are brought back into a semblance of togetherness.
This is just the skeleton of the story, the melodramatic part; the real drama is in Joe's mind and the way he maneuvers around the explosive traps the adults carelessly drop in his path.
The pressures on Joe increase as his mother alternately tries to enlist him as an understanding ally and strikes out at him because of the guilt his presence engenders in her. Both his father and his mother's new lover apply similar pressures.
For Joe, as he tries to save the world centered in the microcosm of his small family, there is the constant tension of always doing the right thing, of trying to figure what the "right thing" is. Can a lie be the right thing sometimes?
Joe is forced to take a cram course on life and the way adults deal with it. And he concludes that "what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned - even the people who love you - and that is all right. It can be lived with."
Learning to live with it may be another theme in "Wildlife," learning to live with the world as it is rather than as we hope and dream it will be.
In the process of telling us this delicate story of shattered hopes, Ford evokes the harsh beauty of Montana and the grittiness of the ordinary people who live there. Ford has captured all of this with great economy and precision.