Wildlife is the story of an autumn in Great Falls, Montana when sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson's life with his parents is turned upside down. Wildfires rage in the mountains around the town; Joe's father, a golf pro who has lost his job, decides on impulse and without apparent consultation with his wife, to go off and help fight the fires, and while he is gone Joe's mother falls in love with another man. The story is told by Joe himself, a first person retrospective narration.
This time around (many years after my first reading) I found myself altogether less satisfied with the book, though some in the group who were new to it - notably Margeret and Clare - had the same reaction as my earlier one. They loved the depiction of sixteen-year-old Joe's confusion about what was happening, which is indeed psychologically very real - largely due, I think, to Joe's authentic, somewhat demotic voice (which is what inspired me) (and which may indicate that the stuffy, sexist voice of The Sportswriter we all disliked was after all a similar, if dubiously successful, act of ventriloquism on the part of the author).
However, quite a lot of the discussion circled around interpretations of the characters. People asked: what exactly was Joe's father's motive in taking off for the hills and the fires? Towards the end he appears to indicate a midlife crisis, but was that all? What had been going on in the parents' marriage? And what exactly was Joe's mother's motivation in involving Joe in her affair, sometimes in what seems a bullying way, sometimes pathetically? And what did she see in her lover, Warren Miller, who seems an especially unattractive man? It was hard to get a grip on those things. Margeret and Clare said, Well, we can't know because Joe doesn't know, that's exactly the point: we are inside his confused head. The fact is, however, that people were left wanting to know. Clare pointed to the film of the book, which makes things clearer, but others countered that such interpolations by a scriptwriter and/or director would of course be necessary for a film, and the fact remains that they are interpolations of things absent from the book.
I pointed out, to strong agreement from Anne and John, that, taking account of the overall structure of the novel, it's not exactly true that we are simply inside the teenage Joe's head. The book opens (and ends) with a much later, retrospective, adult viewpoint:
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...
This sets one up to expect a more adult insight into the story and the characters - and maybe a more ironic or detached view of Joe's confusion - than is provided by the shift, as the story gets going properly, to his contemporary unknowing perspective.
At the end, the adult Joe states in a final sentence: 'God knows there is still much to it that I myself, their only son, cannot fully claim to understand.' It seems to me that this is an acceptable statement for a memoir, but not for a conventional fiction (which this is), where we require a certain insight and resolution of meaning or significance - unless the narrator is being ironised by the author, but that is not the case here: there's a close identification of narrator and author.
John commented that one result of this lack of authorial detachment is that we never see Joe from the outside or through the eyes of any of the other characters, so in fact it's quite hard to get a grip on him as a rounded character. He also seems strangely to have no friends, or much life beyond the hermetic setting of the family, though of course he was at school. Such elisions and omissions are more suitable to short stories, and John thought that this general lack of roundedness made the book an inflated short story rather than a novel. Wildlife is indeed a short book, and in fact Ford had previously written a short story, 'Optimists', about a similar situation also set in Great Falls and also featuring a family called Brinson.
Anne also pointed to what seems like a mismanagement of time. We get the impression that Joe's father is away at the fire for some time, indeed weeks, but after he returns we discover that he's only been away a day or so. We are also given the impression, through Joe's teenage perspective, that after the denouement, his mother goes away and leaves him with his father for a long time - the impression created is for years. It comes as a surprise when, as the prose moves back to the retrospective viewpoint, we are told that 'at the end of March, in 1961' - ie, only six months later - 'my mother came back from wherever she had been.' It's perhaps acceptable, as Clare I think said, that the troubled boy should have experienced the period in this distorted way, but the shift from the contemporary teenage viewpoint back to the retrospective adult one, occurs, like the shift at the beginning, subtly, so subtly that this seemed like an inconsistency. But perhaps it is this subtlety that made Clare and Margeret declare that they had hardly noticed that narrative frame, and were simply happy to share Joe's teenage experience.
* The story I wrote after first reading Wildlife is 'Holding Hands' which is included in my collection Balancing on the Edge of the World.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
