Trials of A Transient Household

By Paul Gray

WILDLIFE by Richard Ford; Atlantic Monthly Press; 177 pages; $18.95

Richard Ford's growing number of admirers may be puzzled at first by a sense of deja vu when they begin his new novel. Haven't we met people like this, in a similar landscape, somewhere before? Of course. In mood and subject matter, Wildlife seems to be a natural extension of Ford's highly praised collection of short stories, Rock Springs (1987); in fact, one of those stories, Great Falls, foreshadows the central plot of Wildlife. But to point out such similarities is not to suggest that the author is repeating himself. He is, rather, playing a longer, more intricate variation on a theme he has already mastered.

Any simple description of that theme -- coming of age in the boondocks, the triumph of hope over the dictates of happenstance -- inevitably misrepresents and diminishes the nature of Ford's accomplishments. His fiction is almost totally free of abstractions, of arrows pointing to the meanings or the morals to be drawn. What Ford renders most faithfully is the texture of experience, not the lessons learned but how it feels to be enlightened.

Hence the narrator Joe Brinson looks back to the year 1960, when he was 16 and his parents were newly arrived in Great Falls, Mont., hoping to benefit somehow from an oil boom in the area. Dwarfed like everyone else by the vast ! empty spaces, they find instead the same marginal isolation they have encountered elsewhere. Jerry, the father, is a golf instructor at the local country club until he is fired on the probably unwarranted suspicion of stealing. With her husband suddenly out of work, Jean, the mother, takes a job giving swimming lessons. As Joe gets used to these domestic changes, he is presented with a fresh conundrum: his father's sudden decision to go off and help fight the forest fires raging nearby and his mother's fierce opposition to this plan. "I'm a grown woman," she says to Joe's father. "Why don't you act like a grown man, Jerry?"

The father's departure unhinges the transient household. Joe realizes that he has lately been included in a drama that his parents have been staging for years. "We haven't been very intimate lately," his mother confides about her relationship with his father. "You might as well hear that." Why should he hear that? To prepare him for the appearance of Warren Miller, a local rich man, in the Brinson home one afternoon when Joe gets back from school.

The mother's affair with Miller, played out in a few days with her son as witness and her husband's reappearance imminent, should be easy to condemn, especially by Joe, who loves and misses his father. But Joe blames no one. He watches and remembers, "When you are 16 you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again -- which is a loss. But to shield yourself -- as I didn't do -- seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in."

By the end of this book -- after Jerry Brinson comes back from the fire to find his domestic life in ashes, after a reflexive, ineffectual act of violence -- an early remark from father to son has taken on new significance: "You have a clear mind, Joe. Nothing bad will happen to you." That does not mean what it literally seems to say. Nothing bad will happen to Joe, not because he is immune to misfortune but because he has the capacity to endure -- by understanding -- everything.