WILDLIFE
Richard Ford
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990
177 pp., $18.95
A good writer, who knows many things, will know this among them: that however good he is, and however many books he may have written already, he does not have - never will have - a lock on his muse. He will know that, whatever he has achieved in the past, success for the future is not assured; that beginning a new book is always like beginning a new life, beset by new and different perils and fraught with strange and unimagined difficulties.
He will know, also, that at the instant in which he ceases to be aware of all this, at that instant too he will cease to be a writer and become at best a commercial hack or at worst a pretentious self-imitator. Money may still come after that, and even acclaim. But the money will arrive with the mechanical regularity of a salary or a stipend, and the acclaim will soon acquire the cynical disconnected quality of advertising copy for a product whose name has become a mere household world. There is no good life possible for the writer who has watched this happening to himself, has understood what was in fact happening to him, and done nothing to keep it from happening.
Richard Ford is no commercial hack. Nor is he guilty as an artist of the fatuous self-parody that finally ruined Ernest Hemingway as a writer. He is the author of four novels and a book of stories, each book distinct from the other and marking a new departure for itself, usually in a new geographic and cultural setting. Ford, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, has lived impermanently around the United States from New Jersey to Montana, where he presently resides.
His first novel, A Piece of My Heart (1976), is set largely in rural Arkansas on the Mississippi River. The Ultimate Good Luck (1981) has Oaxaca, Mexico, for the scene of its action, with flashbacks to Michigan; The Sportswriter (1985) has the state of New Jersey as its principal locale; and Rock Springs (1987) and Wild-life are fixed in the area of central Montana. The most obviously plausible-seeming way to get ones muse in a full nelson is to write the same book over and over at diminishing levels of power and efficiency as, for example, Walker Percy unfortunately did.
Ford will have none of that. He has taken the courageous way, making each of his books so new in relationship to the preceding ones as to require a good ear to distinguish in what way they are nevertheless of a piece and from the hand of the same author. Only with the last two books - the Rock Springs stories and, especially, Wildlife - has his courage to reach apparently exceeded his power to grasp. Whether he is finding the Montana locale an intransigent one is not a mater that I am prepared to speculate upon.
I do sense however that Richard Ford is temporarily out of touch with his aims, his methods, and his quite considerable talent so as to make him, for the time being, an inadequate judge of his own work. Wildlife, like Hemingway's Islands in the stream or The Garden of Eden, ought never to have been published at all. The difference is that in the case of the Hemingway novels the dead man's greedy estate was at fault while, in the present one, Ford has only
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