SOURCE: Coates, Joseph. “A Son at a Loss.” Chicago Tribune Books (27 May 1990): 3.

In the following review, Coates praises Ford's Wildlife as a beautifully modulated, consistently fine novel that accomplishes “a thoroughly worked-out expression of human feeling.”

Richard Ford's fourth novel confirms that he, even more than the late Raymond Carver, is the principal heir of Ernest Hemingway in language, subject matter and esthetic strategy: the simple, colloquial sentences, the concentration on what T. S. Eliot called the “objective correlative” and Hemingway defined as “the sequence of motion and fact that made the emotion” for male characters who have almost no other means of thinking about, or even knowing, what they feel.

But Wildlife also points up how far Ford has gone beyond the constricted mental territory of the typical Hemingway man, who was always telling himself not to think about this or that specific pain or loss, the...