SOURCE: Schroth, Raymond A. “Out of the Frying Pan.” Commonweal (10 August 1990): 461-62.

In the following review, Schroth describes Ford's Wildlife as “a middle-class mini-saga which mirrors the pain and chronicles the minor redemptions of America at large.”

In its very first sentence—“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”—Richard Ford's impatiently awaited new short novel, Wildlife, both tells its own whole story and recalls most of the major themes of Ford's four other works, particularly The Sportswriter and his recent book of short stories, Rock Springs. Once again, though without repeating himself, he recreates in the most intimate detail three seemingly month-long days in the lives of otherwise faceless men and women who struggle to survive the pains of anonymity, failure, infidelity, and...