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 family disintegration, in a middle-class mini-saga which mirrors the pain and chronicles the minor redemptions of America at large.

In “Empire,” the longest and most intriguing story in Rock Springs, Vic and Marge Sims, crossing the northwest on a train, peer out into the night at a wild fire burning on the open prairie. It is a fire which Vic imagines “could turn and sweep over them in a moment, and they would all be caught, asleep and awake.” With the ambiguity of any resourceful symbol, the fire is both a projection of their own relationship—their passion, Vic's faithlessness—and the terrible heat of larger events—the forces of nature, providence, and chance over which none of us has any control.

In Wildlife, the fire is back. Forest fires have been raging all summer in the Rocky Mountains just sixty miles beyond Great Falls, Montana, the boring frontier to which Jerry Brinson, a thirty-nine-year-old golf pro, has transported his wife Jean, thirty-seven, and son Joe, sixteen, from Lewiston, Idaho, with the false hope of somehow cashing in on the Gypsy Basin oil boom. Imagining that “small people like him” were making money in Montana, he wanted “a piece of that good luck” (reminiscent of The Ultimate Good Luck, the title of Ford's second novel) “before all of it collapsed and was gone in the wind.”

But Jerry—a handsome, smiling man with delicate hands and a short fluid swing—though “innocent and honest” in the eyes of his son, is neither successful, lucky, nor strong; he is fired from the golf club for stealing, cleans out the cash register on his way out, then impulsively leaves his family for three days to join the army of men—many of them vagrants—fighting the forest fires on the distant mountainsides.

Jerry is barely out the door when Jean, who begins to sip whiskey with new regularity, brings home the hulking Warren Miller, a businessman in his late fifties whose wife has left him. He's all the things Joe's father is not: unathletic—he limps, a Dartmouth man, a thirty-third-degree Mason, a successful entrepreneur who flies his own plane. Things “happen around him,” the mother says.

We witness the family's apparent incremental disintegration through the eyes of young Joe, who, thirty years later, seems to recall every whisper heard through the walls, every toilet flush, and the smells of tobacco, cold ashes, and hair oil, as vividly as if it had all happened the night before. He is a credible and disarming witness for us, a scrupulously honest, soft-spoken, lonesome adolescent who quietly adores his weak father and longs for him to return, but somehow both loves and tolerates his mother as she unwinds.

Though Wildlife could well have been called Great Falls, evocative as it is of the Montana landscape where Ford, until recently, has made his home, the title is probably inspired by the occasionally mysterious birds and animals who appear as counterparts to principal characters.

Warren Miller tells Joe that he once opened the window of his plane to listen to the honking of a flock of geese who flew alongside. The night Joe's mother carries on with Warren Miller and Joe is afraid that their lives are now “out of all control and out of all sense,” he spies a magpie in his “white with frost and moonlight” yard which flies into the light of his flashlight and leaves him with his heart pounding. And his father reports that while fighting the fire he saw a live bear, which had climbed a hemlock tree, catch fire—a startling image that foreshadows Wildlife's odd dénouement.

If Wildlife has a problem, it's in the ending. Ford's first two novels wind up in violence; the third, The Sportswriter, with the suicide of a secondary character and its thirty-eight-year-old, divorced narrator dallying with a college girl. Wildlife, filtered through the recollection of a sixteen-year-old's perceptions, with its glimpses of guns, its mounting tension, and its intensified picture of Miller as an ominous, lurking, destructive creature, prepares us for a final conflagration.

What Richard Ford delivers is both less dramatic and more true than what he has cleverly led us to expect. His morality—insofar as a novelist can indirectly propose a moral system—is one of self and mutual acceptance, of living with sin, but not denying the true meaning of the word. Ford's mid-America is a nation of fractured families trying to deal with fires—whose loves and lesser bonds are all flaming relationships which, like the prairie and forest fires, “smoke and smolder on for a long time … hard to put out.” Relationships in which both the potential firefighter and potential arsonist dwell equally in us all.