With few exceptions, lyricism in novels goes in inverse proportion to length. A generalisation if you like, but it throws up a useful way of looking at this odd brace of novels, if only by way of contradiction. Richard Ford's new novel [Wildlife] is short and anything but lyrical, but it succeeds in a very difficult intention. Seth Morgan's first novel [Homeboy] is very long, is meant to be lyrical in every line, and succeeds only in defeating what is perhaps a doomed intention.

Ford, whose earlier novels have earned him a comparison with Hemingway—unfair, because Ford is the better writer—tells the simple story of a three-day episode in the lives of a man and woman as observed from their 16-year-old son's point of view. Ford's themes are the preoccupations of the boy: his love for his parents, loneliness and a desire for knowledge.

The father is a middle-class drifter of considerable charm: a golfing pro with an elegant swing, beautiful hands and an appealing stoicism. The mother, following from one rented house to the next, working as a bookkeeper and living in godforsaken towns that time and money have passed by, lacks her husband's optimism. College educated, she sees how things are. Against the stereotypes of place and time—Montana in 1960—she also says how things are. As a result, the son is faced with two contradictory views of the world which he would prefer to be resolved into one. He needs to believe that his parents' marriage, their love for one another, and his for them, can work the conjuring trick of healing the rift between optimism and reality.

The story takes place against the background of a terrible forest fire which, as with all the other elements of this mature novel, Ford never obviously elevates to the status of symbol. The fire burns, destroying life around it, and becomes the focus of hundreds of desperate lives. Unemployed Indians and men down on their luck go off in cattle trucks to fight the fire, living in rough camps on its shifting perimeter. Women, hungry for adventure, are drawn to the camp and to the exhilaration the fire incites in the men.

In the space of three days the husband loses his job, having been accused, rightly or wrongly, of a theft from the golf club. The son realises that his parents do not sleep together. The father goes away to fight the fire. The mother finds an apartment in town and takes a lover in the form of a gross businessman, and their activities are partly witnessed by the son.

What is satisfying in Wildlife is its density. This is proper storytelling, lean and taut. And it is real, grown-up life. Ford captures perfectly the loneliness that can only be had in families.

Seth Morgan's Homeboy, a first novel by a man whose CV includes being Janis Joplin's “fiancé at the time of her death” and a convicted armed robber, has a different view of real life. His tortured saga of Californian streets attempts to make every sentence count, ensuring that very few do. The whole 390 pages goes by in a blur of vernacular meant to be an updating of beat: “She was jonesin' on that carnal metaphor for her soul: the Life—in a minor key, played on a G-string tourniquet.” Chicano whores are “tacotwats”, the men drive “beanmobiles”, the Chinese are “ricepropelled punks” and the whole palette of colours goes monochrome very quickly. If Morgan would stop using Rickie Lee Jones as a role model for novel writing and find an editor prepared to say boo to his flapping geese, his next novel might be one to read.