Wildlife (novel)

Upon its release in 1990, the novel received mixed —though generally laudatory— reviews. Publishers Weekly was impressed with “Ford's remarkable ability to capture distinctive voices […] and again proves Ford to be a gifted chronicler of the down-and-out.”[2] Meanwhile, The New York Times reviewer —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt —expressed concerns that sometimes Ford’s style devolves into "sententious baby talk."[3]

Kirkus Reviews observed that as the narrator relates his hard won wisdom to the reader, it can sound like “K-Mart pearls […] the kind that country-and-western songs are strung with, and here especially they appear to be the only things Ford's high lonesome sound is after.”[4]

Joseph Coates, writing in the Chicago Tribune, found Wildlife to be “a beautifully modulated full-length novel” and believed that Ford “accomplishes the most thoroughly worked-out expression of human feeling I’ve read since James Agee`s A Death in the Family, which also was about a boy’s loss of parenthood…”[5]

The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 2018 with Paul Dano, making his directorial debut from a script he co-wrote with Zoe Kazan.[6]