SOURCE: Johnson, Diane. “Tell, Don't Show.” New York Review of Books 37, no. 18 (22 November 1990): 16-18.

In the following review, Johnson discusses Ford's Wildlife in conjunction with two books by other authors that explore the screenplay form. Johnson asserts that, in Wildlife, Ford effectively utilizes dialogue and visual imagery to express the internal thought processes of his characters.

I remember once seeing a friend's father, an elderly musician, sitting on the front porch reading the Trout Quintet, nodding and smiling over certain passages like someone rereading Persuasion, or like mathematicians who read beautiful theorems for aesthetic pleasure. Most of us sometimes read, with the same active imaginative enjoyment, recipes or the bridge column—two short, short dramatic forms. Sometimes these short works are in a different or compressed language, like the Trout, or like the passage in front of me: “w. m. p.1, up 1 p.3 = k.6, p.6, rpt. from *,” which...