The Fork River Space Project

by Wright Morris

A clean, unclipped and unmarked copy in a Brodart jacket cover.

Genres: Fiction

185 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1977

About the author

Wright Marion Morris was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms.
Morris won the National Book Award for The Field of Vision in 1956. His final novel, Plains Song won the American Book Award in 1981.

Reviews

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a time when few read Cormac McCarthy. More recently, Percival Everett (thank goodness I started collecting the latter before he hit it big.)

I’m not sure if Wright Morris will be rediscovered, but I’m going to get everything he’s written before it happens, and if the world is just, it will.

Morris captures, perhaps even more than Willa Cather, what it’s really like on The Great Plains. The Fork River Space Project (what a title) charms - humorous, eerie, and at times touching - but it’s the crafty sentences and turn of phrases that pulled me in. His voice is so unique. I couldn’t help but wonder who influenced his writing? You get a sense of the usual suspects - Twain, Melville, Thomas Mann, Henry James, and to an extent, James Joyce. Nabokov was a peer, so perhaps? Henry Green? Apparently, he corresponded with John O’Hara and Muriel Spark. These connections make sense, but really his style is all his own.

Besides The Fork River Space Project, I’ve only read In Orbit, which was just great enough to keep me coming back.

Here’s an insightful article by Peter Orner about Morris’s work and why it’s pretty insane that he is not more widely read:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/bo....

I love the quote from novelist, Michael Parker, who said of one Morris’s novels that it just sits on his shelf and aches and aches. I met Parker once and one of the things he said that stuck with me is to not just read modern fiction of this time, but to go back and read the Edna Ferbers. There’s a reason they were lauded in their day.

Morris won the National Book Award twice, and there’s a reason. He’s just that good.

[Daniel Grenier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Câline de bine de câline de bine.

[Wherefore Art Thou · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping for a little more space and less thinly veiled bisexual cuckoldry but I think this is a *fine* novel nonetheless. It’s at least interesting in its midwestern setting, almost southern gothic in its depiction of the dilapidated Fork River town, and it’s somewhat convincing of the philosophical value of a sense of awe amidst stagnation and temporal stability.

Not one I’d necessarily go out of my way to recommend but I have found myself to be continually intrigued by Wright Morris and will look to read more. This, like The Huge Season, has great pieces, but perhaps is a weaker whole. I know he’s written a book where he puts it all together, he must have. I have to find it and read it.

The most annoying part of this reading experience was how much Alice, a character that has very little going for her besides being much younger than our male protagonist, a habit for flushing red, and gestures occasionally at independent thought, was placed on a pedestal. We gotta create better, more well-elucidated real women Morris, we gotta do that next time.