Richard ford canada review

Literary fiction is not really my genre, but in straitened circumstances (in France without enough to read) I picked this up, along with some others, in the Belfort Fnac.

Although this novel features both a bank robbery and a double murder, you can tell it’s not really in the crime genre, because the focus here isn’t on the crimes themselves but on the effect they have on the first-person narrator, Dell Parsons, a year-old boy whose fraternal twin sister has run away to San Francisco while he has been exiled to Canada.

The book takes about half its length ( pages) to reach Canada, by the way, which it does at the end of Part One, which deals with the lead-up to the bank robbery.

Canada is a quintessentially American novel, because only in the United States does Canada mean what it means in these pages. So it’s rather odd to be a British person sitting in France trying to grasp this meaning. This is a novel about borders and lines, decisions, and appearances. Set in , its action takes place over a very short period of time. Kennedy and Nixon are in an election campaign, but we never quite get to the result of that election, which simply fits into the background, anchoring this novel in a time when the border between Canada and the USA was more porous than it is now, when it was more like, say, the border between France and Germany in the EU: only the font change on the road signs lets you know you’re in another country.

Canada: a place that looks the same as the USA, where the accent is supposedly different, but not much, and where the head of state is a distant queen, seen only in portraits, and where the dollars are a different colour.

Everybody has slightly weird names in the Parsons family. Dell’s parents, Bev (a recently discharged airforce man from Alabama) and Keeva (the Jewish intellectual and disappointed daughter of Polish refugees) somehow end up robbing a bank. Dell tells you this almost immediately, but takes over pages to get to the point, a

"Children know normal better than anyone," says Dell Parsons, the narrator of Richard Ford's luminous and utterly forlorn new novel, and certainly Dell when he was a child knew far better than most what a normal life, especially a normal American life, is likely to turn out to be. The opening sentences of the book, which are bound to go straight into the collective literary memory, tell us what he, and we, are in for: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."

The year is , and the Parsons family – father Bev, mother Neeva, and year-old Dell and his twin sister, Berner – are settled, just about, in the city of Great Falls, Montana, having moved there four years previously. Bev, a good ol' boy from Alabama, had been an air force bombardier who saw action in the Philippines and Osaka, "where they rained down destruction on the earth". Having left the service, he works as a car salesman and then gets involved in a beef-smuggling racket with a local band of Indians. Neeva, short for Geneva, "a tiny, intense, bespectacled woman with unruly brown hair, vestiges of which ran down her jawline", is Jewish, and has literary pretensions, or longings, at least. She and Bev are an archetypical American married couple of the time, who just happen to become bank robbers.

"While from a distance," Dell writes, "it may seem that our parents were merely not made for one another, it was more true that when our mother married our father, it betokened a loss, and her life changed forever – and not in a good way – as she surely must've believed." At a certain level, and although Dell specifically denies it, Canada is a study of that sense of loss, which was, and is, pervasive in American life – consider today's Tea Party movement and its members' plaintive wish to "take back" the country from the mysterious forces that

Richard Ford is a writer of jangling personal fascination to many in the literary world. Charming and charmed, he is an embodiment of interesting and intimidating contradictions: a Southern childhood, a Midwestern education, a restless adulthood occurring not just in New York and New Jersey but in seemingly every state beginning with “M” (or “L”). Brief stints in law school and the Marines (and an application to the C.I.A.). Wanderlust and a knack for real estate. The Irish-American Southerner’s gift of gab. The belligerent responses to book reviews, the poor spelling, the beautiful French, the mercurial temperament, the indelible child characters from someone with no children at all. He cuts a transfixing figure for even an ordinary reader’s curiosity: the book-jacket photographs with their silvery-bronze patina suggesting a pale-eyed cattle rustler, his laser-blue gaze smudged simultaneously with apprehension and derring-do, a tin-woodman tint evoking a man of metal and mettle, in sorrowful quest of his forgotten heart.

When, in , Ford left his publisher, Knopf (which was the original publisher of four of his books, although not even the first four), for HarperCollins, news of his departure was reported on the front page of the Times’ Arts section. Such is the swirl around the man, even as the work itself, at its best, is pure vocal grace, quiet humor, precise and calm observation. And so, in a time when the novels of even his most brilliant contemporaries are often fleet and attenuated, the telltale sign of waning energies or multi-book publishing contracts, a hearty meal of a novel from Richard Ford, even if it is titled “Canada,” represents a warm moment in American letters.

Opening in Montana in , “Canada” is a story told by Dell Parsons, the son of a retired Air Force pilot and a schoolteacher—parents who have turned ha

The former newspaper reporter in me demands I begin my thought here on Richard Ford’s new novel Canada(Ecco) with a bit of full-disclosure: Ford lives here in my native state of Maine and is a friend.

More full-disclosure: that last sentence seems so wonderfully odd to me, as I am a thirty-seven-year-old man still very in touch with his seventeen-year-old self who read Ford and his pals Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and believed they were the giants of contemporary American fiction. Two decades and many books later, I can’t say my opinion has changed much: Ford’s Canada is only further validation that I was right about at least one thing when I was seventeen.

Ford’s new novel—his first since closing the Frank Bascombe trilogy that began with The Sportswriter (), earned the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner for Independence Day (), and wrapped with The Lay of the Land ()—finds the author returning to the landscapes and themes that made me fall in love with his prose: a combination of Montana and great upheaval during one’s teenage years.

But make no mistake, Canada is not an elder statesman of American letters repeating himself.

While Ford’s reputation stands in many ways on his Bascombe novels, it was actually his other books and stories that first cast their nets over me. Something about the stark geography of the stories in Ford’s Rock Springs () seemed so perfectly harmonized with the spare prose. I’ve read and re-read it over the years. That collection is shot through with narrators not unlike the Canada narrator Dell Parsons, a man in his sixties looking back at his fifteen-year-old self. In particular, Rock Springs features Les, the narrator of the collection’s celebrated and oft-anthologized final story, “Communist.”

Ford followed Rock Springs with his quietly powerful novel Wildlife(). The short novel is narrated by Joe Brinson, a man approaching middle age but reminiscing and searching to make sense of the ye