‘Canada’ by Richard Ford

Reviewed by Dave Margoshes

Personal traumas come in all sizes and shapes, from losing one’s entire family and almost your own life in the Holocaust, as one extreme, to getting mugged for a gold chain around your neck, say, at the other end of the spectrum. American writer Richard Ford’s impressive new novel, Canada, pivots around a bank robbery committed by the narrator’s mother and father when he was fifteen. The robbery, all $2,500 worth, sets off a chain of events that lead to further trauma: suicide, murder, and, for the narrator, school teacher Dell Parsons, an ultimately successful life of struggle with sorrow, regret and guilt.

The lengthy novel, 400 plus dense pages, is Parsons’ meticulously recalled attempt to make sense of the senseless events that transformed and inextricably coloured his life.

Ford opens Canada by having his narrator say “First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.” It’s a grabber of an opening, but a full two hundred pages pass before we actually get to the robbery, though the details of the days leading up to it are painstakingly detailed over at least the preceding hundred pages. Then, it’s almost another two hundred pages before we finally get to the murders – those murders promised in the novel’s second sentence – though they too are painstakingly prepared for by Ford’s methodical, always thoughtful prose, which heaps on the detail – both the telling kind and the seemingly trivial – to paint a vivid picture of Dell’s world and life, embellished by navel-gazing reflection on everything he thinks, feels and experiences. The story is told by an adult Dell, fifty years on, but Ford does a terrific job of getting the reader under the skin of the insecure, naive fifteen-year-old Dell was at the time of its events.

And it should be noted that when those murders finally happen, though we’ve been anticipating them for almost 400 pages, they come as a shock, slapping us in the face with unexpected vigour, so skilfully has Ford led us to this point.

Ford, a Pulitzer Prize and PEN Faulkner Award winner, overwrites in a meticulous, deliberate manner – if his narrator tells us, for example, that his mother was “tiny” or his father was disappointed about not making it as a pilot in the war once, he tells us half a dozen times, or more. And he describes characters over and over again, often to good effect. While this repetition calls attention to itself, it also has the effect of developing a cumulative emotional power. Ford’s mastery of the quotidian detail is unmatched in today’s fiction. Listen to this: “‘Do you want your supper?’ my mother said softly, leaning over me. Her glasses lens caught light from somewhere behind her. Her palm was on my cheek; her fingers smelled of soap. She brushed my hair, held the helix of my ear lightly between her thumb and forefinger. I’d twisted into my sheets and couldn’t move my arms. My hands were asleep.” The clarity of the writing and the tenderness of the mother’s gesture bring this scene, like countless others, sharply alive.

This overwriting struck me at the novel’s beginning as padding, and I never really shook that feeling – the novel would read better fifty pages or more shorter, in my view – but I have to admit the turning pages develop a relentless rhythm which develops considerable narrative strength and emotional force, so there may be method in Ford’s madness. Dell doesn’t just tell us about those long-ago events that traumatized his life, he pulls us helter-skelter into the trauma with him.

The story unfolds first in Great Falls, Montana, in 1960. Dell’s dad has just retired from the air force and is at loose ends. Through a series of banal mishaps, he’s drawn into a misguided attempt to make some quick cash by robbing a bank, aided by his overly pliant wife, who hopes her share of the loot will buy her way out of the failing marriage. (There’s no need for a spoiler alert here, as we know from the beginning there will be a robbery, and that it will go wrong.)

After the parents are arrested, Dell is transported by a friend of his mother’s into Canada to keep him out of the clutches of the juvenile authorities. His twin sister Berner is supposed to go too, but she runs away first. (It should be noted that the “Canada” of Ford’s novel is restricted to the fictional town of Fort Royal in southwest Saskatchewan, in the Great Sand Hills area north of Maple Creek, not far from the Alberta border. Saskatchewan might have been a more apt title.) There, he’s entrusted into the very untrustworthy hands of Arthur Remlinger, a man whose blinkered life bears some remarkable similarities to what Dell’s own life becomes.

It seems clear enough that, in the context of this novel, “Canada” represents an “otherness” or alternate universe to that of the United States – similar and foreign at the same time. This is meat and potatoes material for Ford, who grew up in Mississippi and has lived in the South, Maine and Montana, marginal areas which, from the centre (New York City, say, where writers tend to gravitate), must seem as foreign and “other” as Canada.

The novel is divided into three parts, the first two about equal in length. The first part, leading up to the bank robbery and its ramifications, is set in Great Falls; the second, leading up the murders, is set in Fort Royal. (The wind-swept prairie of southwest Saskatchewan in which this fictional town is located is a part of Canada that Ford knows well, having made a number of goose-hunting trips to the area – not coincidentally, goose-hunting plays a significant role in the novel.) Part Three is really a postscript, bringing Dell Parsons up to date as a sixty-six-year-old high school English teacher on the eve of retirement. It feels tacked on, like those scrolled texts at the end of a “based on a true story” movie that lets you know what happened to everyone.

I’m a great admirer of Richard Ford and feel disappointed that I didn’t like Canada even more than I did. But despite my reservations, the fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is a character few readers will forget, and his story is mesmerizing.

HarperCollins | 432 pages |  $29.99 | cloth | ISBN #978-1443411110