Canada

How's this for a grabber of an opening paragraph: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister's lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first." Now that's a book you want to keep reading.

So begins Canada, by Richard Ford. I have read three other Ford novels, all of them in the Frank Bascombe trilogy, so this is a departure for me in my Ford reading. But it bears certain resemblances to his other writing, which I will get into.

The book is narrated by Dell Parsons, who tells us about his fifteenth year, which is quite remarkable. He has a twin sister, Berner, and they live in Great Falls, Montana. The year in question is 1960. His father is an itinerant former Air Force captain, who seems incapable of holding a job; his mother is a bookish teacher. After the father, named Bev, owes some local Indians a lot of money in a beef scam, he plots robbing a bank. Bev and the mother, Neeva, rob a bank in North Dakota, and are quickly caught, leaving Dell and Berner alone until the authorities get their act together.

Berner runs off, but Dell is whisked out of the country by a friend of his mother's into a small town in Saskatchewan, where he will work for the friend's brother, a mysterious man who owns a hotel and arranges goose hunting expeditions. Dell will become fascinated by this man, and learn he has an event in his past that he will do anything to keep hidden.

Ford is a gifted writer, and Canada is a terrific book, but it does raise certain literary thoughts in my brain. Ford has been lumped into a subgenre called "dirty realism," or a kind of realism that centers on the mundane in at times numbing detail. Canada is beautifully written: "I could only see the bright gravel roadbed in the headlights with the dusty shoulder shooting by, thick wheat planted to the verges. It was cold with the sun off. The night air was sweet as bread. We passed an empty school bus rocking along. Our headlights swept its rows of empty student seats. Far away in the fields, cutting was going on after dark. Dim moving truck lights, the swirl-up of dust. Stars completely filled the sky."

But I did read the book with a sense of impatience. I wouldn't say the book was too long, it's just that by using the trick of letting us know what will happen, Ford does some serious tantalizing. The book does focus on mundane details, and in the first half, the one with the robbery, it seems like a man telling us a story who takes forever to get to the point.

The second half was much better paced, and has the added dynamic of a few more colorful characters, such as Charlie, the Metis hunting guide who is given to wearing lipstick, and Florence, who paints the drab scenery. But it does bring up a problem with flashback narratives like this--who can remember their lives from fifty years ago with such detail? It's something we forgive in literature all the time, but in this book it calls attention to itself, with Dell remembering the events of days fifty years later when most of us couldn't remember what we did yesterday. Sure, it's easy to remember big things, like the last time you see your parents in jail, or watching men get shot and then helping to bury them, but the in-between stuff would be to most of us a blur, unless we kept a diary, which Dell does not. It's a literary device that we often don't think about.

But I'm just making a point, and don't want to suggest that Canada is a lesser book because of it. Overall the book has a hanging cloud of sadness. Ford begins one chapter with: "Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you."