03 Jun 2012 23:16:59
Like Ford's breakthrough novel, The Sportswriter, first published in 1986, Canada is essentially about the consequences of a sudden tragic rupture in the fabric of an ordinary family life. It marks a distinct shift in style, though, from the dense, discursive sentences that characterise the Frank Bascombe trilogy – The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land. In Canada, the writing is leaner, tighter and less concerned with the inner significance of everyday things. Ford can still stretch a sentence, often beautifully, to paragraph length, but his writing is much more straightforwardly descriptive than it has been for a long time.
In a way, this is a return to the so-called "dirty realism" of earlier books like A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck, though Canada is much more epic in its scope and more confidently slow and deliberate in its telling. The narrator, Dell Parsons, now a retired English teacher, looks back with a kind of bemused detachment on the unlikely events that unmoored him from his ordinary life and pitched him headlong into an uncertain future. From the start, it is apparent that this is someone trying to make sense of the past, and the leisurely way the story unfolds reflects the narrator's need to be sure-footed in his piecing together of events. One of the consequences for the reader is that the narrative, which is meticulous in its re-creation of period details – the makes of cars, the cut of clothes, the slow, repetitive rhythms of small-town life – takes a long time to catch fire. Even the bank robbery, when it is finally described almost one hundred pages in, is reconstructed in low-key fashion, its outcome a foregone conclusion. What is important here is not the event, but its long aftermath.
Canada is divided into three untitled parts. The first, concerning the crime and its immediate fallout, is set in the mid-to-late 1950s in Great Falls, the Montana town that Ford has used as a backdrop in some previous stories. The second describes Dell's clandestine flight to an even more downbeat town just over the border in Canada and his new life as a kind of odd-job boy for a mysterious American fellow exile, Arthur Reminger. When Reminger's own dark past catches up with him, Dell becomes an unwitting accomplice in a ruthlessly executed killing and is spirited away once more, this time to the care of another stranger 500 miles away in Winnipeg. Of that long interlude we are told nothing, and the third and final part of the book, a short postscript set in the recent past, mostly concerns Dell's visit to his estranged sister, Berner, who is living – and dying from a terminal illness – in Minneapolis.
What is of most interest to Ford is not the crimes themselves, but how they shape Dell's life and his way of being in, and responding to, the world. Throughout, Dell's calm and measured voice suggests someone not so much damaged as detached. There are hints here and there of the "dreaminess" that infects Frank Bascombe's life in the wake of his son's death and of his grief-driven tendency to endlessly circle, but not quite close in on, the meaning of that cruel loss. There are several moments in Canada where Dell seems on the verge of some great epiphany, but arrives instead at a smaller understanding of the strange trajectory of his younger life. Having had, as his mother predicted, "thousands of mornings to wake up and think about this", Dell has finally connected his father's decision to rob a bank to his experience of active service in the second world war, a life-changing interlude that his father has no way of describing, much less understanding.
"When he returned from the theatre of war and from being the agent of whistling death out of the skies…" writes Ford in one of those luminous passages of reflection that have become a kind of signature, "he may have been in the grip of some great, unspecific gravity, as many GIs were. He spent the rest of his life wrestling with that gravity, puzzling to stay positive and afloat, making bad decisions that truly seemed good for a moment, but ultimately misunderstanding the world he'd returned home to and having that misunderstanding become his life."
In a roundabout way – is there any other way in a Richard Ford story? – the faults of the father are passed on to the son. The older Dell, though, who guides us though the strange jolts in his life calmly, step by step, does not so much misunderstand the world as keep it at a safe distance, so justifiably wary is he of the sudden, cataclysmic turn it may take. This strategy seems to have worked and, by the end of the book, he seems a remarkably accepting, even contented, individual.
By then, we have found out that his parents are dead, his mother by her own hand, and that his long-lost twin sister, whose life has been altogether more blighted by the robbery than his, has not long to live. That he has survived and, to a degree, thrived, is down to some degree to his passivity and to his acceptance of things as they have turned out. He refuses throughout to blame his parents or to dwell too deeply on the big question of what might have been. Instead, his philosophy is best summed up by the wisdom he passes on to the students in his writing class, which manages to be both matter-of-fact and poetic: "I believe in what you see being most of what there is… and that life's passed on to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that's the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent."
Perhaps that is the abiding subject of all Richard Ford's work. Here, though it is broached by way of some uncharacteristically violent interludes, it resounds with a newfound clarity. A surprisingly different kind of great Richard Ford novel, then, and one that casts its spell very slowly and with a steady cumulative power.
