Canada by Richard Ford

Richard Ford has earned a place among the most venerable practitioners of a durable brand of American realism. His fiction draws strength from its stolid traditionalism: its faith in the idea that formal conservatism, respectful attention to the lives of ordinary people, and a line-by-line dedication to the craft of writing are the surest paths to literary significance. His aesthetic, broadly speaking, is that of a writer who reveres Anton Chekhov and John Cheever, thinks everything James Joyce wrote after The Dead was a mistake, and believes with Ernest Hemingway that the only eloquence manly enough to deserve respect is a plain-spoken eloquence. Ford’s tenth book, Canada, is in many ways a credit to his no-nonsense approach. It is a deeply considered piece of work, notable for the tasteful restraint and clarity of its prose. Yet it is also a novel that is often slow and whose uniformity of expression can seem limiting. Its meditative first-person narration locks it into a confessional mode that tends toward literalism and the over-explicitness of hindsight. As a consequence, there is a monological quality to the novel that not even Ford’s astute delineations and deftness of touch can overcome. Canada is set in 1960, the year its narrator, Dell Parsons, turns fifteen. Dell lives with his parents and twin sister in the small Montana town of Great Falls. The early chapters sketch their family history and paint a picture of their relatively contented domestic existence. Shadowing Dell’s reflections is the fact, announced in the opening paragraph, that the course of his life is about to be determined by two serious crimes. The first half of the novel leads us through Dell’s recollections of how it came about that his parents decided to rob a bank. The second crime, the details of which are only revealed toward the end of the novel, is a double murder. That Ford announces these decisive plot points from the outset suggests something of his underlying purpose. Canada is not a novel with any interest in the generic contrivances of crime fiction; it makes no attempt to milk the sensational aspects of its story for suspense or dramatic effect, nor does it flirt with the inverted glamour of outlawry. When Dell thinks of the exploits of Bonnie and Clyde, it only serves to reinforce the stubbornly unromantic quality of his mismatched parents’ relationship and the almost endearing ineptness of their misguided attempt to free themselves from their financial woes. Canada’s interest is the way in which a quotidian existence might lead a person to the kind of breach of normality that the robbery represents. It is concerned with the repercussions and the enduring significance of such a radically disruptive act. Throughout the first half of the novel, Dell often wonders about the closeness of bad events to the surface of everyday life. The incremental process by which his mild-mannered parents become bank robbers does not lessen the peculiarity of their crime, or the decisiveness of their crossing of the border into North Dakota to carry out their half-baked plan. For Dell, the robbery suggests that life is shaped by contingency. ‘Bad things can just happen to you,’ his father confirms. ‘And you live on through them.’ The irony of this observation is that Dell’s father brings ruin upon himself and his family as a direct consequence of his own foolish choices. But the focus of the novel as a whole is on the statement’s unironic truth. Dell bears no personal responsibility for his parents’ crime, but must live with the consequences. This is underscored by the novel’s geographical symbolism, its explicit concern with the crossing of borders, literal and figurative, and its overt narrative symmetry. Canada is divided evenly between Dell’s account of his time in Great Falls and his attempt to reorient his life after his parents have been imprisoned and his sister has run away, spooked by the prospect of being taken into state care. In the second half of the novel, Dell is driven across the border into Canada, where he is placed under the supervision of a surrogate father figure, in the form of a disreputable character named Arthur Remlinger, an expatriated American with a murky past. This sudden upending of his existence places Dell in an ambiguous position. He is forced to reassess his identity, to make sense of the events that have displaced him, and to consider the extent to which the border crossing represents a clean break with the past. The notion that Canada gravitates toward is that life is less mysterious than it sometimes appears. ‘I have the habit of only seeing things the way they’re presented to me,’ Dell’s rueful mother tells him from her jail cell. ‘I’d like you to turn out different. It’s a weakness of mine.’ And Dell does turn out different. He comes to realise that the truth is not necessarily as others present it to him and that events become comprehensible on a personal level when one learns to live with the world’s underlying disorder. He overthrows his youthful habit of mystification, the ‘reverse thinking’ that leads him to imagine significance where there is none and to misjudge other people. In a brief coda we encounter Dell as an old man. He has built a respectable life in Canada, becoming a high school English teacher who advises his students ‘not to hunt too hard for hidden or opposite meanings – even in the books we read – but to look as much as possible straight at the things you see in broad daylight. In the process of articulating to yourself the things you see, you’ll always pretty well make sense and learn to accept the world.’ It is a sober, secularised vision, and even a somewhat moralistic one in the distinction the novel comes to draw, via Remlinger, between the honest and dishonest life. It evokes the American myth of self-invention, but at the same time resists it, utilising the northern expanse of Canada as a symbolic counterweight. Ultimately, Dell does not deny his past, nor does he let it define him. ‘Impersonation and deception,’ he reflects, ‘are the great themes of American literature. But in Canada not so much.’ Canada is, in many respects, a conventional Bildungsroman. Its conventionality, the steadiness of its march toward mature realisation, often makes one conscious of its element of over-determination. I lost count of the number of times Dell mentioned his youthful ignorance of the world’s machinations. The most effective parts of the novel are those in which Ford manages to draw out the idiosyncrasies of his characters (his depiction of Dell’s unhappy parents is particularly memorable), to deploy his symbolism in intimate and subtle ways, and to wrest his tale free from its weighty geography. There is an incident late in the first half of the novel when Dell’s father is distracting himself with a jigsaw. In an attempt to amuse his son he swallows a piece, rendering the puzzle forever unsolvable. The symbolic implications are more or less obvious when the incident is understood in light of Dell’s eventual fate, the relationship he comes to have with his past, and his suspension between his American and Canadian identities. The ability to invest such an obviously symbolic gesture withcomplex resonances suggests that implication, rather than explication, remains Ford’s greatest strength as a writer. In Canada, one wishes there were more of it.

James Ley

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