Ford writes emotional dynamite
Richard Ford’s new novel,
Canada, begins with his narrator Dell Parsons realizing that “blaming your parents for your life’s difficulties finally leads nowhere.” This epiphany is, predictably, premature, given that it’s followed by some 400 pages of blame.
Still, Dell can be forgiven for ignoring his own advice. He’s hardly the first to nurse a grudge against his parents.
“They mess you up, your mum and dad,” to clean up the opening line of Philip Larkin’s famous ode to family dysfunction, and the mum and dad in Ford’s novel are no exception. Their actions, purportedly made out of desperation but with the best intentions, have enduring and devastating consequences for their children.
At the age of 15, Dell and his twin sister have been living a rather ordinary, if not entirely idyllic life in a small town in Montana, circa 1960. But that all changes once his underachieving father – “Most losers are self-made men,” as Dell discovers — decides to rob a nearby bank and make his wife an accomplice.
Ford tells the story from the point of view of the 65-yearold Dell, a retired English teacher in Winnipeg, looking back, in obsessive detail, across a half-century and across the Canadian border on an event, which remains, for him, more implausible than tragic.
In fact, Dell spends the first half of the novel, which is set in the United States, making excuses, mostly lame, for his parents. So while he entertains the possibility that his parents were, at the start of the 1960s, “among the first who transgressed society’s boundaries (and) embraced rebellion,” he rejects the idea and concludes: “They were regular people tricked by circumstances and bad instincts, along with bad luck, to venture outside of boundaries they knew to be right, and then found themselves unable to go back.”
The more we get to know Dell, the more evident it becomes that he has been undone by a single moment, the moment he went from being a sensitive, promising teenager with a seemingly bright future, to a kind of fugitive by association, a young man on the lam. His mother, correctly assuming she and Dell’s father would be caught, arranged for her children to go where no one would know or find them – Saskatchewan.
Canada is Ford’s first novel since 2006’s The Lay of the Land. Preceded by The Sportswriter and Independence Day, Lay of the Land completed Ford’s superb trilogy of middle-class American dreaminess, featuring the irrepressibly unreliable Frank Bascombe.
Dell shares with Frank a gift for rationalization, especially when it comes to understanding his own emotions. But, unlike Frank, Dell has given up on happiness. The best he can do is try to forgive others for what they have done to him and himself for what he has allowed them to do.
Raymond Carver once said of Ford that “sentence for sentence, (he) is the best writer at work in this country.” Canada is Ford’s 10th book and this still feels about right. No one constructs a sentence like Ford. No one packs it with as much emotional dynamite and then hides the dynamite so expertly. The result is that every line in this new novel has the potential to detonate, like a tiny, ticking bomb. Here, for instance, is Dell nonchalantly describing his relationship with his father: “In truth, we were never very close, although I loved him as if we were.”
The second half of the novel, set in a remote Canadian border town, resumes the retrospective narrative with Dell more isolated than ever – his twin sister has run off with her boyfriend – and falling under the sway of another unreliable father figure. Arthur Remlinger is a shadowy but charismatic man who has agreed to take Dell in. Perhaps because of what the two have in common: both are Americans and both have come to “the most unreachable place on earth” to escape their pasts.
Ford never misleads us. We know Dell’s attachment to Arthur will not end well. Inevitably, Arthur ups the ante on Dell’s experience of adult negligence. Where his parents were clumsy criminals Arthur is a cold-blooded sociopath. What Dell learns from his new mentor, ultimately, is that it is possible to have your life ruined twice.