Oh ... Canada?
While his publishers were originally opposed to the name of his new novel, Canada, Pulitzer-prize winner Richard Foot stuck with it, knowing the word evokes feeling, meaning, consequence.
When American novelist Richard Ford, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day, presented his publishers with his new novel, Canada, he got pushback over the title.
“I told them I’d be happy to get rid of this title if you can give me a better one.” Over the phone from a Maine hotel room, Ford pauses, then chuckles. “They have to admit defeat as soon as you say that.”
Their sensitivity to the book’s title illustrates something Ford already knows: the power of a single word to evoke feeling, meaning and consequence.
In a leisurely conversation, the Mississippi-born author took the time to talk about the warm gust of inspiration that Canada, the country, brought to him, and the haunting, lyrical new novel he wrested from those feelings.
“Every time I went to Canada, and I’ve been going since 1962, I always felt a sense of affirmation. I never felt that kind of feeling before. That’s what makes people write about things.
“Writing is using language to give some kind of tangible shape to a set of feelings. There is a kind of mystery to it when you realize you have a kind of commotion going on in your heart and your belly, and that commotion sort of says, put me in play, whatever this is. That’s what my notion of writing is: I’m just going to put in play a set of feelings I have and see what I can say about them.”
The book was conceived in October 1989, when Ford was living in Dutton, a windswept speck of town in northern Montana, waiting for some edits to come back on another manuscript. “They weren’t coming back, so I said to myself, I’m a writer, I’m going to write something.” He rented a little room on top of a car garage, and set up.
“I’d been up to Saskatchewan a few years before, and been really compelled by it. I didn’t have a premise. I thought what I’d like to do is write a story about a 15- year- old who is abandoned by his parents and forced to go up into Saskatchewan.”
He wrote 20 pages, and then the other manuscript came back. It would be 20 years, the longest he’s ever let a work brew, before he came back to finish the novel.
Canada, released internationally this week, tells the story of a young American boy whose parents commit a crime. He flees the U. S. to avoid being taken into custody of social services.
The opening lines, Ford said, came fully formed: “First I’ll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”
Dell, the narrator, who tells his story from the dual perspective of both 15- year- old boy and reflective adult, gives away the main events before the story has begun to be told. With this bold gesture, Ford fearlessly tightens the ligatures of suspense.
“When you write the first line of a novel, you set the course tonally, experientially, morally. You can give those things up at the beginning because you get something back from giving them up. It’s not as though you have squandered them. What for me was most important was not those events, but what differences those events made, the consequences of those events.”
Once spirited into Canada, across an almost invisible border that becomes a metaphor for the narrow line between good luck and bad, law and lawlessness, contentedness and misery, Dell lands in an alien prairie landscape, a child lost in the wilderness.
Ford is at his finest in the middle of things, another reason the Saskatchewan landscape so appeals to him.
“I love the Midwest. It’s that sense that you can’t feel the sides. The parts of writing a novel I like the most are when you’re sunk deep in the middle and you can’t remember the beginning, and you can’t think what you’re going to do at the end. That’s when you have the chance to do some good work. That’s when you have to be really careful, to be really adventurous, when you have to be as smart as possible and that’s what you’re in the business to do when you’re writing novels. It was a wilderness for Dell, and I felt the same peril myself.”
He pauses for a moment, as he recalls this moment in the process, where he was lost in the wide, wild middle of Canada.
“It helps at this point to write good sentences. That’s a big help, because then the book falls on its sentences, more than it falls on its events.
“Sentences are a kind of action. If you can write good sentences, pick good words and write sentences with good syncopation, you can create action of a kind.”
Bringing the book, all of his books, to their conclusion, having pushed his characters through “the darkest possible things,” has its own burdens. Ford never wants to leave his readers in the darkness.
“What generally makes me feel bleak is when something bad happens in the book and there isn’t enough in the book to relieve it.”
The gift of consolation a beautiful ending brings is an almost mystical experience in a Richard Ford novel, especially in Canada, and the responsibility to bestow it upon readers is something he takes very much to heart.
“You have to write a very good ending because you have created this artificial environment, and you’ve kept people in it, and you have to let them out. Really let them out, not just walk away and abandon them. You have to give them some ceremony that will release them, that will let the book do to them what it needs to do.” Richard Ford appears at a Vancouver Writers Festival event, Monday, May 28, 7: 30 p. m., Frederic Wood Theatre, 6345 Crescent Road, UBC. $ 21/$ 19 seniors and students. 604- 629- 8849 or vancouvertix.com.