Richard ford canada review
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Ford’s language is of the cracked, open spaces and the corresponding places raph by Eugene Richards / Reportage by Getty Images
Richard Ford is a writer of jangling personal fascination to many in the literary world. Charming and charmed, he is an embodiment of interesting and intimidating contradictions: a Southern childhood, a Midwestern education, a restless adulthood occurring not just in New York and New Jersey but in seemingly every state beginning with “M” (or “L”). Brief stints in law school and the Marines (and an application to the C.I.A.). Wanderlust and a knack for real estate. The Irish-American Southerner’s gift of gab. The belligerent responses to book reviews, the poor spelling, the beautiful French, the mercurial temperament, the indelible child characters from someone with no children at all. He cuts a transfixing figure for even an ordinary reader’s curiosity: the book-jacket photographs with their silvery-bronze patina suggesting a pale-eyed cattle rustler,
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Canada by Richard Ford - review
"Children know normal better than anyone," says Dell Parsons, the narrator of Richard Ford's luminous and utterly forlorn new novel, and certainly Dell when he was a child knew far better than most what a normal life, especially a normal American life, is likely to vända out to be. The opening sentences of the book, which are bound to go straight into the collective literary memory, tell us what he, and we, are in for: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."
The year is , and the Parsons family – father Bev, mother Neeva, and year-old Dell and his twin sister, Berner – are settled, just about, in the city of Great Falls, Montana, having moved there four years previously. Bev, a good ol' boy from Alabama, had been an air force bombardier who saw action in the Philippines and Osaka, "where they rained down destruction on the earth". Having left the service,
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Literary fiction is not really my genre, but in straitened circumstances (in France without enough to read) I picked this up, along with some others, in the Belfort Fnac.
Although this novel features both a bank robbery and a double murder, you can tell it’s not really in the crime genre, because the focus here isn’t on the crimes themselves but on the effect they have on the first-person narrator, Dell Parsons, a year-old boy whose fraternal twin sister has run away to San Francisco while he has been exiled to Canada.
The book takes about half its length ( pages) to reach Canada, by the way, which it does at the end of Part One, which deals with the lead-up to the bank robbery.
Canada is a quintessentially American novel, because only in the United States does Canada mean what it means in these pages. So it’s rather odd to be a British person sitting in France trying to grasp this meaning. This is a novel about borders and lines, decisions, and appearances. Set in , its acti