Canada

First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.

Our parents were the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank. They weren’t strange people, not obviously criminals. No one would’ve though they were destined to end up the way they did. They were just regular – although, of course, that kind of thinking became null and void the moment they did rob a bank.

Richard Ford is an amazing writer. I had forgotten this, because I haven’t read any of his books in quite a few years, but his language is more like prose (I know, most language is prose….I don’t know what I’m trying to say, because his language certainly isn’t poetry, but it’s elevated beyond mere words), just beautiful and rich. I loved this book.

Canada is told from the point of view of Dell, an adult looking back at the months that changed his life so dramatically, just a few months in 1960, in such a way that there was no going back, and his life would forever be bisected into ‘before’ and ‘after’. I’m not giving too much away when I tell you that Dell and his sister, Berner, are left in an uncertain and difficult situation. Their parents fear they will be put in an orphanage, but are helpless to act from jail. Berner runs away, and Dell is spirited away, over the border, to the care of a man that the family doesn’t even know. Their family is shattered. Were the story told from Dell’s 15-year old self, it would perhaps lack the insight and compassion that his 66 year old self is able to bring. Dell tells about his parents’ marriage, about his twin sister, and how very different she is from him. About how all he wants is to go to school, make friends, play chess, and maybe learn how to keep bees.  Dell has a singular way of looking AT an issue, not through it, not beside it.  He doesn’t analyze it too much.  It makes him an interesting choice as an English teacher, which he becomes when he grows up.

I won’t say more about the plot…just that I loved this book, I love the writing, and I’m now thinking I want to go back and re-read some previous works by Richard Ford.

I’ll leave you with one more snippet.

God knows what could’ve been going on in their brains in the days immediately after the robbery.  Stolen money was somewhere in our house.  They must’ve felt conspicuous, and that they were now in a hostile world (whereas a day before they’d been invisible).  Previous life, which they’d grown impatient with for their private reasons, must’ve seemed bewilderingly and abruptly out of reach – the raft having drifted out too far, the balloon ascended.  The past was cruelly ended, the future jeopardized.   Though this may also be what joined them:  an unexpected mutual awareness of consequence.  Neither of them had been richly imbued with that.  Lacking an awareness of consequence might’ve been their greatest flaw.  Through each of them had reasons to know that acts had results.

Doesn’t that make you want to read more? Delicious.