Aloneness isn’t the same as loneliness. It is much more terrifying. Richard Ford’s new novel, Canada, is about the kind of aloneness that can only be experienced by someone who is very young.
Dell and Berner Parsons are 15-year-old twins. They live in Great Falls, Montana with their oddly-matched parents. Their father, Bev, a gregarious, handsome country boy from Alabama, seemed an unlikely choice for Neeva Kamper, a short, intense woman tending a blossoming disappointment with life that her husband only succeeded in fertilizing, both literally and figuratively. A physical attraction the night that they met left Neeva pregnant and Bev, a sucker for old fashioned values, with no choice but to do the right thing. The attraction was short-lived and, from time to time, Neeva has thought about leaving him and her suffocating existence in Montana.
Life in the Parsons’ home was comfortable only in the sense that it was predictable. Berner inherited her mother’s sense of dissatisfaction and can’t wait to leave the dead-end promise of Great Falls behind. She has taken up with a local boy who seems destined for a correctional institute and sneaks off to meet him despite (or maybe because of) her parents’ objections. She confides to her brother that they have “done it” in the back seat of his car. Dell isn’t sure of the specifics of what they did.
Dell always seemed much younger than his twin sister, as if their being born at the same time was a miscalculation. He spent his free time that last summer planning new chess strategies and looking forward to school starting again in the fall.
There is an undercurrent of trouble in the family that goes deeper than their shared sense of separateness from each other. Although Neeva has a position teaching fifth-grade in a local school, Bev has recently been ushered out of the Army Air Corp because of his involvement in a scheme to sell stolen beef. Acting as a middle man for the distribution of meat was a lucrative position, however, and Dell soon found himself pedaling the ill-gotten beef to the railroad. When one of the transactions goes sour, Bev is left owing a great deal of money to people to whom owing money can be very unhealthy.
The phone rings and there is no one on the line. Strange cars with sinister-looking occupants drive slowly by the house. Dell and Berner hear their parents furtive conversations. Even behind closed doors, they can sense the raw panic in their father’s voice. Neeva finally succumbs to it.
Two seemingly decent, ordinary people, whose hopes and dreams for themselves and their two children mirrored those of millions of other people, do something quite extraordinary. They rob a bank. Badly, as it turned out. It was as if four members of the Parsons family had been coalesced into a single pane of glass and dropped onto concrete, shattering into a hundred pieces. Every shard inflicting wounds that will never fully heal.
In order to escape being sent to a state home, Dell is taken to Canada by a friend of his mother and placed in the care of the woman’s brother, a dapper, remote, and very mysterious American expatriate. Dell finds a strange comfort in the vast emptiness of the Saskatchewan wilderness, but his association with his guardian leads to an involvement in something even more horrifying than his parents’ desperate crime.
Canada is told from Dell’s point of view and Mr. Ford has managed to traverse the shifting terrain of an adolescent’s perceptions about life with the skill of a tightrope walker. Dell emerges from these pages as an amazingly resilient individual; a nice kid who, having been dealt a really bad hand, still manages to stay in the game.
The novel takes place in 1960 and Dell seems terribly innocent by today’s 15-year-old boy standards. Berner takes a special delight in shocking him with her rebellious behavior, but he never demonstrates much of an enthusiasm to emulate her dogged determination to leave childhood — and Great Falls — behind in the dust. It is this innocence that makes Dell seem especially vulnerable to the wicked ways of the world, but it protects and insulates him, too.
All of the major characters in Canada flail against an undertow that eventually draws them under. Dell’s salvation is his constant refusal to accept the possibility of drowning. Like most of the wounded souls who populate Mr. Ford’s work, his final triumph is, by most standards, a modest one. But Ford’s prose has always been firmly implanted in the real world, where the clandestine escape across an international border to a wild, untamed place doesn’t guarantee a happy ever after.
Life is neither fair nor dependable. It isn’t like a chess board where certain pieces can only move certain ways. Maybe the gift that was bestowed on Dell, that provided courage when he was abandoned and comfort as he lay in a ramshackle cabin while the night wind howled outside, was his realization that no one has the right to expect a happy ending. The trick is to never give up hoping — and striving — for one.
Canada will be published by HarperCollins in June, 2012.
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