"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." That's the first two lines of the book.

Beyond the vast ocean of Saskatchewanian wheat fields, burrowed with the detritus of past lives and half-lives, a fifteen-year-old boy is marooned on a forgotten prairie land with fugitives and transients, like a scrap of driftwood or a windblown, bone-cracked bottle. His surname is a mystery for twelve chapters; it's released, finally, like a swift, soft teardrop.

Ford's great American/Canadian novel is a coming-of-age adventure tale about realizing one's own identity through narrative, memories, and self-examination. Moreover, it's about crossing, dissolving, and abnegating boundaries, physically as well as psychically, and generating rapport between our internal selves and the external world. At the heart of this story are the borders we cross and the crosses we bear. Symbolic, too, is that Saskatchewan is the only Canadian province with no geographic physical properties to denote boundaries. The abandoned young Montanan hero redefines divisions and indivisible spaces with deep reflection.

"If anything, the similarity to America made its foreignness profound..."

This half of a twin, living as if he were an orphan, tells us his story with tender wit and optimism amidst the garbage heap of objects and dwellings inhabited by outlaws and goose hunters. He was taught to "always know something that I could relinquish." And he was able to see the world as its opposite, and draw strength from that.

The view of melting pot America ultimately merges with the cultural mosaic of Canada, and becomes a theme. In lesser hands, many aspects of this book could have seemed repetitive, tautological, but Ford amplifies the meaning of every revolving concept by mining it to its irreducible essence. Nothing is diminished in this masterpiece. The themes are potent, and not diluted with hollow slogans.

The story's hero narrates dramatic, life-changing events that happened to him and his twin sister, Berner, after their parents robbed a North Dakota bank in 1960. The twins' father, Beverly Parsons, was an Air Force bombardier from Alabama, a smiling, talkative, self-serving handsome six-footer who returned from the war ultimately misunderstanding the world he came home to, and unsuited to the woman he fell in love with. But he embraced all that America stood for.

Mother, Neeva, was a bespectacled intellectual from Tacoma, the daughter of educated Jewish immigrants, a woman who didn't want to assimilate with the people and land of Montana. The mismatch of parents created a terrible, unresolved tension that was chronicled in Neeva's journal and left as part of a legacy of loneliness for the children to untangle or inherit.

This nerve-shattering story is filled with vivid incidents and characters alike, propelled by charm and clarity, provocative as it is diverting. Short, fluent chapters maintain a lyrical, vibrating rhythm. It is accessible, engaging, eloquently woven and plotted, not one word out of place, not one event unnecessary. The prose is unprepossessing and yet noble, austere but lush, stark yet playful, elegiac but bright, polished with all the messiness of life.

It moves with the alacrity of a gazelle, spins together with effortless grace. As radiant and moving as a cinnamon sun and as sublime as a silver moon. This is a sensuous departure from the Frank Bascombe novels. The understated narrator's voice is flawlessly vulnerable, wry, and lightly brushed with a mournful surrender.

As an addendum, I read that Ford is planning to write more novels set in Canada. According to Harper Collins, "We are thrilled to be publishing the first of Ford's novels to be set in this country" (north of the 49th parallel).