The turning point in Richard Ford’s Canada is a father who decides to rob a bank in 1960. Dell is fifteen years old, living with his twin sister and parents in Great Falls, Montana, when his parents leave for a few days, and are arrested shortly after they return. The first half of the 420 page novel covers their lives up to that point. Dell is looking back from mid-life resifting his memories for clues as to why it happened. His father was in the Air Force during the war, though to his regret not a pilot, and stayed in the military into the late Fifties. As war ended he married an educated woman whose Jewish immigrant parents rejected the new couple. Living on and off air force bases in the South and Midwest meant that Dell and his sister, Berner, had no sense of roots. This cloak of anonymity is a fatal misjudgement when the father decides that robbing a small rural bank will go unnoticed and improve their shaky finances.
With both parents in jail, Berner disappears in search of her boyfriend and Dell is driven by a friend of his mother’s to a “safe haven” in a small town across the border in Saskatchewan. This is the second half of the book: a fifteen-year-old suddenly thrust from family, school and childhood, living in a prairie ghost town and doing menial work for the brother of his friend’s mother.
Richard Ford doesn’t need my praise to quote next to his Pulitzer Prize. Suffice to say, that I found this book, which I read aloud to my wife, painfully real. It’s as if the cloak of invisibility that Dell’s father assumed is realized by the author himself, in a masterpiece so good that you don’t notice the brush marks.