Richard Ford, Canada ***

The new novel from Richard Ford is quite different from the Bascombe trilogy, one of my all-time favorites. It's far more plot driven (as opposed to character driven), and takes place in the West rather than the suburban Northeast. The main theme of the book is how remarkable, life-changing events happen right in among the mundane events of everyday living, and can themselves be rather mundane.

I really enjoyed the first half of the book, Part I, during which the narrator's mismatched but ordinary-seeming parents -- a former Army officer and a somewhat bohemian Jew -- get arrested for robbing a bank. The details of life for a 15-year-old boy in Great Falls, Montana in 1960 are vivid, and his confusion about how to square the parents he knew with the fact that they robbed a bank seems genuine. He remains a bit of a cipher as a character, but his observations are interesting.

The second half of the book was less successful. Our narrator is taken to a small town in Saskatchewan and put under the care of a mysterious hotel owner. The descriptions of the place remain solid, but I found the narrative and characters less interesting than in the first half.

Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites ** 1/2

This book, whose subtitle is America After Meritocracy, purports to show that our current crisis of public confidence results from the failure of meritocracy. Meritocratic thinking is fundamental to the American creed, but the disasters of the past decade -- the financial crisis, the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and so on -- demonstrate the bankruptcy of the approach.

That's what the author says the book is about, but he doesn't question the fundamental correctness of a meritocracy. He points out how difficult it is to assess merit in real life situations and illustrates the problems that come from the single-minded pursuit of limited goals, but his suggested solutions are the traditional liberal ones: progressive taxation, class solidarity, and government regulation.

Hayes' prose gets a bit overheated when he describes the crises, so that it's easy to lose track of his point. Ultimately, he attributes our lack of trust in social institutions to two factors: the unprecedented inequality in modern America and the inherently different interests of the elite and the rest of us. The role of meritocracy in  his analysis is that its individualistic bias sanctions the inequality and that people welcomed into the elite naturally take on the interests of the elite class. It seems to me that these issues arise regardless of the method used to choose the governing class, so that it's not a strike against meritocracy.