Sunday, September 16, 2012

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.

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