by Lorrie Moore
When, in 2008, Ford left his publisher, Knopf (which was the original publisher of four of his books, although not even the first four), for HarperCollins, news of his departure was reported on the front page of the Times’s Arts section. Such is the swirl around the man, even as the work itself, at its best, is pure vocal grace, quiet humor, precise and calm observation. And so, in a time when the novels of even his most brilliant contemporaries are often fleet and attenuated, the telltale sign of waning energies or multibook publishing contracts, a hearty meal of a novel from Richard Ford, even if it is titled Canada, represents a warm moment in American letters.
Opening in Montana in 1960, Canada is a story told by Dell Parsons, the son of a retired Air Force pilot and a schoolteacher—parents who have turned hapless bank robbers, and who are quickly apprehended and sent to jail. Dell also has a twin sister, named Berner. “Berner and I were fraternal twins—she was six minutes older—and looked nothing alike.” (Twins who are not the same sex are always fraternal, not identical: that a narrator would stop to explain this is unfortunate and a mistake, perhaps of the proofreading variety, which it would be good no longer to see in a novel.) The narrative proceeds in the perfectly melded voice of the adult Dell, who is now a retired English teacher, and the fifteen-year-old Dell, who has witnessed his family break apart forever. It is a prairie America of box elders and elms not yet done in by beetles. The deer and the antelope play, or sort of. Families are presumed to be solid, although they are put together in a hurry.
The narrative moves leisurely, as Dell ponders why his parents embarked on their foolhardy robbery: his father had gotten into an illegal business deal with local Cree Indians; he then needed money and feared for his children’s lives. The narrator’s mind churns and circles, like a buzzard over a corpse. Young Dell is a budding chess player, and he has learned patience in contemplating the moves of others: “Each one was sacrificing something—a strength—to achieve an advance toward a goal.” The family has lived a peripatetic existence, moving from airbase to airbase. Dell has learned from his mother, who is Jewish, and who fears and disparages these communities, to keep his distance, to absorb profound breaks in his life, and to understand that everything one loves can be taken away, and that one must register and contemplate facts and meanings later, in a spirit of acceptance. As indeed both mother and son do in a literary fashion by the story’s heartbreaking close. “Things happen when people are not where they belong,” Dell also learns.
If one is looking for a powerful through line of suspense and drama, one will not find it in this book; instead, one must take a more scenic and meditative trip. There are novels that are contraptions, configured like cages, traps, or flypaper, to catch things and hold them. Canada is more contrary: searching and spliced open and self-interrupted by its short, slicing chapters, then carried along again by a stream of brooding from a son and brother with a hundred questions and only a few answers. Looking back, Dell references Ruskin—“Composition is the arrangement of unequal things”—and the idea is given large significance at the novel’s beginning and at its end.
Dell’s measuring of facts and reconsidering of criminal events may remind one of William Maxwell’s novella “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” but Dell Parsons is also reminiscent of the sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson of Ford’s 1990 novel Wildlife; those two teenage boys have 1960 Great Falls, Montana, in common, as well as a desire to explore one’s own culpability in family life gone bad and to examine the foibles and cracked wisdom of vain and damaging older men. Ford’s Canada, where Dell is smuggled from Montana by a family friend after his parents are arrested and his sister runs away (not to be seen again by Dell for fifty years), is a swatch of Saskatchewan whose frontier-saturated qualities have elements in common with the improvised set of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, where the nineteenth century rushes headlong and ramshackle into the twentieth, and people’s hobbies and outfits and demeanors seem to derive from every decade imaginable, like a modern-day opera.
The place is a sanctuary for exactly the sorts of desperadoes who recur in Ford’s fiction. These men, including the more upstanding ones in his Frank Bascombe trilogy (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land), often seem on the lam from things that require clarification and pondering. Ford has long made dissection of a certain unsavoriness part of his skill as a writer—he can parse spoiled masculinity like the finest of feminists—most famously in the widely anthologized short stories “Rock Springs” and “Communist.” A boy’s experience of adult carelessness has often been his subject. As Dell says of his parents, “They were always running from the past, and didn’t look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.” That simultaneously acute and blunt anatomy, as in “Communist” and Wildlife, performed by a young man observing his elders, often involves the witnessing of gratuitous cruelty: “We saw three magpies pecking a snake as it hurried to get across the pavement. Our father swerved and ran over it, which made two thump-bumps under the tires and the magpies fly up.”
When Dell is put to work with a wild-goose gutter in the Saskatchewan hunting trade, under the care of a character with traces of makeup on his face and the terrific name of Charley Quarters, he is given more such men to contemplate. Quarters is perhaps the most vivid:
“So did you hear all about me?” Charley Quarters said. We were rattling along through the dark in his old International Harvester….His truck stank of beer and gasoline and the same strong sour-sweet stinging odor I didn’t recognize. ...
Charley was even stranger in the daylight—his knobby head larger, his shoulders unnaturally narrow, his legs bandied out at the knees where his boots stopped, his black hair still clutched back with his rhinestone barrette.
One of Dell’s few breaks from this life of goose butchering is an interlude where, in a poignant longing to go to school, he rides his bike out of town to one he has heard about, finding himself at what turns out to be a Catholic home for wayward girls. This allows Ford to set up a sharp, memorable scene straight out of the world of Alice Munro:
“What do you think you’re here to do?” the tall, older-looking girl said in a hard, unfriendly way, as if she wanted me to leave. Her long body loosened up when she spoke. She cocked her hip, as if she expected me to say something smart back, like Berner would’ve done.
“I just came out to see the school,” I said. ...
“You’re not allowed in here,” the nice girl with the skinny arm said. She smiled at me again, though I could tell it wasn’t friendly. It was sarcastic. One of her side-front teeth was gone and a space was dark inside her mouth, which ruined her nice smile. Both girls had bitten-down fingernails and scratches on their arms and measly bumps around their mouths, and hair on their legs, like mine. ...
“What’s your name?” the smaller girl with the skinny arm said.
I gripped the handlebar and set my foot on the pedal, ready to push off. “Dell,” I said. ...
“Dell’s a monkey’s name where I come from. Shaunavon, Saskatchewan,” the older girl said, unbothered by the nun who was quickly approaching. The girl suddenly reached her long arm farther through the gap in the bars and fastened a terrible grip on my wrist, which I tried to get away from but couldn’t. She began pulling me, while the other girl laughed. I was tipping sideways, my right leg and just my shoe heel holding me up, but beginning to fall.
“Don’t touch them,” the nun was shouting. I wasn’t touching anybody.
“He’s afraid of us,” the smaller girl said and started walking away, leaving the older girl imprisoning me through the bars….“I want to make a man out of you,” she said. “Or make a mess.”
The novel contains two or three thrillingly written set pieces, and this is one of them. They are part of several lessons Dell learns about acceptance—something that his mother once tried to teach him—though what h
e really learns is passive resilience with a chess player’s field awareness, something that his mother, who kills herself in jail, turns out not to have as much of as her twin children.
* * *
—
There is a story about John Cheever that was once told at Yaddo by a painter in residency there. She was sitting next to Cheever discussing upstate New York, and told him, “Last year, I went to Cohoes to buy shoes with Hortense.” “Oh, what a wonderful sentence!” he exclaimed. I went to Cohoes to buy shoes with Hortense! At which point the painter thanked her lucky stars that she wasn’t a writer, since she had no idea what was remotely lovely about that sentence.
Richard Ford’s Canada may be a similar experience, though his focus is on a different America from Cheever’s, and his lyricism is the reverse of, say, Nabokov’s tight, pebble-hearted poetry. Ford’s language is of the cracked, open spaces and their corresponding places within. A certain musicality and alertness is required of the reader; one has to hear it instinctively and rhythmically.
In the night when I got up to use the toilet, I found my father alone at the card table with his Niagara Falls puzzle spread out like a meal in front of him.
Ripe wheat stood to the road verges, yellow and thick and rocking in the hot dry breeze that funneled dust through our car windows and left my lips coated.
After that we saw a big coyote in the road with a rabbit in its mouth.
His complexion looked orangish and roughed up with acne whelps and he had a band-aid on his neck.
The beauty of these sentences may have to do precisely with Dell’s referencing of Ruskin: “Composition is the arrangement of unequal things.” “Card table” and “Niagara Falls.” “Road” and “lips.” “Coyote” and “rabbit.” “Roughed up” and “band-aid.” Arranging variety is also what the young chess player learns as he proceeds; not every component has the same powers, but they are offered up in combination with purpose, bluff, and patience. “Loneliness, I’ve read, is like being in a long line,” Dell notes, “waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen.” The world of Ford’s Canada is full of impulsivity, self-hypnotics, and gambits that do not pay off. But some do. The “ACTUAL BONNIE & CLYDE DEATH CAR—WILL PAY $10,000 IF YOU PROVE IT’S NOT,” an attraction that the young Dell sees with his father, in Biloxi, Mississippi, and contemplates again at the novel’s end, may be as eloquent as Ruskin or chess in its bleakly sly statement about the arrangement of things. Ford himself has placed it there.
(2012)
Ethan Canin’s “The Palace Thief”
There is a kind of long, fate-obsessed story of which Ethan Canin has become an American master. His accomplished handling of time—sometimes seeming to take a life in its entirety, exploding then knitting it together slightly out of sequence to better reveal the true meaning of an experience—results in fictions of tremendous depth, wisdom, and architectural complexity.
In “The Palace Thief,” narrative time is woven whole by the slightly mournful voice of a man looking back at the debilitating confines of his life. He is like a monk in a moral hair shirt, sitting on the edge of an extremely narrow (Procrustean?) bed. Images of cells, prisons, slavery show up in the story to underscore the service to the rich and powerful that has constituted not just this man’s livelihood but his entire spiritual existence. His lack of self-pity is a kind of blind spot—and the sly coincidence of his expertise in Ancient Rome is not lost on the reader. Canin does not sentimentalize his protagonist and make him more respected, admired, or powerful than he is. The story keeps the ruling class in their golden palaces and will not allow into the story the reassuring sop that the rich do not always win—or anything that would let us imagine that. (One sometimes forgets that, in the tale of David and Goliath, David quickly becomes a figure of power and might: not here, where the smallness of one man remains so no matter what authorial fondness is draped upon him.) It is Melville of whom we may be reminded: “Bartleby, the Scrivener” or Billy Budd or “Benito Cereno” is perhaps the model, especially in Canin’s examination of ironic or quietly inverted hierarchies within the workplace. Canin lets his narrator look behind the images and events that may prompt our awe, especially those attached to power and social class but also those attached to service, devotion, the enforcement of justice—not to leave them smashed and demolished but to reassemble them with a tempered and diminished faith. By the end the story allows us to see even more than its protagonist and narrator can.
The class divide between the rich and their educators has been remarked upon for centuries, and the unworldliness of schoolteachers, from Miss Jean Brodie to Mr. Chips, is hardly without literary precedent. But all is a trickier task in shorter form. And what it means to be an American teacher of the privileged in the twentieth century has its own particulars, angles, and puzzles. The compression of this long story summing up not just one life but several is an ingenious accomplishment. Moreover, it contains Canin’s special skill at mixing public and private events—part of the national experience too often ignored by our writers. Canin’s fiction is always a construction of vital surprise, what the literary critic James Wood has called “livingness,” set forth in perfectly textured prose. He is interested in the moment when a person’s life turns, or his destiny is defied, or his character is revealed or anatomized for the inexplicable thing it is. He makes time rush forward like Gatsby’s car or Ahab’s ship, while his men remain children in the bodies of the old. It is heartbreaking business and, here, in “The Palace Thief,” expertly done.
(2012)
Homeland
One of the intriguing aspects of the gripping and widely praised Showtime drama Homeland, a story about the machinations of CIA counterterrorism analysts and their prey, is that it is fearlessly interested in every kind of madness: the many Shakespearean manifestations—cold revenge, war-induced derangement, outsize professional ambition—as well as the more naturally occurring expressions, such as bipolar disease and simple grief. Homeland ruthlessly pits these psychic states against one another in different permutations and settings, like contestants in The Hunger Games, to see which will win, which will die, which will kill or be killed, which will bond or marry or breed or starve.
Homeland’s opening credits show images of the burning towers of the World Trade Center, and its initial season ends with a young woman being strapped to a medical table and fitted with a bite plate so she can undergo electroconvulsive therapy. There is your spectrum. That later in the second season this same young woman will be quizzed about this experience with hostility, curiosity, and flirtatious compassion by a torture victim is one of the many gladiatorial moments of psychological derring-do this series has to offer. Its writers go out on limb after limb and seem unfrightened not just of loose ends and blind alleys but of out-and-out nuttiness both as subject and as method. Madness is as madness does.
Homeland’s star is the brave Claire Danes depicting the brave Carrie Mathison, whose bipolar disorder is a secret she is trying to keep from the CIA (which would withdraw her security clearance if it knew) and whose second-guessing and sixth sense (the hunch sense) make her a kind of drug-sniffing dog for the counterterrorism unit that employs her. (People who do their work fully, and the only way they know how, are often apprehensive about being called brave, as if their underwear were showing or life-threatening spinach were in their every smile. Danes nonetheless has put vanity aside for this performance. Compare her with the always pretty analyst played by Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty.) The pressured speech and flights of ideas that are symptoms of the character’s disease are also useful in elaborate detective work, since really only an obsessive and insomniac can puzzle it all the way through.
The most visually arresting image of both Homeland seasons thus far does not involve a single gun or explosive or death of any sort but is a bulletin board whose color-coded components are created by Carrie through da
ys of mania, and are decoded, understood, and assembled like a piece of installation art by her mentor, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), when she is yanked off her project. Seeing the camera pull back on this decorated corkboard is like watching a world come to light.
Carrie’s ten-year search for the al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Nazir takes her directly toward a recently rescued Marine sergeant, a handsome redhead named Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), who was a prisoner of war in Afghanistan. Carrie suspects that his long stint as a prisoner means he was turned by Nazir and has come back home to wreak havoc on his own soil. Her colleagues—at least in the first season—are not buying it. Except for Saul Berenson, who is more persuadable, since he knows that Carrie is exceptional at what she does. (Patinkin’s performance is superb but he does not hide his Broadway roots: a simple knock on Carrie’s door has more than a little ragtime in it; each carefully pitched syllable he utters is pegged to a note, and as his voice climbs and moves emotionally he sometimes seems to be singing. When Saul says to Carrie, “You’re the smartest and the dumbest fucking person I’ve ever known,” he delivers this potentially throwaway line with such concentration, restraint, and theatricality that it becomes the most dramatic utterance thus far in the entire series.)
