Book review: Richard Ford, "Canada"

I'll be honest with you, I have yet to make it through a Richard Ford novel, but it's not for lack of trying. It seems like every few years I get coaxed into trying one. I have tried to read his Pulitzer and Pen/Faulkner Award-winning Independence Day no less than three times. It never works, but I keep trying, and I'm not really sure why.

Ford's newest novel Canada sounded like something that would be just up my alley. According to the synopsis, after his parents commit a bank robbery, a teenage boy is sent to live with family in Canada. I was intrigued by the idea of a coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of abandonment and Saskatchewan (the Kansas of Canada) so I snapped it up.

As I read, the realization slowly dawned that this was a book where very little happened, and the narrator just talks about people endlessly. The bank robbery - which is the event that kicks off the main plot - doesn't even occur until halfway through the book. By the time I gave the book up, I was ready to subtitle it "Canada, or My Parents Are Idiots."

The second failure of the book falls squarely with me, and not with Ford himself. I as a reader am 100% sick of reading novels about the problems of middle class white guys. (But hey, some of my best friends are middle class white guys.

If I were feeling charitable, I would call this novel "introspective." But I grew irritated with the parents' stupidity, and even more irritated with the narrator who seemed to know everything about everyone despite being utterly useless himself. The sister was the only character who interested me, but every time she appeared, Ford quickly ushered her off-stage, perhaps because he worried that she would steal focus from the male characters.

Image copyright Richard Ford/Ecco Publishing