LITTLE ROCK — Someone once said, “so many books, so little time.” They were right. So let’s get moving.
Canada by Richard Ford (Ecco, $27.99). The publication of a Richard Ford novel is an occasion at our house, and his latest is an immodestly ambitious work that cribs from Joseph Conrad and ScottFitzgerald as it looks back on 1960 from the perspective of an adult, looking back 50 years and remembering a string of “very bad things” that overwhelmed his 15-yearold self that year.
“First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later,” the narrator, Dell Parsons, begins. His parents - father Bev, aformer World War II Army Air Corps bombardier, and mother, Neeva, a nonobservant Jewish schoolteacher - were, he tells us, “the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank.”
“Yet because very few people do rob banks, it only makes sense that the few who do are destined for it,” Dell muses, “no matter what they believe about themselves or how they were raised .... it’s an odd thing to believe about your parents - that all along they’ve been the kind of people criminals come from. ”
Bev gets involved in a scheme to sell stolen beef with some dangerous people and when he incurs a debt to them he doeswhat he can think to do. But the Parsonses botch the robbery and are soon caught and sent to jail, leaving Dell and his twin sister, Berner, temporarily abandoned - no one immediately comes to whisk them off to foster situations.
They are together in their home in the “hell-hole” of Great Falls, Mont. (a place Ford has written about before, perhaps most notably in his 1990 novel Wildfire), for an uncomfortably intimate night, then Berner splits for San Francisco with her boyfriend. A family friend abducts Dell, ostensibly to save him from the juvenile authorities, and drives him north across the border into “the void” of Saskatchewan. There she deposits him with her brother, an enigmatic hotelier named Arthur Remlinger, an American living in exile in a ghost town on the Canadian frontier.
Remlinger is a stylish figure reminiscent of Jay Gatsby and Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, a shadowy operator who puts Dell to work in his nearly deserted hotel. Dell is also required to help Charley Quarters, a cross-dressing dwarf with Indian blood who arranges goose hunts.
Deprived of books and even television, Dell yearns for education so much that he bicycles for miles across the prairie to a Catholic-run school for “wayward girls” (Dell does not grasp the meaning of the phrase) in hopes that he’ll be allowed to take classes there. Instead he’s chased away by a young nun, who can’t imagine that there might be some noble reason for a young man to turn up on the school’s doorstep.
Eventually, Remlinger’s past overtakes him and Dell is once again uprooted in the wake of a crime.
From any synopsis, Canada might seem to be a sensational book, as it contains crime and violence and unsettling moments with peculiar characters. But Ford is less interested in moments of rash action than in the consequences and lingering reverberations of those actions and the way we piece together akind of sustaining narrative from what could be taken as random and irrational moments.
Ford has said he began writing Canada more than 20 years ago. The book does feel more of a piece with his early “dirty realism” works like A Piece of My Heart (and, for that matter, Wildfire) than the final two installments ofhis Frank Bascombe trilogy (Independence Day and The Lay of the Land). But his habit of discursive investigation and clean-eyed detachment is still much in evidence. If Dell is damaged, he doesn’t concede it. Like Bascombe, he’s another cool observer at the bonfire of the vanities.
Ford’s prose is leaner than ever, pruned of some of the restless, nearly neurotic, observation manifested (particularly) in The Lay of the Land. While Bascombe registers as preternaturally equanimous (as “serial killer cool,” someone once said), Dell is a less sophisticated and possibly a more compassionate character. He speaks more directly than Bascombe.
It’s too early for me to pass judgment on Canada, except to say that it is unequivocally a Ford novel and therefore worthy of any intelligent reader’s attention. Some are saying it is his best ever. It is not difficult to understand why.
Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin, $24.95). Charlie Beale, a 39-year-old WWII veteran, arrives in the small and seemingly idyllic Virginia valley town of Brownsburg in 1948, takes a job as a butcher, starts buying up land and ingratiates himself into the familyof his employer, especially with his boss’ 5-year-old son, Sam. Charlie also commences a torrid affair with the enigmatic Sylvan, the young wife of the town’s wealthiest and most powerful vulgarian, a fat man named Boaty Glass who bought the girl “like a head of cattle” from her father when she was 17.
While the gothic story that unspools is fairly conventional - an old-timey murder ballad - Goolrick’s voice is understated and elegiac, painterly in the way it carefully builds up realistic detail without clogging or running muddy. He infuses the book with a sense of foreboding, as he limns a small town that is already a kind of nostalgic whim, even as it’s coming into being. Goolrick sets his tale in a place and an age “where the terrible America wanting hadn’t touched yet, where most people lived a simplelife without yearning.”
But the stranger Charlie is a yearner, a kind of doomed Shane, and his disbelief in sin doesn’t save. I haven’t read Goolrick’s well received first novel, 2009’s A Reliable Wife, but he appears to be a stylist of the first rank.
Goliath by Susan Woodring (St. Martin’s Press, $24.99). An inscrutable suicide throws the North Carolina town of Goliath into a tizzy of selfexamination and existential dread in Susan Woodring’s well-crafted but ultimately contrived second novel. The deceased was the town’s most important citizen, the head of the furniture factory that had sustained the town for decades. Here and there are clues to the seeds of his despair, but the plot tortures credulity. Woodring is trying a little too obviously fora symphonic suite of grief - a Winesburg, Ohio or an Our Town. You can hear her blacks crackle and drag, the diva warming up in the wings: “They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town ... ” E-mail:
Style, Pages 45 on 06/24/2012