Canada by Richard Ford
The right to publish a boring, 418-page book must be earned.
Richard Ford earned that right by winning a Pulitzer Prize first and then leaving enough good writing along the way so that even as you stretch through another hundred pages of nothingness there is plenty at which to marvel at.
Here is an early, inconsequential paragraph that nevertheless has much a writer like me could learn from:
What I know firsthand about bad things—seriously bad things—was that late in the first week of August my father came home one evening, and though I didn’t see him, I knew something unusual was going on in the house. You become sensitized to such things by the sound of a porch door slapping closed too hard, or the thump of someone’s heavy boot heels hitting the floorboards, or the creak of a bedroom door opening and a voice beginning to speak, then that door quickly closing, leaving only muffled noises audible.
If that isn’t a convincing sample, consider the unaltered praise offered Ford by the New York Times:
he’s doing it with a level of linguistic mastery that is rivaled by few, if any, in American letters today
Still, Canada is so boring. Aside from the Pulitzer and the linguistic mastery, what else is on offer? How about this opener?
First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.
If you do attempt to read Canada, let that setup soak in. When I realized we weren’t going anywhere, I went back and memorized those two sentences to remind myself that we would be going somewhere. Do the same if you hope to finish.
Image by mikesa10 
The reward for finishing, for me, was a novel that is truly “true to life.” What happens in real life cannot match what is in the mind. While something does eventually happen, our protagonist has little agency in it.
Canada is a writer’s book. The protagonist becomes an English professor. This is his lesson for us schlubs to learn from. Canada is a novel to be read with a highlighter. To appreciate it, you need to be the kind of person who will read the following sentence a few times even without giving a damn who it is about:
Though it may also have been that our parents, aswirl in the thickening confusion of their own young lives—not being made for each other, probably not physically desiring each other as they briefly had, becoming gradually only satellites of each other, and coming eventually to resent one another without completely realizing it—didn’t offer my sister and me enough to hold on to, which is what parents are supposed to do.
They say the mark of a great voice is if you would listen to them read your grocery list. The mark of Richard Ford’s greatness is that I would read this book.
[amazon template=image&asin=0061692034]
So, the Sportswriter it is not?
One of my rules of thumb, for years now, was never read a book that has an English professor as a character. That only speaks to laziness, and in any case Russo did it better in Nobody’s Fool. (Mainly because it was a secondary character who was mostly a failure at it.)
A newer rule of thumb has come to be that we are in a bad period for fiction right now. Getting mostly exquisite sentences that say absolutely nothing. The Franzens, Foster Wallaces, etc. aren’t doing much to fix this as the market for the books is moving into poetry like bleakness. And by that I mean we are getting to the point that the readers of literature are a dwindling, tightening circle. A circle that seemingly only looks inward. And while I haven’t read Canada, your review helps confirm this.
ETA excellent review by the way.Report
The story itself is about a 15-year-old boy growing up with two parents who rob a bank. He’s not at all an English professor. The book, itself, however is written as an autobiography by the English professor that this boy grows up to be. There are probably only a couple of pages where he references being a professor now at all. His grown-up life altogether take up perhaps 20 pages.
So, I would say don’t avoid it solely because you don’t like reading about English professors. You won’t be reading much of anything about an English professor doing things.
But you should avoid it if you want to avoid reading something *by* an English professor who doesn’t bother hiding the fact in how he writes, even if he is writing about something orthogonal to being a professor.Report
I only mind things that sound like they’re written by an english professor when they’re explicitly written for children.
Note to the New Voltron: abate, though short, is not a word most children know. Even 15 year olds.Report
I didn’t know there was a new Voltron. That sort of thing might be explicitly for kids and at the same time totally not all intended for the kids.Report
It’s worth a watch, seriously.
There’s an Xcom reference, and one to Kids as well….
[adult humor that the censors didn’t get in the slightest]Report
OK, got it. It does still speak to the trap of the modern lit writer, which is keeping the reader safe in the characterizations of the novel. Making sure they aren’t leaving the bourgeois values.Report
One of my rules of thumb, for years now, was never read a book that has an English professor as a character.
Or a professor of “symbology”.Report
The Anubis Gates is about an English professor who turns into a different English professor 🙂Report
Yes, and it is Genre with a capital G! (Brendan needed to be of a profession that would get him included in the mission, hence it doesn’t fall victim of a conceit to keep the writer and reader safe.)Report
I haven’t read any Richard Ford but I kind of dig that last bit you highlighted.
I also don’t see anything wrong with books about English professors. Stoner by John Williams is a great book about a dirt poor farm boy who becomes an English professor at the University of Missouri.
Note if I had a genie wish for a career, tenured professor of drama or literature at a picturesque college or university in the Northeast or Northwest would be a strong contender. Middlebury, Reed, Amherst, U of Washington, Portland State, a school in Boston, NYU,
etc.
I think there is a constant tension between what so called lit snobs get out of books and what genre fans get out of reading. A friend once said fans of genre are people who want to live anywhere but this world. My fantasies through reading are more for upper Bohemia of a kind.
What do you generally read for pleasure?
One thing I have noticed is that many people (if they read) are relentlessly practical in their reading choices. Stuff for business or work abound. I have a hard time forcing myself to read career oriented books.Report
The general problem with having an English prof for a character is that it becomes the fantasy, the “live anywhere but this world” for a certain set of readers. It is really no different that reading a Harlequin in that sense, a genre novel for lit fans. A safety net as far as character development goes. Kinda like a play about actors, in that there is very little in the sense of challenging thought going into it.Report
A play about comedians and failed comedians, on the other hand, is a great way for the author to stretch themselves.Report
If this is what you seek to avoid, then have no fear. His is not a life that one would envy. Even after becoming a professor, I didn’t sense any real joy in that.Report
I think Stoner is a good exception to the rule. The main protagonist had a rather tough life and the book is not that modern. The protagonist starts off as an agriculture student at the turn of the 20th century.
How do you feel about Lucky Jim?
There are some great plays about plays or plays within plays though. Noises Off by Michael Frayn. After Darwin by Timberlake Wannabaker (sp?)Report
Who’s Camus Anyway
… is not one of them.
(mostly notable because the guy I was watching it with knew one of the actors).Report
I have never read Stoner, so really have no opinion on that. Well, other than of course someone could write an amazing characterization of a professor, but to do so at this time they would absolutely need to rise above the fray of current literature.
I haven’t read or thought about Lucky Jim in decades, but would say that it is pretty forgettable, a literary novel that sinks to genre. Contrast it with his Green Man, a genre novel that rises to literature. A lot of that may be due to the skills learned as a writer moves away from his first novel and practices the trade.Report
My favorite books of his are both genre: The Alteration and The Anti-Death League.Report
@aaron-david
Read Stoner. Read the other novels by John Williams as well, they are called Butcher’s Crossing and Augustus.Report
Butchers Crossing has been on my list for a while now, just never stumbled upon it. Now I will keep that one in mind and be on the lookout for his others. Thanks!Report
Richard Ford is far and away my favorite author, as constitutive of my emotional worldview as any other thing or person not in my family, really, and I didn’t finish Canada. Yet.Report
He’s certainly worthy. I’m glad I read Canada. Can you elaborate on the emotional worldview? Or write a post about it? 🙂
I think one of the prices I’ve paid in so rarely reading any fiction is that I’m not particularly good at it. I get lost with anything more story whose lessons are more subtle than The Little Train that Could.Report
I’m not sure I can. It’s something about the way he presents a certain calm, detached masculinity that’s also deeply vulnerable and insecure, and then wraps it together with contemplation of what it is to be American (or, to be more precise, a white American male born before, oh, 1970 to be quite generous to me). I think it connects me with an American (white) male attitude – a graceful or at least not-complaining acceptance of some of the responsibilities that come with of power and privilege (though in the event also most often grievous failures to actually discharge those responsibilities faithfully) – that is dying out, probably thankfully, today, but that I’m glad to know about. In short and to fully own the cliche, Ford probably helps me understand my father a little better, even though my actual father can’t stand Richard Ford, and thinks he’s smug and mean-spirited. Which he is.Report
…This, by the way, is one stab at it. I could probably have another try at it and say something completely different.Report
…Let me clarify to say that I’m not saying that attitude is exclusively one that white males can have – not at all. I’m just trying to acknowledge what is probably one of the most last critiques of Ford – that he presents an extremely white-male view of the world and being American. I think that definitely keeps him from climbing the ranks of our most important literary figures to the very top echelon. To an extent he shies away form the hardest parts of the American experience, and his imagine, though prodigious in considering one kind of perspective, is of limited range. But all the same, given that my social my social identification happens to be the one into which he’s put so much effort at filling out with a recreated literary consciousness, for that reason his creations end up speaking to me personally quite a bit. But that really doesn’t make him our most valuable author by any stretch of the imagination, nor would I expect his work to speak to people who aren’t white American males as much as it does to me (though in many cases it very well might…).Report
most last*ing*Report
This is immensely helpful to me in making sense of the book.Report
…I’m assuming you have read the major Ford novels and some of the stories, then? I’m not totally clear from the review, but I can’t imagine why else you’d have stuck with Canada.Report
No, this is the first novel of his I’ve read. I only read it because it was recommended to me by a friend who let me borrow his copy. It’s taken me a couple of years to actually make it through.Report
My overall take on Canada, based partly on listening to interviews with RF, is that it is the work of a guy trying above all to do something different from what he’d been doing just, and what was the main thing he’d done in his career, which in this case was the same thing. Which means it’s not necessarily quite the thing that felt most right or natural for him to do at that time. So it’s sort of an experimental work. And I think you can kind of pick that up in its highly formalistic and stylized construction. It’s cerebral, and not very direct or emotional, even for Ford, and Ford is already not very much those things. Though he is sentimental as all get-out. Or at least, Frank Bascombe is.Report