Sorry, Standard Fiction

 “Canada” by Richard Ford, 2012

Canada has always been a safe space for runaways from the violent gargantua of the United States. Indigenous leaders and tribes like Sitting Bull and the Dakota escaped across the Northern Border. Runaway slaves continued north across Lake Champlain to its waiting arms. Draft evaders headed north in their thousands to evade fighting the imperialist war in Vietnam. Even during Iraq and Afghanistan some anti-war Gis tried to make the trip, but the doors were closing.

Fiction follows fact. Sinclair Lewis' anti-fascist liberal hid in Canada in It Can't Happen Here. Wade Whitehorse from Russell Banks' book Affliction left for Canada after setting his vicious father's house on fire in New Hampshire. The anti-sexist rebels of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale went there for refuge. Criminals have also found it a haven, certainly during Prohibition, but also the prohibition against weed which continues in some U.S. states. But the doors are closing, especially as they did during the deadly U.S. CoVid epidemic.

This story centers around a 15 year old boy in 1960, Dell. He's quiet, obedient and observant, living in the ordinary range town of Great Falls, Montana. He's looking forward to school as its August, where he can deepen his hobbies of chess and bee-keeping. He has two parents that should never have married and one gangly, pimply twin sister Berner whose not quite up to the task either. It's written from Dell's point of view years later, combining his childish naivete with hindsight.

His dad is an Air Force veteran from a small town in Alabama. His mother is a tiny Jewish woman from Tacoma. They got married after a brief fling, then traveled around the U.S. living on air force bases while having their two kids. Like many army spawn, the kids made no friends. Bev – dad – is a hail-met country boy, not cruel, tries to be funny, is kind, but thinks he can outwit the world with sweet talk and a nice face. Yeah, he's a bit of a simpleton. Geneva – Ma - on the other hand went to college, teaches school and probably should have married someone a little higher up the class and education strata. These two have nothing in common except their children – a regular occurrence in marriages. Opposites attract – and then repel. Another commonplace.

So what's the drama? Well, Bev quits the Air Force, tries his hand at selling cars and then real estate, and fails at that. Instead he gets into a scheme with some local Cree indigenous who rustle cattle for meat, which he sells to the railroad for steak. The scheme goes wrong as it predictably would and suddenly, Bev needs money.

The solution he comes up with is to … wait for it … rob a bank. This numb-nuts goes into a small bank in North Dakota with no mask, his southern accent, wearing an identifiable air force jacket, with his own car he'd already driven into town once before, waving his Air Force issued gun around. He stood out in this tiny burg like a sore thumb. They jack $2,500 and tiny mom (yes he roped her into it) drives the getaway car. Predictably ... they are caught a few days later. Both Dell and his sister Berner are left alone in the house while the parents are in jail. Ma was going to leave her husband the next day with both kids on a train for Seattle - but that is one day late. She has, however, made arrangements for the kids to be spirited across the loose Canadian border to escape an orphanage.

Bleak, wheat and geese.

Instead wayward Berner runs off to San Francisco as an incipient hippie, ignoring her mother's instructions. Dell is driven north into Saskatchewan, Canada to the town of Fort Royal to live under the protection of a man named Arthur Remlinger. He runs the local hotel in this one-horse prairie ville. Arthur puts Dell up in a shack outside of town, puts him to work cleaning the hotel and working the 'geese' - as shooters come from the States to kill geese. Eventually we find out Remlinger too is a refugee from the law in the U.S. – the bombing murder of a union man in Detroit. He's virulently anti-union, went to Harvard for awhile and affects fancy clothes and sophistication. He later snuffs two men who come looking for him. You can't make this stuff up – though I guess you can.

Dell eventually gets away from this thug, goes to school in Winnipeg and lives a normal life as a teacher. His sister on the other hand stays fucked up, drinks too much, can't hold a job and eventually dies of cancer in a trailer park in Minnesota. The mother commits suicide in jail and dad disappears. The moral of this story is that some people should not get married or have children evidently. This is not news to anyone. Perhaps the book should be required reading for newlyweds or new parents?

Dell is observant about nearly everything and this saves him in some sense. The story is told in extreme detail on some days – every facial expression, every emotion, every thought, every minute is tracked by Dell – so that it takes over 500 pages to tell. In one scene in the shack outside Fort Royal he actually describes the contents of a bunch of storage boxes that contribute nothing to the story. It's exhausting in a way. Why did I read it? I was in isolation due to CoVid.

A standard, 'coming-of-age,' family saga with a 'criminal' twist thrown in.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Handmaid's Tale,” “Affliction,” “It Can't Happen Here,” “Factory Days,” “Oh Canada,” “A Less Modest Proposal,” “Northland,” “Tar Sands,” “NAFTA 2,” “The Listening Point.”

Red Frog

November 15, 2022