Don’t hold your breath

The case for Richard Ford isn’t hard to make. Ever since his breakthrough novel The Sportswriter in 1986, his multi-award-winning fiction has combined an unsparing intelligence with an unashamed high-mindedness about what literature can achieve — nothing less than a careful exploration of the best way to live. In some hands, this moral sense might feel self-conscious, sentimental or even faintly embarrassing. In Ford’s, it’s done with such measured skill that the impact is quietly overwhelming. Sentence by sentence, too, his prose is pretty much peerless. Every word that makes it onto the page has clearly been on trial for its life, before being triumphantly acquitted.

The case against Richard Ford is trickier — and, because it carries obvious risks of philistinism, has generally been left to ordinary readers rather than critics: that, for all his undeniable talent, the experience of actually reading his books can often be quite boring. The trouble with Canada is that it makes even us long-time fans fear the philistines might be on to something.

Not that there’s any sign of this in what will surely become Canada’s famous opening lines: ‘First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.’ But if that leads you to expect a thrill-packed ride, my advice would be not to hold your breath.

The narrator, like that of Ford’s notably shorter novel Wildlife (1990), is a teenager living with his mismatched parents in Great Falls, Montana in 1960 when his genial father gets sacked for stealing — in this case, from the Air Force. Struggling to adjust to civilian life, Bev Parsons soon sets up another scam to supply stolen beef to a railroad dining car, until a deal goes wrong and he finds himself owing $2,000.