Not Making a Fuss About Things: A Review of Richard Ford's Canada

In May 1863, Clement Laird Vallandigham, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio, was exiled to the South by President Abraham Lincoln after a military commission convicted him of treason for allegedly seditious words he had spoken in a public forum. Vallandigham was what was called a Peace Democrat because he wanted Lincoln to end the American Civil War and negotiate a truce with the Confederacy.

When Vallandigham reached the Confederate Army lines in Tennessee, nobody quite knew what to do with him. Although CSA politicians often reached out to Peace Democrats to encourage them to hamstring Lincoln, the Southerners really had little use for Vallandigham. The Ohioan made his way to the Carolina coast and boarded a blockade-runner. His eventual destination was Canada, a neutral nation that had a border with the Union. It did not take him long to sneak back into Ohio, where he would run for governor (and lose) and help shape the unsuccessful 1864 Democratic national platform.

For Vallandigham, Canada was just a temporary safe haven, a place to go when a wayward American son was looking for a way to go home again and re-establish his good name. One hundred years later, Canada would again become a safe haven for Americans in wartime. Draft dodgers and dissenters moved to Canada to avoid serving during the Vietnam War. These men made their decision to move north voluntarily. Many would eventually return home, but others stayed.

Richard Ford’s latest novel looks at the American flight to Canada in a totally different way. Unlike Vallandigham or the Vietnam-era protestors, his main character in Canada is driven across the frontier from his home of Great Falls, Montana, into Saskatchewan against his will when he is just a teenage boy. Why is Dell Parsons left with a lunatic hotel owner and an oddball hunting guide away from his family and country? Because his parents have committed an incredibly ill-advised crime, robbing a bank in North Dakota, after Dell’s father has made a series of blundering choices on ways to make money when times are particularly hard. Dell’s mother had left the fate of her children — including the boy’s twin sister — to a friend, who decided to preempt any attempt by the state of Montana to make them orphans and instead she plans to ship them to Canada.

While it is not the essence of this novel, what happens after the bank robbery and later the heinous crime that the hotel owner, Arthur Remlinger, the brother of the family friend, commits against two Detroit men is instructive. That is, we find out that Dell decides to stay in Canada, despite the fact he had been brought there his against his will. On the other hand, his sister, who also was supposed to end up in Saskatchewan after his parents were arrested for the robbery, skipped out of their Great Falls, Montana, hometown and eventually landed in San Francisco. She stayed south of the border; Dell went north and stayed.

In this way, Ford has written a Hardyesque novel, giving us the story of a family broken up by fate but then letting us see what happens as a consequence. Dell’s mother, a quiet, studious Jew from Tacoma, marries a hapless, though amiable Southerner who was a bomber in the Air Force during World War II. Dell’s mother Neeva has about as much reason to marry Bev Parsons as Tess does Angel Clare. Thus, Ford, in his tenth work of fiction, offers a cautionary tale about family and marriage.

At the end, Dell confides that in his adult life as a literature professor he has continually instructed his students to contemplate the long life of Thomas Hardy, who straddled two centuries (the nineteenth and twentieth) and two different literary worlds (the novel and poetry). Dell even cites The Mayor of Casterbridge, which starts with the protagonist selling off his wife, every bit the almost inexplicable life-changing event that the bank robbery is in Ford’s novel.

Ford, the Mississippi native who now lives in Maine, has struck it well along these lines, fixing the reader on his main theme. Ford asks his readers to contemplate the point of no return, when the border has been crossed and, unlike Vallandigham, one cannot go home again. Despite the god-awful hand he is dealt, Dell Parson somehow accepts his past and goes on to build a life for himself. He is, as he tells his students, a “‘Canadian conscript.’” That’s probably what makes this American writer’s novel so Canadian: having Dell keeping life simple, accepting his fate, and not making a fuss about things.

Canada is not without a few flaws. It’s a tad too long, and there are moments when Ford interjects a contemporary political comparison that seems out of place. Yet, overall, the effect of reading Canada is fairly first-rate, much like reading his 1990 novel, Wildlife, which also is set in Great Falls. And while the title may be Canada, it is in many ways about American teenage life — a feckless middle-class kid tinkering with chess and pollinating bees, and then having to come to terms with a messed-up family.

And surviving it all.