From the early reaches of discoveries you made as a teacher
comes the major awareness of how much good information and potential for
learning in the reading of a work you are not on the best of terms with.
Such works give you a printout of things not to do, and as
you read such works, groaning inwardly at the graceless prose or obvious
devices, you are removing the potentials resident within your own prose to
follow suit. While there is more to be
gained from making your own mistakes, there are positive things to be had from
seeing the mistakes of others and the momentary sense of smugness at the
thought that you would never do such a thing.
This smugness lasts until you catch yourself doing that very thing,
taking the hit of your error, then finding ways to correct it.
This is all prologue to the fact of your ongoing
difficulties with two writers of some stature, the late John Updike and Richard
Ford. You’d arrived at a grudging
acceptance of many of Updike’s short stories, but could never find the motivation
to finish any of the Ford you’d begun.
Because of your pal Duane Unkefer’s near madness for Ford, you’ve tried
again and again, but no use.
This is by no means to say Updike and Ford are lacking skill
or reach; each has considerable presence on the page. Your objections to their work has more to do
with a sense of regret in the latter and a dislike of the tone of the
former. That said, you consider each at
a high level of ability to have a presence on the page.
Nevertheless, her you are, over a third of the way through
Ford’s latest, Canada, and to put the
matter in as few words as possible, you’re in deep. The first-person narrator, Del Parsons, whom
you reckon to be in his sixties at the time of his writing the narrative, is
looking back at his mid teenage years where he and his fraternal twin sister,
Berner, and their parents lived in Great Falls, Montana. The mother was a teacher and had dreams of
teaching at a small college, writing poetry, perhaps a few stories, while
teaching literature.
The father, a bombardier on a Mitchell B-25 medium bomber
during World War II, emerges thanks to his son’s reconstruction of him and
Ford’s relentless ability to convey, evoke, and dramatize, as a complex,
likeable fuck-up of achingly accessible behavior. In many ways, the father is the more
sympathetic character in the novel, and yet, you could argue that the mother is
as well, and so are the two kids.
So also are the individuals we meet for only brief moments
about a hundred pages in, characters who happen to be at a small bank in South
Dakota when Bev Parsons is robbing it and the mother is outside revving the
engine of the getaway car.
Ford is a facile, graceful writer, and this time he not only
has you, he has you reading at a slower pace than your usual wont, the better
to drink in the vividness of place while at the same time considering the
implications of the events, the naiveté of the young narrator, and the
occasional zinger of a rhetorical question this narrator is asking of himself,
through which he is also asking of the you when you here at his age and the you
of your present age, just as the narrator has moved from being naïve to more
complete in his formation.
From this author who you’d not been able to read before, you
are immersed in the outcome of one of your favored conditions, the unthinkable,
come to pass. You are very much the
hostage of a dramatic writer who has the exquisite ability to withhold
information, causing you to read for the same reasons you find reading
attractive. Ford uses information as
event and manages to turn event into information.
We cannot know the people in our everyday life, you believe,
with any sense of certainty, a fact that means you wish to trust but cannot
quite do so. You do the next best
thing. You invent plausible characters
whom, even though they may lie to you from time to time or cheat you, you are
able to believe them. This is important
because you will follow them as they lead you to places were you might not have
otherwise gone, and where you will learn things you might otherwise have
refused to see.
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