Canada

Canada
by Richard Ford
(3/5 stars)

This is one of those literary novels that mostly makes you think the author's done better work in the past.  Like some of the later John Irving novels I've read it's not completely awful, but there isn't much impact to it.  It certainly doesn't surpass Ford's Pulitzer-winning "Independence Day."

Basically in 1960 Dell Parson's parents rob a bank in North Dakota to pay off some Native Americans.  The most implausible part is that no one takes the kids when the parents are arrested; they're just left there to fend for themselves even though they're 15.  I don't think that would happen even in 1960 in a small Montana town.  Most likely they'd have gone to the police station until a social worker could take them to an orphanage.  But anyway, the book is called Canada because Dell ends up in Saskatchewan, in an even worse town than the one in Montana.

The idea of fleeing to Canada to start a new life would have had a lot more impact back in 1968 or so with the Vietnam War in full swing and people going to Canada to avoid the draft.  In 2013 it comes off as quaint.

It's one of those novels too where the author uses a narrator who is probably the least interesting character in the book.  This only works when the characters around that character are far more interesting, which is just not the case here. (It's the case in Where You Belong by me.)

Anyway, for what it is the book is well written, but it really felt to me like a book out of time.  I suspect the only reason the book takes place so long in the past is that's the time period the author is familiar with as a teenager.  I think we're about at the point where a book taking place in 1960 would be considered "historical fiction" akin to a book about Henry VIII.  Sorry, septuagenarian authors but your golden days of yore are ancient history.

That is all.

Rock Springs

Rock Springs by Richard Ford

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

October 16, 2006

While a novel is like a symphony where all the various pieces are part of one whole, a collection of short stories is more like an album of popular music where each selection stands apart from the rest. The biggest problem of "Rock Springs" is that it sounds like an album of one song played over and over again.

Each story in "Rock Springs" features a down-on-his-luck man in Montana who has (or is about to) lose his job and has a wife/girlfriend who works at a bar. Something then tears the man and woman apart, whether it's an affair, murder, or they just plain get sick of each other. The narrator gains some insight. The end.

The first stories are interesting, especially the title track which features a petty criminal named Earl taking his daughter and waitress girlfriend across the country to evade the law for writing a bad check. Over time, though, the formula is repeated so many times that it loses any appeal and the stories become predictable and dull. And all of these stories bear a striking similarity to Ford's novel "Wildlife" which also takes place in Montana and has a down-on-his-luck man losing his wife.

The stories all have similar narration as well, all sounding as if they were written by someone with only a 4th grade education and featuring Ford's typical clunky dialogue. The dialogue is especially bad in "Children" where an Indian boy and his friend entertain his father's mistress. (This I suppose was the most unique of the stories.)

All of the stories are similarly dreary, which reflects real life, but I couldn't help wishing for something to brighten the somber mood a little. None of this is to say "Rock Springs" is a bad collection of work, just that it's repetitive. You can read the first story or two and not miss anything with the rest.

That is all.

Wildlife

Wildlife by Richard Ford

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

August 9, 2004

At 163 pages, "Wildlife" is more of a novella than anything else and about as dry as the scorched Montana landscape. The biggest problem is not so much the story, but the way the story is told. In some cases, the impersonal first-person narrator works, as in "The Great Gatsby", but in others like "Wildlife" or "A Prayer for Owen Meaney", the narrator is such a nonentity that they don't add anything to the story and act only as a buffer that prevents the audience from really getting to know the other, more important characters.

The story, if you don't know, is that when narrator Joe's father loses his job as a golf instructor, he goes into the forest to help fight a wildfire. While he's gone, Joe's mother has a fling with an older local businessman, Warren Miller, but whether this was already going on before Joe finds out is unclear. When Joe's father returns from the fire, his mother moves out for a while. And that's it.

In this case Joe (complete with dull name) has no friends, no ambitions, and few (if any) opinions to share. He's no one I could ever care about, because his only function seems to be as a recording device to report the activities of his parents to us readers. The parents, as though aware of this, speak in an unnatural way to always indicate to us what they are feeling or thinking. It's the problem I've had with all of Ford's books, including the Pulitzer-winning "Independence Day". Some writers are able to write convincing dialogue and others (like Ford) are not.

It's hard to say much about "Wildlife" because there's so little to it. There's not a lot of action, drama, or passion and the story itself isn't much that we haven't already seen before. Again, the story told through Joe the buffer keeps us from really learning anything about the characters and that prevents us from feeling sympathetic towards their plight. It's hard to feel sorry even for poor Joe, because he's so without distinguishing features to his personality.

I've said this before about similar cases of first-person stories using a bland narrator--which always prompts other people to reach for the "Not Helpful" button--and that is that the story would have been more interesting either in first-person focusing on one of the parents or in third-person and focusing on both, so that we weren't so buffered from everything. What makes Ford's Bascombe novels "The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day" so much better than his other novels is that we learn just about everything about Frank Bascombe and he is the center of all the action of the story, so that even if he is emotionally detached, it's easier to feel sympathetic towards him as a reader. This can't be said for this dry little book.

If I hadn't bought this book for about as little as you can realistically pay without stealing it and if it were longer, then I would give it 1-star for wasting my time and money. But I'll give it a bonus star for not wasting either one. Now go reach for the Not Helpful button, I command you!

A Piece of My Heart

A Piece of My Heart by Richard Ford

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

July 16, 2004

There are a few four-letter words that would fill in the title of this review, but I can't say them on a family-friendly website. I think 'garbage' will suffice. Pointless garbage if you want to be more specific. The only reason it doesn't get 1-star from me is that it's Ford's first novel and I have a tendency to be lenient on debut novels.

The story involves Robard Hewes, the hick living in California, who decides to up and leave his wife to go to Arkansas to find the woman who's been sending him letters for quite some time. There's also (for whatever reason) Sam Newell, a law student in Chicago who's bummed out about life (for whatever reason) and goes to a hunting camp on an island in Mississippi owned by his girlfriend's grandfather. Robard gets a job on that island and at the same time has a brief affair with Buena, the woman who's been writing him and is unhappy with her washed-up career minor league pitcher husband.

Robard was a fun character--gruff, mysterious, and yet driven for some reason to do something even he knew was stupid. I'm not sure why the whole book didn't revolve around him, because Sam Newell served no purpose whatsoever in the story. Ford didn't even bother to follow up on his story, that's how unimportant he was to the plot. Robard is the story, and the point of his story is that sometimes people make dumb choices and have to pay the consequences for them. A good point, but one I already knew from reading Richard Russo's far superior "Nobody's Fool", which I recommend over this.

Mr. Lamb is another interesting character, the wacky old Southern coot with an island not even on the maps. Mr. Lamb pays Robard to drive around and run any poachers off his private kingdom while he goes out fishing with his "telephone", an electrical device that has grave consequences for Mr. Lamb. Mrs. Lamb always had a certain amount of mystery attached to her, because at first she just sits around listening to the radio, but later we find out she handles a lot of the business affairs. TVA is the black servant who would be a horrible racial stereotype except for an undercurrent of resentment towards his employer. Buena is a snotty brat and it soon becomes clear to Robard what me, as the reader, figured out long ago and that is she's not worth crossing the country and risking his life for--Helen of Troy she is not.

I never did quite understand the point of the interludes with Sam and his father. Sam was so unimportant that I'm not sure why bringing up scattered episodes (most little more than a page or a few paragraphs) of selling starch in the South was necessary. It didn't add much in my mind to Sam or to the story in general. Like Sam himself, those episodes could have been done away with.

There are some nice descriptions, but otherwise Ford's writing itself is what brings down this book. For some reason he had a fear of pronouns when writing this book that manifested itself in ambiguous "He"s. For example, Ford might say something like, "Mr. Lamb sprinkled salt on his food. He pushed away from the table." Now you'd think the "he" in the second sentence means Mr. Lamb, since he was the subject of the last sentence, but no, it refers to Robard or Sam, depending on if the part of the book focuses on Robard or Sam. That led me to a lot of confusion and I'm still trying to figure out why an editor didn't take umbrage with it. As with Ford's "The Ultimate Good Luck", I also had trouble following some of the action because the details were sketchy about what was happening, such as how (and why) Sam ended up in the water in the beginning of the story.

I wouldn't recommend this book, because Ford does go on to better things like "The Sportswriter" and the Pulitzer-winning "Independence Day". Those demonstrated how much the author developed as a writer and are much more worthy of your time. However, if you're a fan of Richard Ford, (I'm not) then you'll want to read this as a curiosity to know where the author got his start.

The Ultimate Good Luck

The Ultimate Good Luck by Richard Ford

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

July 8, 2004

Never has a book involving cocaine smuggling, at least three murders, and Mexican prisons been so boring or unsatisfying. I've read Ford's Frank Bascombe novels and the difference in the writing and subject matter (to use the old cliche) is night and day while there's no difference at all in the lack of passion in the characters, specifically Harry Quinn, the protagonist.

Harry doesn't care if he gets Sonny out, he only cares about getting himself and his wife Rae out of Mexico alive, which may or may not happen, we never even really find that out. Rae doesn't even care about getting her brother out, so both her and Harry are making a half-hearted attempt. This is great, complex stuff, but from a reading standpoint it comes off as cold and clinical, to the point where I never cared if Harry or Rae lived or died. Heck, if one of them died, maybe the other would have had to experience some emotion then.

I'm not saying I want a lot of melodrama, but I do want to feel SOMETHING. I hate putting down a book with a weary sigh and saying, "Yeah, so?" It means the author failed to deliver the goods, although in this case maybe Ford got what he was after, because I felt as cold and detached from everything as Harry.

In terms of the writing, this is nowhere near the caliber of "The Sportswriter" or "Independence Day". The sentences are choppy and filled with a lot of amateurish telling instead of showing and useless adverbs. The characters are all so bland and detached that I never care about them. The action is handled so poorly that in big moments, like the gunfight at the end, I didn't know what was happening. The dialogue was stiff and unbelievable. And of course the plot really never went anywhere. Based on all this, there's simply nothing for me to recommend with this book.

Do yourself a favor, if you want a book with drugs and action, then there are probably plenty of others more exciting. Or if you want decent literary fiction that's a better example of Ford's writing, check out his Bascombe novels. Those might not make you feel much at the end either, but they are written better. Good luck to you if you still try this book, you'll need it.

Independence Day

Independence Day by Richard Ford

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

October 18, 2002

Independence Day is the story of a long (oh, so very, very long) Fourth of July weekend for middle-aged real estate agent Frank Bascombe. Over the weekend he maybe makes some slight changes, turning his life in a new direction (possibly).

I'm not a middle-aged guy, but I've had some revelations in my own young life, so I get what Ford is saying. Frank is mired in the "Existence Period" where he pretty much just tries not to let things bother him, just keep everything even keel. On this holiday weekend, Frank and his son Paul, who's been getting in trouble for shoplifting, vandalism, so on, are going to the Basketball and Baseball Halls of Fame. At first glance, I thought the book would revolve around the travels of father and son, but this is not the case. Instead, for a good two hundred pages or so we readers are mired in the dull life of Frank Bascombe as he tries to sell a house to middle-aged former hippies who have yet to discover the comfortably numb bliss of the Existence Period. And there's Frank checking out his hot dog and root beer stand outside town, trying to collect rent from his deadbeat tenants, and having overly philosophical talks with his girlfriend, whom Frank really can't commit to because it would upset the delicate balance in his mundane life.

When the father and son jamboree finally does get underway, I almost wished it hadn't, because Paul is a very weird kid. He reminded me of a couple cousins of mine, which is not a good thing. After Frank tries to bond with his son at the Basketball Hall of Fame and on the way to Cooperstown (without lots of success) Paul is mercifully hit in the eye when he stands directly in the path of a batting cage pitching machine and has to go to the hospital. Inexplicably, Frank's half-brother takes him to the hospital why Paul is choppered there. The half-brother appears from nowhere and his sudden appearance seemed a little too convenient for me.

Anyway, after Paul's injury, Frank begins to realize that maybe he should try to get out of the Existence Period and commit to his girlfriend, have a better relationship with his ex-wife and kids, so on. The book grinds to a halt before it's really clear what exactly Frank is going to do, which left me wondering, "I read all this way for what?" A book so long and plodding, I wanted some kind of conclusion, something to make me feel it was worthwhile, and I don't think I got that.

My biggest complaint is that some of the characters didn't seem real to me. Paul (and his sister) are so weird, the girlfriend is too cerebral, and the ex-wife was flat. Maybe I just don't know enough people...

However, this is a fairly good book. The story, as slow as it is, is engrossing and the writing is almost top-notch. I'd recommend giving it a look, especially if you're a middle-aged man in an Existence Period of your own.