Canada

Canada

Are our parents the people we can actually trust? What value/role do we fit into our parents’ lives? These questions seem to haunt Dell Parsons, the narrator of Richard Ford’s Canada. In Ford’s novel, Dell, now a retired high school English teacher in the titular country, looks back on two formative events in his life: a bank robbery and two murders. 

Each of these events shape his life, as he comes close to becoming a partner to or actor in these crimes, despite the fact that the adults in his life seem to have no compunction with bringing someone of his age and experience into orbit of these events. When his father, driven to rob a small, North Dakotan bank to pay off debts incurred during the commission of illegal beef sales, he first considers enlisting the services of his fifteen-year-old son to draw suspicions away from his actions. 

In that moment, we can see both the desperation of the father and the way that he views his only son. The son’s purpose and life is adjunct to the needs and desires of the parents, causing him in later years to imagine what might have happened had he participated in his father’s bank heist. Would he have succeeded where his father and mother did not? Would he have died in a hail of bullets like his father’s aspirational heroes—Bonnie and Clyde?

What Dell and his sister Berner turn out to be are afterthoughts in a system of neglect and disinterested adults. After the arrests of their parents, no officials from the state come to check in on their welfare, leaving them to choose their own paths. 

Berner’s path is one of running away, becoming a sometime waitress, sometime nurse’s assistant, who dies of liver cancer from years of substance abuse. She does not form the meaningful relationships that seem needed to succeed in life, with the exception of her final relationship with Ray who tends to Berner during the last days of her life.

The story reminds us of the cruelty and hardships that life cannot often deal to individuals. Ford’s insistence on seeing who these characters are brings to mind the travails of Sophoclean characters who cannot escape the inevitability of fate. It is not enough to survive for Dell; rather, he must use the world’s events to become someone who places value on the things that he missed in his childhood—education and meaningful relationships.