Richard Ford

A teacher at the end of his career, married without children, with a wife who is an accountant by trade, decides to recount two pivotal events from his adolescence. Had he been—who knows?—an astronaut, a Silicon Valley adventurer, or simply a sensitive, and therefore fragile, person, he might have given us a tale less prosaic and intellectualized, yet rich in emotion and feeling; instead, the sprawling novel sets out to demonstrate how > the best thing to do in life, to survive, is to bear losses well. (...) the world changing around us does not care how I feel . The novel is divided into two parts. In the first, the setting is a small Montana town: an ordinary family, husband and wife, fifteen-year-old twins, a girl and a boy (our narrator-teacher). The father is strapping, amusing, the classic charmer: a former army officer who, after leaving the armed forces, chased far-fetched schemes, ending up in petty dealings skirting the edge of the law; the mother is slight, shy, introverted, and a dreamer. > The strange union of their ill-matched physical traits is always in my mind as one of the reasons for their tragic end: they were without question simply wrong for each other and should never have married . To the children, home seems normal, until the parents commit an incredible and unpredictable act: a bank robbery, following which they are arrested and sentenced to many years in prison. Why did they do it? What drove them to commit such an absurd act? Never mind the father, superficial and incurably optimistic, but why the mother, so sensible and on the verge of separating from her husband? > She might have felt not despair or terror or greater alienation (which would have been normal). But freedom. From all the forces that oppressed her. She might have concluded that this uncontrolled sensation came directly from the very qualities that isolated her. (...) This might have made her feel better than she had in a long time. The mother is undoubtedly the most interesting character in the novel, and it would have been worthwhile to investigate her further to grasp the full measure of her reckless act, which will lead her to suicide. Yet > my parents began to recede in my vision, as when you are sick and fever shrinks the world and stretches distances. My parents grew smaller and smaller until I was alone in the dimly lit kitchen, and they were on the verge of vanishing, almost disappearing . And indeed, in the novel's second part, the setting and circumstances are far removed from the still-adolescent world of the first. To escape the clutches of the authorities, a friend of the mother takes the boy to Canada, to a small town where her brother Arthur runs a hotel. Here, the narrative takes on an artificial cast, typical of a contrived armchair literary construct. The boy comes of age in short order (a coming-of-age novel?) and is drawn to the figure of Arthur: a cultured yet violent failed revolutionary who seems intent on assuming the role of mentor to the protagonist—a sort of *Great Gatsby*, a mysterious superhero, a failed and nonetheless arrogant intellectual. The friendship between Arthur and the boy ends abruptly when the youth becomes entangled in a murder. Arthur kills two people, and the boy is used, unbeknownst to him, to create a diversion and deceive the victims. And it is then that the protagonist realizes that the only possibility is to maintain life in a generally acceptable state, regardless of the borders crossed: like a puzzle, like a symphony, like > the game of chess, in which the individual competitors are part of a long, single enterprise that pursues a condition not of adversity or conflict, or defeat or even victory, but of an equilibrium underlying it all . It is a cynical and pessimistic conclusion, according to which, in order to survive—to avoid being overwhelmed and destroyed—one must not get involved; that is to say, one must not truly live. It is a dreadful novel, not merely due to its disproportionate length, but above all because it lacks tension, pace, and genuine psychological depth; the characters are stereotypes, mere pretexts for philosophical reflections that are, moreover, frequently impenetrable. The premise upon which the first part rests held real promise: an incomprehensible event upends everyone’s lives; parents can commit acts that alter their children’s lives, radically and for the worse. How often have we seen this happen! Yet the development of the idea disappoints through its absence of emotion, of real suffering. The second part is a series of clichés, of characters and settings that evoke literature rather than real life. What is Canada to the narrator-protagonist? An escape, an unreal country, the setting for his coming-of-age? We will never know, for the pointless digressions are far too numerous. Why not read it? It is long, prolix, tedious, and contrived.