Canada by Richard Ford

This is the story of how 15-year-old Dell Parsons's life was derailed and permanently changed by a single, spectacularly uncharacteristic act by his mother and father: a barely planned and ineptly executed bank robbery.  It is essentially about the consequences of a sudden tragic rupture in the fabric of an ordinary family life.

 The narrator, Dell Parsons, now a retired English teacher, looks back with a kind of bemused detachment on the unlikely events that unmoored him from his ordinary life and pitched him headlong into an uncertain future. From the start, it is apparent that this is someone trying to make sense of the past. What is important here is not the event, but its long aftermath.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, concerning the crime and its immediate fallout, is set in the mid-to-late 1950s in Great Falls, the Montana town that Ford has used as a backdrop in some previous stories. The second describes Dell's clandestine flight to an even more downbeat town just over the border in Canada and his new life as a kind of odd-job boy for a mysterious American fellow exile, Arthur Reminger. The third and final part of the book, a short postscript set in the recent past, mostly concerns Dell's visit to his estranged sister, Berner, who is living – and dying from a terminal illness – in Minneapolis. There are several moments in the book where Dell seems on the verge of some great epiphany, but arrives instead at a smaller understanding of the strange trajectory of his younger life. He spent the rest of his life wrestling with what happened that was beyond his control, puzzling to stay positive and afloat, but ultimately misunderstanding the world his father chose and having that misunderstanding become his life.The faults of the father are passed on to the son. The older Dell, though, who guides us though the strange jolts in his life calmly, step by step, does not so much misunderstand the world as keep it at a safe distance, so justifiably wary is he of the sudden, cataclysmic turn it may take. This strategy seems to have worked and, by the end of the book, he seems a remarkably accepting, even contented, individual.