Good Reads
American writer Richard Ford often quotes the F.R. Leavis line, "Literature is the supreme means by which you renew your sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness." Books help us figure out how to live. Ford did just that by revealing the interior monologue of American everyman Frank Bascombe in his trilogy: The Sportswriter (1986), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day (1996), and The Lay of the Land (2006). He continues to puzzle out how we make ourselves into who we are with his latest novel, Canada, about Dell, a 15-year-old boy on the modern frontier of Montana and Saskatchewan, whose life is thrown in an unexpected direction when his parents decide to rob a bank. Mississippi native Ford spoke to reader and interviewer Jade Chang about goose hunting, bank robbing, and his bromance with Raymond Carver.
Richard Ford: This was my decision, though I had some pushback from powers that be when I wanted to call this book Canada, and some not good things were said about the American experience of Canada.
Canada for Dell, and for several people in this book, is a kind of refuge. I like Canada a lot—it's a place from shore to shore where I always have been very happy. I went there first in 1962, and when I go, I always feel something lift off of me, like a burden of some kind. I'm sure it's the burden of my citizenship, but I think it's something endemic to life in Canada...a sense of safe haven, renewed possibility.
Canada is so crucial to the U.S., if only because we share this immense border, we share a life! I got interested in the distinctions that are crucial but not visible. You can cross the border anywhere and not notice anything about the physiognomy or the language that's changed, but it's all very different. And it's almost philosophically, if not spiritually, interesting, those things that seem alike but are different. And it's a measure of ourselves as successful human beings that we can see those differences.
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