"The Americans in the bar were mostly large, loud-talking men dressed in rough hunting attire. They laughed and smoked and drank rye whiskey and beer and enjoyed themselves. Many of them thought that being in Canada was highly comical, and made jokes about having Thanksgiving in October and the strange ways Canadians talked (I'd never much detected it, though I tried) and how Canadians hated Americans but all wished they could live there and could be rich."
Richard Ford is an American novelist resident in Maine. He's written several novels, and his book Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize.
In Canada a young man living in Great Falls, Montana learns of his parents' failed attempt at robbing a bank. After they're arrested he and his twin sister part ways, and he's spirited away to distant Partreau, Saskatchewan. Once in Partreau he's placed in the care of the enigmatic Arthur Remlinger, a fellow American who runs a hotel.
I found some of the word choices and sentence structures used in this book a bit odd, and I'm not sure if this oddness was intentional or not. Was the author attempting to convey the protagonist's limited vocabulary? Or the way people spoke in the late 50s/early 60s? I'm really not sure.
In terms of pacing, Canada moves very slowly, and this would be my main argument against it. It takes forever to get going, with the above-mentioned arrest taking place about halfway through the book. Given the story it's trying to tell, Canada could have easily been half as long.
Most perplexingly, Canada as a country doesn't factor into the story for several chapters. If the author was trying to use Canada as his theme, or as some kind of metaphor, he fails spectacularly to do so. The nation of Canada isn't present in enough of the book to impart any larger meaning.
The protagonist's continual woolgathering also grows tiresome. Events that might have had more impact are diminished by his extreme passivity, and the people he meets never seem to influence him as much as they should. He never seems to have a stake in the things he witnesses, up to the point where a loved one's passing barely affects him at all.
Canada isn't a bad book, but it's definitely not as entertaining or absorbing as it could have been. If the author had just revised it a bit, making Canada into more of a symbol and enlarging the roles of various characters, it would have worked a lot better. As it is it's simply OK, and will probably fade quickly from your memory after you've read it.
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