proper manky

© 2012 Proper Manky (signed copy bought at Laguna Beach Books)

Done reading.

By Richard Ford. Best all-around book I have read in several decades. Rarely been that deeply affected by a book. Ford is such a superb writer. Everything is in perfect pitch, the dialogue, the character and landscape descriptions, the lonely, melancholic voice of adolescent wonder, longing and naivete. Every page is pure precision.

Ford writes for all the senses evoking smells and sounds and sights like few other writers, except perhaps Faulkner. A masterful craftsman who reminds you on every page that perfect writing is manual work. Every sentence is handmade.

In its most denuded form, this is a sweeping memoir about the formative year in the life of a sheltered fifteen year old boy in 1960 in Montana whose parents rob a bank and who is then sent to rural Canada to live with strangers where he becomes entangled in a murder.

The main themes of the book are about assimilation, accommodation, adjustment, acceptance, and adaptation to changing circumstances, about flexibility. It is about absence and crossing borders, frontiers be they psychic, moral, or national. It’s about unattached belonging. It’s about the “composition of unequal parts”, about making sense of things and thinking things through; or not thinking things through, as it were.

On his way to Canada, the boy is given this advice:

Don’t spent time thinking old gloomy, though. Your life’s going to be a lot of exciting ways before you’re dead. So just pay attention to the present. Don’t rule parts out, and be sure you’ve always got something you don’t mind losing.

Interesting as the plot is, the true pleasure is all in the details. There’s a beautiful diction and pace to the book throughout. It starts with fast, short vignettes and panoramic shots skipping time here and there until toward the middle it comes almost to a complete stand still at the time of the robbery, with events unfolding as if in slow motion capturing a sense of life suspended, only to slightly accelerate again when the setting moves to Canada and then into the present.

Also, starting with the first paragraph (“First, I’ll tell about the bank robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”), Ford has an intriguing way of strewing breadcrumbs from the future into the present narrative. Yet, even though one knows what to expect, one always remains curious as to how things come about, how things are being made sense of.

Ford writes with an almost cinematic quality:

We were rattling along throughout the dark in his old International Harvester. I could only see the bright gravel roadbed in the headlights with the dusty shoulder shooting by, thick wheat planted to the verges. It was cold with the sun off. The night air was sweet as bread. We passed an empty school bus rocking along. Our headlights swept its rows of empty student seats. Far away in the fields, cutting was going on after dark. Dim moving truck lights, the swirl-up of dust. Stars completely filled the sky. […] Mosquitoes and gnats were filtering out of the wheat into the headlamp heat. Some came in the open truck with me. Then a sudden, quick flickering flash of wing fell in through the light, twisted upward, and was gone again. A hawk or an owl, drawn to the insects. It made my heart pound harder.

Ford is also a master of parenthetical and subordinate digressions, employed with great restraint. To wit:

And, of course, I knew some particulars because we were there in the house with them and observed them – as children do – as things changed from ordinary, peaceful and good, to bad, then worse, and then to as bad as could be (though no one got killed until later). […] We also knew the life with our parents was very different from other children’s lives – the children we went to school with, and parents who acted normal together. (This, of course, was wrong). We also agreed that our life was a “situation,” and waiting was the hard part. At some point it would all become something else, and it was easier if we simply were patient and made the most of things together.

These are not just a stylistic device for mere rhythm and effect. It’s very deliberately in the service of the book’s general conclusion:

What I know is, you have a better chance in life—of surviving it—if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

Finally, the cover of the book is brilliant on 3 levels. First, there are just the colors, the gold, yellows, the reds, etc. Second, the colors eventually emerge as a maple leaf, underscoring the book’s title. Finally, it’s not so much that one “sees” the maple leaf, but that one “hears” it as make-believe, which the book of course is full of.

Needless to say, highly recommended!

Interesting interview with Richard Ford here. Another one is on NPR, where one can hear that Ford hasn’t quite scoured Dixie out of his voice (just as Bev Parsons in the book). One more here, H/T MS. This hour-long interview by Michael Silverblatt, in typical erudite and breathless manner, nicely draws out the theme of opposites, of imbalaces, of similarities and dissimilarities. Ford also gives a reading of a lengthy section of the book.

Favorite words or expressions encountered in the book: oddment, mare’s tail, devilment, whirligig

Favorite phrases:

• “The nervous American intensity for something else.”
• “Nature doesn’t rhyme her children (Emerson)”
• “Warm breeze spun the silver whirligigs in the weedy yard. They made soft clicking sounds, fluttering.”
• “Life-changing events can seem not what they are.”