Across the (Not So) Great Divide: Richard Ford and Canada

Richard Ford’s fiction often focuses on border crossings, literal and imaginative, which challenge characters to expand their visions and reground their lives in what might be called a new normal. In much of Ford’s fiction, Canada, as place and idea, plays a crucial role, offering his characters new possibilities for seeing and understanding. The affirmative promise of Canada, while present throughout much of his fiction, is nowhere more important than in Ford’s 2012 novel entitled simply Canada. In this novel, the American protagonist, Dell, ultimately comes to settle in Windsor, on the border between the US and Canada, a place that imaginatively represents the balancing of his desire for freedom with that for adaptation and responsibility. For Dell, the normal and the abnormal are merely “two sides of one thing that have to be held in the mind simultaneously to properly understand.” Dell’s comment expresses at the same time Ford’s affirmation of the dynamic interplay at the borderlands, real and imagined, between the US and Canada.