Canada, by Richard Ford

To help us understand ourselves, every age needs its Huckleberry Finn, a naive boy on the lam, harmed or abandoned by his parents and left to confront evil and to figure out life for himself. Though it may be impossible to equal Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Richard Ford’s novel is another masterpiece of the genre. Not only is it a masterful character study, it gives us so much to think about that it rewards repeated readings.

In a season marred by the senseless murder of 12 people in a Colorado movie theater and of six people in a Wisconsin Sikh temple, Canada couldn’t be more relevant. At 15, Dell Parsons, Ford’s narrator, is forced to face evil in both banal and terrifying guises. Fifty years later he still struggles to make sense of the experience. “First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later,” he states in the novel’s opening lines, surely among the most dramatic in recent literature.

Until the day when the police come to arrest his parents, Dell thinks of his life as normal, safe and predictable. He’s close to his twin sister, Berner, knows that his parents love him, and looks forward to the beginning of school and to becoming a good chess player. Suddenly the two children find themselves abandoned and bereft. They visit their parents in jail and realize that they are unlikely ever to see them again. No one comes to look after them.