A Review of An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson

Halfway through Richard Ford’s new novel, Canada, the young narrator, Dell, having been abandoned by his family, is spirited across the border between Montana and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan in the back seat of a car driven by family friend Mildred Remlinger. The world Dell has known in Great Falls, Mont., is in ruins following the arrest of both of his parents in connection with a botched bank robbery, and the world he is about to enter is entirely unknown to him:

Ahead, where the highway was only a pencil line into the distance, two dark low bumps became visible on the horizon, backed by blue sky in which there was not a floating cloud. I wouldn’t have seen the bumps if I hadn’t looked where Mildred was looking. It was Canada there. Indistinguishable. Same sky. Same daylight. Same air. But different. How was it possible I was going to it?

The two dark low bumps cohere into huts for customs officials on this lonely border road, and once Dell passes them, the novel, which has been spinning its wheels for more than 200 pages, suddenly locks into gear and begins to cruise toward greatness. In part, this sense of velocity is literal: after weeks of hanging around waiting for his parents to commit the idiotic crime announced on the first page of the novel, Dell is finally on the move, in the back of a car driven by a near-stranger, observing the world not through the eyes of a bored and perplexed teenager, but through the eyes of a first-class novelist inhabiting the consciousness of a frightened 15-year-old boy. Buzzards hang “in the sky, curving and motionless.” The night air is “sweet as bread.” The land itself is not merely land, but in a marvelously unforced way, an indicator of the narrator’s sense of loss and lostness:

Once we were out of the hills, there were no landmarks…There were even fewer trees. A single low white house with a windbreak and a barn and a tractor could be seen in the distance, then later another one. The course of the sun would be what told you where you were — that and whatever you personally knew about: a road, a fence line, the regular direction the wind came from.

Ford’s characters, too, which in the American portions of the novel, have been largely made up of loose collections of physical description and character tics, become stranger and far more interesting once we hit Canada. The first person Dell meets in Canada is the novel’s single great achievement: a gruff, unsavory Métis Indian named Charley Quarters, who lives alone in a filthy trailer and spends his days leading Americans on geese-hunting expeditions, but also wears lipstick and eye shadow and writes poetry.

Charley Quarters is the real thing, the sort of character who could exist nowhere but in fiction, but who feels utterly alive and real on the page, and for 50 pages or so, this odd, misbegotten novel comes alive as Dell settles into his strange new world, living in a shack in the middle of ghost town in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding prairie. And then — splat — the book dies again, never to show any more than the occasional sign of life for another hundred-odd frustrating pages.

In truth, Canada is two novels, neither of which has much to do with the other, or, for that matter, with Dell, its ostensible narrator and central character. In the first novel, set in Montana in the summer of 1960, Dell’s parents, Bev and Neeva Parsons, rob a bank in a manner so criminally inept and for reasons so lacking in basic common sense that Ford is forced to spend dozens of pages just making it sound like actual human beings might do such a thing. The second novel, set in the fictional town of Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, focuses on Arthur Remlinger, a mysterious American hotelier and one-time political hothead who is in hiding after committing a politically motivated crime in Detroit years before.

Neither of these crimes, along with a double murder that, again, Ford announces on page one, make much sense, but from the reader’s point of view, the far larger problem is how little they touch on the life of the narrator. The bank robbery, which puts his parents in jail and causes his twin sister, Berner, to run away to her own, separate fate, radically alters the trajectory of Dell’s life, but up until then, it really has nothing to do with him. For 200 pages, Dell moons around Great Falls, friendless, reading obsessively about chess and beekeeping, while his idiot father loses job after job and gets on the wrong side of some no-good local Indians, leading him to conclude that his only hope is to pack his wife in the car and rob a bank in North Dakota without bothering to wear a mask or otherwise cover his tracks.

Once in Canada, after a few chapters in which Dell finally seems to be participating in his own life, Ford loses interest in his fate and changes the subject to Arthur Remlinger’s crime, which has even less to do with Dell than the bank robbery. The reader is asked to wade through page after page of exposition about what Arthur did years ago and why he did it, largely delivered in summarized dialogue by Charley Quarters. Why is Charley telling young Dell all this? I couldn’t figure that one out, but by then, frankly, my dear, I didn’t give a damn.

One comes away from Canada feeling as though a less gifted author was trying to write a knock-off of a Richard Ford novel, and has made a hash of it. All the classic Fordisms are there: the sensitive teen at the mercy of hopelessly bad parents, the lonesome Western landscapes, the borderline clichés dressed up as prairie wisdom, the sense that all is in elegy to a lost and fallen world. But unlike in Ford’s best work — the first two Frank Bascombe novels, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, and the excellent story collection, Rock Springs — where all this stuff works, in Canada, the old Ford magic comes off as half-baked and pretentious.

Richard Ford has earned his place in the pantheon of late-20th-century American novelists, and 15 years ago, one could plausibly argue he was among the best Americans writing, but his later work — that is, most of what he’s done since he won the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day in 1996 — has seemed of a lesser quality. Now, this new book, Canada, exhibits a degree of badness that makes one wonder if the earlier stuff was really all that good. Wasn’t Frank Bascombe always a wee bit of a gasbag? Didn’t some of the stories in Rock Springs seem a little, well, contrived?

If you have a soft spot in your heart for Frank Bascombe and the other hard-luck characters in Ford’s earlier fiction, you may well want to skip this trip across the border.

AWP-goers take heed! As 10,000 writers descend on Seattle to take up the cause of literature, raising drinks and touting books and giving readings, certain questions may surface about the state of literature. We’ve been told that the author is dead; the book as form is dying; no one is reading and if they are, they’re distracted. And so how is it that so many people are still at it with the pen? AWP conference attendance has ballooned in recent years as more and more writers empty their already shallow pockets for the exuberant and wearying spree packed with publishing tips, idol worship, and camaraderie. If something about this makes you wonder about the state of the métier, and, well, especially if it doesn’t — Dubravka Ugrešić is the author to consult. And you’re lucky because her latest book of essays, Europe in Sepia, will be waiting at the Open Letter table, one island in that vast archipelago of tables manned by booksellers pedaling their wares.

The literary festival circuit is one that Ugrešić knows far more intimately than she’d like — in Europe in Sepia the reader follows her on a dizzying tour as she hurtles across the continent, from Bratislava to Budapest to Graz, and to destinations further off, Jerusalem; Oberlin, Ohio; and Zuccotti Park. This hectic pace of appearances sustains an esteemed writer who in an ideal world would be able to subsist off her writing. But these are not prosperous times and history hasn’t been kind to Ugrešić on these matters. The constant motion with which she moves resonates with a line she quotes from The Coming Insurrection: “This world wouldn’t be hurtling along with such speed were its own destruction not constantly at its heels.”

The prognosis? It’s not good. Ugrešić laments what has become of the author who has to perform to earn a pittance and a hot meal. She laments a culture where action and image trump the self-doubt and time for contemplation. She’s covered some of this ground before, most recently in Karaoke Culture, but in Europe in Sepia her tone is more resigned. The digitalization of everything has drastically altered how the literary world operates: “no longer a space of contemplation, subversion, spiritually enriching escapism, or discovery, but one of spectacle…like it or not, they are all participants in the society of the spectacle. Measured by its yardsticks, they divide into winners and losers.” And she’s already identified her affinities on the matter, within the context of Yuri Olesha’s novel Envy. The characters can be divided into two distinct types, exemplified by two brothers — Andrei, the rational and successful businessmen, and Ivan, the loser, the poetic soul, and dreamer. Ugrešić proclaims, “I’m with the losers.”

For the uninitiated, Dubravka Ugrešić is a Croatian essayist, novelist, and intellectual who was expelled from her homeland during the Croatian War for her vocal opposition to the war and powers that be, opposition which drew accusations of sedition and witchcraft and of being a feminist who was raping her homeland. She’s lived in exile ever since but still writes in her mother tongue. This language barrier distances her from Dutch literary culture in Amsterdam, where she now resides, as do the heightened tensions regarding worker immigration in the European Union.

Ugrešić calls this constant state of unsettledness she’s been exiled to the “out-of-nation zone,” or ON-Zone for short. With ON-Zone status comes a series of dilemmas for an author of any stature, especially now: she must rely on translation to reach her readers but translations are in short supply; she does not have a national identity or readership to anchor her work. The end result? Relegation to the diminutive halls of a minor literature. That this untangling of political affiliations accompanies discussion of her writing only reinforces her claim.

And yet there’s nothing minor about Ugrešić’s mind, writing, or body of work.

Ugrešić’s writing is unified by her sharp wit, cunning mind, absurdist sensibility, and its fragmentation. Her “patchwork” fiction is littered with references to Kafka and Isaac Babel and interspersed with patterns and recipes and articles from women’s magazines. Ugrešić’s essays are just as fragmented, with her mind racing the hyperkinectic speed of her travels, it seems.

In Europe in Sepia, Ugrešić examines the current cultural climate, in Croatia, on the European continent, and here in the States. Her findings are bleak. In these precarious times, the patina of the past’s optimism becomes even more alluring. Nostalgia and specifically the ways that nostalgia is repackaged as kitsch is an idea Ugrešić returns to again and again. Dutch author Arnon Grunberg wrote of Ugrešić’s ongoing obsession with both seduction/manipulation and poshlost (defined by Nabokov as “a special term for smug philistinism”) in a tribute to Ugrešić’s oeuvre that ran on this site last year. In Europe in Sepia, Ugrešić examines how the popularity of memorabilia, like mugs bearing the mug of the Yugoslav revolutionary Tito, obscures the fact that important and challenging conversations about the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars have failed to take place. If poshlost and seduction perfuse her previous work, Europe in Sepia adds a throughline of defeat.

And so Ugrešić sides with the losers. Epigraphs taken from Olesha’s Envy precede each section of the book. They speak of mankind having reached an “upper limit,” of “wrack and ruin,” and the “dark and gloomy cesspool” of human emotion. Past promise has given way to the current culture of crises — economic, ecological, literary, you name it. And the future, whatever the prognostication, does not seem bright. Only the ecologists, who Ugrešić calls modern prophets, have answers: “When they say the end is nigh, it’s believing time.” And so Ugrešić adopts the stance of the cultural ecologist who speaks in biological parables. For example, regarding life in Central, South, and Southeastern Europe, she writes: “They don’t try planting flowers — gardening is a belief in the future, and they have no future.” It doesn’t stop there. She uses lessons on biodiversity at Dublin’s National Botanical gardens to examine growing hostility against immigrant workers. Population overgrowth and the disposability of the poor is raised in the context of resumption — or “green cremation,” a cheaper and eco-friendly alternative to cremation that takes up less space and that’s accompanied by a liquid portion stripped of DNA that can be used as fertilizer or thrown away.

Ultimately,Ugrešić’s most dire forecast is for the writer: “As a specific human species, the majority of writers are facing extinction. Whether writers fall into the critically endangered group like Sumatran orangutans, the endangered group like Malaysian tigers, the vulnerable group like African elephants, the near threatened group together with the jaguar, or in the least concern group with the giraffe — let’s leave that to the experts.” At least the writers might take solace that they’re not alone? But then, as of late, the fate of the giraffe at Dutch zoos isn’t an enviable one either. In the categories of writers, however, the fate of the female author is even more dire. Ugrešić writes of the lose-lose situation the female author faces, and her inherent insecurity in the male dominant literary culture. A cult of personality is required for a woman to be canonized, and this is something more common among the fine arts, she laments, while she provides a fascinating analysis of Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present as an act of self-deification.

But what’s a woman to do? What’s a writer to do? Of the two obvious choices, reticence or self-aggrandizement, neither works. There should be more choices, just as the airport bookstores she visits should offer more than books by E.L. James and Julian Barnes. True possibility lies in breaking out of this forced dichotomy. Ugrešić recognizes that despite her predictions of doom and gloom that not all is lost, not yet, not when revolution is in the air. Resistance in the form of Occupy Wall Street opened the door to one possible new beginning, or at least to not going out without a fight. Which helps to explain why despite Ugrešić’s dire outlook, she remains invested: “We need to participate in the orgy of communication, even when it seems to those of us sending messages that communication is buried in the din, and thus senseless. Because somewhere on a distant shore a recipient awaits our message. To paraphrase Borges, he or she exists to misunderstand it and transform in into something else.”