Some books you want to savor, page by page, paragraph by paragraph and Richard Ford’s Canada is one of those novels. I’m moving through it delicately, slowly, and happened to come across this paragraph on page 43 and am drawn back to it from the succeeding pages, probably because I’m not ready to let it be swallowed by the mass of memory a novel creates as you read it to the end. It’s too human and comforting for me not to want it fresh in my mind.

What I know firsthand about bad things—seriously bad things—was that late in the first week of August my father came home one evening, and though I didn’t see him, I knew something unusual was going on in the house. You become sensitized to such things by the sound of a porch door slapping closed too hard, or the thump of someone’s heavy boot heels hitting the floorboards, or  the creak of a bedroom door opening and a voice beginning to speak, then that door quickly closing, leaving only muffled noises audible. 

Two sentences. And it’s not that Ford is writing about what hasn’t been written about before; I’m sure it has. The thing that comes out of this paragraph, however, is how precise an aural observation it is, twined with the dread of something unusual and unsettling beginning, and all combined with language that manages to be both clinically and psychologically exact and idiomatically lyrical. It’s common language. It’s a first-person narrative told by a sixty-something-year-old man remembering his fifteen-year-old self, so it has an element of spoken reminiscence to it, but its force and directness, the power of the story it is telling, come from its unhurried tone, the voice of a novel that appears not to edit its words but whose words are just right. One lesson for writers from such an excerpt might be to study how to drive (if that’s the right word) the common observation into the resonating lyrical. I’m going to read it again now. Shh.