A novel I can't wait to get back to: Richard Ford's Canada

About 1/3 of the way through Richard Ford's "Canada" and finding it one of the few novels, and the first in quite some time, that I really just keep wanting to get back to - a great pleasure to read! Not that I haven't read other great novels recently, but most of them have been daunting monuments such as The Idiot or The Ambassadors, whereas Ford can write serious literary fiction that also has a driving plot line and engaging characters, the plot being this: a 70ish man, seemingly a retired professor, is writing an account of the crucial episode in his boyhood, back in 1960 in Montana, when his father and mother, two seemingly ordinary and upright citizens, got involved in a bank robbery and a murder. Ford tells us this in the first sentence of the novel - and he thus sets himself a real challenge: Canada may be a crime novel but it's the opposite of a who dunnit. We know from the first words who dunnit, and the novel is about exploring why and how (and who). Ford is known for his ruminative prose, full of parenthetical qualifications (like this one) - and Canada is typical of his work in this way: he doesn't rush into the action, but has his narrator, Dell, spend a lot of time describing his parents (dad a retired army pilot, mom a part-time school teacher) and his twin sister (smarter and more advanced than he, and far more rebellious) and their town (the mining town of Great Falls, though the family had been peripatetic - part of the theme is narrator's desire for stability, both in family and setting - while sister, Berner, talks about running away from home with her boyfriend, the narrator, Dell, is afraid of moving and missing the start of high school, at which he wants to learn about beekeeping and chess). I suspect that Ford may have written this novel, in a sense, to correct the missteps of his disappointing The Lay of the Land, which was so widely anticipated but poorly received; I love his work, but had a lot of trouble with Lay of the Land, which carried, which was entirely about rumination and observations of the changing (New Jersey) landscape and never picked up any steam, any direction, or any conflict - just zipped across the land from point to point, like the narrator, Bascombe. Canada, by contrast, is full of tension and great scenes - and not where you'd expect. The great scenes are the family scenes; smart and interesting choice to have the story told by one of the children - we're constantly with Dell as he tries to piece together what's going on in the family through inferences, secret observations, and overheard bits of conversation - as dad plans the robbery to get the family out of a dangerous financial fix.