Huck, Holden, and the narrator of Richard Ford's Canada

On this day of sadness for schoolchildren in our area and in our country, I'm thinking about the extremely sad Part 2 of Richard Ford's novel "Canada," a fairly abrupt and unexpected change in the tone of the novel - after part one carefully built to the denouement in which the narrator's (Dell's) parents are arrested and imprisoned for robbing a bank - and Dell indicates that after visiting them in prison he will never see them again - they are more or less erased from the novel, or at least from the foreground of the novel, and Dell is smuggled north to Canada where he is to live with the brother of one of his mother's acquaintances (friend would be overstating it). Essentially, he lives the life of a slave - placed in a horribly decrepit prairie building, order to work endless hours "swabbing" the filthy rooms in the crappy hotel that his so-called benefactor owns, put in the care of a scary little man with strong indications of sexual perversion. Dell is extremely cool and blase about all of this - very unhappy and lonely, but it's a lonely novel - populated for Dell with no friends and no relatives beyond immediate (now broken) family. Over time, he gets to know his benefactor, Arthur Remlinger (?), somewhat better, but it's unclear to any reader why Arthur would have agreed to or wanted to take Dell under his so-called care: Dell gives him free slave labor, but there's a lot of risk involved in illegally sheltering him, so why? One of the most poignant scenes involves Dell's lonely bicycle trek to a nearby town where he hears there's a school for "wayward girls" and for some crazy reason he thinks they'll take him in - of course they don't. This kid needs someone to look out for him and care for him, but he's completely alone in the world - the fact that he is now looking back on his childhood as a adult with apparently a normal life (I think he says he's a professor?) is quite astonishing, but what saves the book from foundering on its own improbabilities is that Dell himself is aware throughout as to how odd and improbable his own life events are. There are quite a few events in this novel, but it's not a dramatic story, it's more a story of mood and reflection and deep sorrow (someone will probably try to film this book, but I doubt a movie could capture the mood well and would probably just cheapen the narrative by making it too vivid - the beauty of the narration is how much Dell tells us by indirection and nuance). Though his Bascombe trilogy is a very adult-centered series of novels (a child is a central character in Independence Day, but he is enigma rather than a fully opened character), Ford has written well about the perceptions of children in a number of his stories and in at least one novel (Wildlife); Canada develops one of the strongest and most unusual teenage narrators in American fiction: a character ans lonely and independent as Huck or Holden, but, unlike them, a character longing to be taken into a family and a society and rejected or ignored at every turn.