The most geographic (and peripatetic) of writers

I enjoyed the many great elements in Richard Ford's "Canada," especially the keen sense of space and geography and the access to the consciousness of a young man from a rather ordinary, if solitary, family who faces a great crisis in life and endures. Typical of Ford, Canada is a highly introspective novel, in which the protagonist/narrator examines all aspects of his thinking and behavior. It's unfortunate that Ford let the plot of the novel get away from him: he's trying something very difficult and challenging here, presenting a novel with two great action scenes - a bank robbery and a double-murder, both telegraphed in the first sentence - as told by a first-person narrator who witnesses neither. The novel is not so much about these dramatic events as about the effect they have on a character. Where the novel becomes a bit unhinged, I would say, is when Ford essentially erases three of the main characters from the novel at the half-way point: he went to great pains to depict the family of 4, as mom and dad careen toward a bank robbery and prison, and I - like most readers, I suspect - expected the novel to be about this family, both before and after the robbery. But, no - the twin sister and the parents vanish from part 2 of the novel, as the narrator goes off to Canada, where he is taken in by a strange and quite cruel man - and this man, Remlinger, becomes the main character in part 2 - yet we don't really care about him or believe in him, his actions are all very sketchy as the narrator, Dell, doesn't know him and can't explain him: he would be an interesting lead character in a novel, I think, but seen obliquely he makes no sense, neither to Dell nor to us. The very short part 3 brings us to the present, with Dell as a 60ish English teacher reuniting briefly with his twin, now dying of cancer: this doesn't feel like an earned conclusion, there's so much about Dell's life in between that we don't know and never will, even more so about his sister Berner's life - the only purpose seems to be for Berner to give Dell the notebooks their mother kept, which explains how Dell could have known the details about the bank robbery and other personal matters. Ford is a writer with a deep and abiding interest in geography - his books examine many different places on the continent, and reader's of author's notes have for years noted that Ford is among the most peripatetic of authors. He has beautifully captured a sense of the landscape in Montana and in Sask., Canada, but it does seem at times that he lets his interest in geography and his skill at rendering a sense of place overwhelm the story - I appreciate he didn't want to write a "thriller" or a who dunnit, but the novel seems willfully deflated of narrative affect, which is a shame, a missed opportunity.