The problem with first-person narrative: Richard Ford's Canada

Richard Ford's novel "Canada" is a good example of the perils of first-person narration. Ford uses the first person a lot, a very suitable mode for his sensibility as writer, which involves characters prone to rumination and introspection and who are often (Bascombe, in particular) literary types who in fact might write down their thoughts, so the first-person narration does not strain credibility. (Updike wisely used third person for his Rabbit novels, which are about as introspective as a third-person narration could ever become.) The problem Ford has to deal with in Canada is that he is telling a story with several great dramatic scenes, and the narrator is not present for at least one of them (the bank robbery, which led to the arrest of his parents). Ford works that out by having the narrator, Dell, now an older man looking back on his childhood, indicate that he had access to a journal that his mother kept - so, OK, we can accept that he can tell us the events of the robbery, even though almost all of the first part of the novel works so well because, from the child's POV (15 years old at the time of the events of the novel, in 1960) he had only the vaguest understanding of what was happening in his family, as his father plans the robbery and draws the timid mother into his orbit. The 2nd part of the novel involves Dell's living in almost slave-like conditions working for a man who owns a hotel/bar/hunting lodge in Saskatchewan. There are many hints, even from the first paragraph of the novel, that this part of the novel, too, is drawing toward a dramatic conclusion - a murder, in fact - though in his fashion Ford does not rush the pace of the novel but rather spends a lot of time allowing the character to explore and reflect on his loneliness and fear and his naive hope that his boss,the hotel owner Remlinger, will actually shelter and protect him and become a replacement for the now-absent father. So how can Ford build toward the conclusion? Unfortunately, only in the clunkiest narrative fashion: he has the totally odd and unlikable character Charley spend about 10 pages telling Dell Remlinger's back story, his right-wing political past that led to a bombing death of an innocent man, his flight to Canada, and now the likelihood, 15 (?) years later, that two Americans are coming north for vengeance. Well, first, why would Charley tell all of this to Dell? Second, why would Remlinger have told any of this to anybody, let alone to Charley? And how would either Remlinger or Charley have any idea that two men were coming north to find Remlinger? They say he was tipped off, but that seems preposterous. And why would Remlinger just wait around for them to arrive (maybe we'll find out why, but not clear yet). Anyway, a really fine novel, but you can see toward the end where Ford's sensibility and narrative decisions bump up hard against the requirements of a plot-driven narrative.