Richard Ford’s magnificent, compassionate, strangely languorous new novel begins with a crafty come-on: “First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.” That’s quite some opener. What follows is not a Bonnie and Clyde-style adventure, but a far more ruminative affair about the imperceptible slide from normal to not normal, edging towards the point of no return. If that’s mildly disappointing, he more than makes up for it in the bitter fallout from physical actions.

Ford’s genius at capturing human frailty and its pitiful disguises burns through this novel, from Dell and Berner’s visit to their parents in jail, when their father insists on keeping up his ordinary banter, to Dell’s final meeting with his sister, to whom the hippie lifestyle has not been kind. In the end, though, the pieces of the whole are not separable. Keeping everything together, achieving a sort of completeness and purity that does indeed recall those great fictional forebears, is the novel’s outstanding feat.

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