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America America by Ethan Canin
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(Hardcover)
- Publisher: Random House Adult Trade Publishing Group
- Pub. Date: June 2008
- ISBN-13: 9780679456803
- Sales Rank: 7,178
- 336pp
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Synopsis
From Ethan Canin, bestselling author of The Palace Thief, comes a stunning novel, set in a small town during the Nixon era and today, about America and family, politics and tragedy, and the impact of fate on a young man’s life.
In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family’s generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president of the United States. Before long, Corey finds himself involved with one of the Metarey daughters as well, and he begins to leave behind the world of his upbringing. As the Bonwiller campaign gains momentum, Corey finds himself caught up in a complex web of events in which loyalty, politics, sex, and gratitude conflict with morality, love, and the truth.
America America is a beautiful novel about America as it was and is, a remarkable exploration of how vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and fate.
Publishers Weekly
Canin's marvelous tale of Corey Sifter, a young working-class man who goes to work for a powerful family and ends up entangled in a political debacle, is wonderfully realized by Robertson Dean, whose deep bass tone is at once powerful and intimate. Told from Sifter's perspective as an older man, Dean captures every possible emotion that saturates Sifter's tone, be it regret or affection, and it's hard not to be riveted. His shifts in tone and dialect for many characters are subtle, his pacing is steady. Dean is quite possibly the quintessential narrator. A Random House hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 21). (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
The New York Times has called novelist and short story writer Ethan Canin "one of the most satisfying writers on the contemporary scene." It's an assessment Canin's many fans wholeheartedly endorse.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
- Reader Rating:
- Ratings: 27Reviews: 16
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...interesting setting, but a bit verboseby harmony1
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June 15, 2009: At key points in this novel the reader is left guessing. Often times beautifully written, but not to the point. The main character never sways emotionally and can seem self-absorbed at times.
So-Soby Kate_Sullivan
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March 24, 2009: If you grew up in the Kennedy era, one can't help but see the similarities to the final fall of Camelot and all of the characters involved. Specifically, Teddy Kennedy and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. I don't know if the author intended to draw such a close parallel but I couldn't separate the two events in my mind, which left me feeling uncomfortable. As uncomfortable as I felt back in 1969 when Teddy got off with barely a slap on the wrist. I'm a democrat so it's not sour grapes but rather unfair and unjust punishment for the death of a young woman. In America America I didn't feel like I really knew much about any of the characters and why they did the things that they did by the final page. Especially, Christian, Clara and their mother who seemed to be bordering on the edge of insanity...but why? Putting that aside, I did enjoy the narrative style. I would give this author another try but this book was just so-so for me.
Fact File
Name:
Ethan Canin
Current Home:
Iowa City, IA
Date of Birth:
196007
Place of Birth:
Ann Arbor, MI
Education:
A.B., Stanford, 1982; M.F.A., University of Iowa, 1984; M.D., Harvard Medical School, 1991
Awards:
California Book Award, The Palace Thief, 1995; Best American Short Stories; “20 Writers for the New Millenium,” The New Yorker
Biography
Born in Michigan and raised in California, Ethan Canin entered Stanford University dead set on an engineering career. Then, in junior year he took an English course that changed the direction of his dreams. Exposed for the first time to the brilliant short stories of John Cheever, he underwent a true epiphany. He changed majors and determined there and then to become a writer.
Canin proved sufficiently gifted to be accepted into the world-famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, but between the daunting competition and a severe case of writer's block, he developed serious doubts about his abilities. Discouraged, he enrolled in Harvard Medical School shortly after receiving his M.F.A. "It was a real failure of the imagination," he confessed in an interview with Stanford Magazine. "I just couldn't think of another job."
Perversely, Canin's muse returned in medical school. A few of his stories appeared in Atlantic Monthly, resulting in a book deal with Houghton Mifflin. In 1988, the short story collection Emperor of the Air was published to glowing reviews. (Writing in The New York Times, critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt observed "The way these stories transcend the ordinariness of human voices is ... startling.")
Canin spent the next few years conflicted over what he wanted to do with his life. He received his M.D. from Harvard and, for a while at least, successfully combined writing with the practice of medicine. But after the enthusiastic response to 1994's The Palace Thief, he found it increasingly difficult to juggle two careers. Finally, after much soul-searching, he made the decision to give up doctoring to become a full-time writer.
Although he is best known for short stories and novellas, Canin has also written full-length fiction -- most notably the deceptively small and spare Carry Me Across the Water, proclaimed by the London Daily Telegraph as "[t]he most wise and beautiful novel of 2001." This story of a scrappy, 78-year-old Jewish-American who sets out to right a tragic mistake from his past is considered by many to be the author's finest work. In 2008, Canin published America America, an ambitious novel John Updike called "a complicated, many-layered epic of class, politics, sex, death, and social history...shuttling between the twenty-first-century present and the crowded events of 1971-72." Begun in early 2001, and stalled after the tragic events of 9/11, the story underwent ten rewrites before Canin finally finished it.
Canin writes slowly and with great deliberation, polishing phrases with grace, elegance, and an accumulation of detail his hero John Cheever would surely approve. Yet, despite his success, he admits that writing for him is hard work. He has repeatedly stated that the process is "exquisitely difficult," a misery rooted in fear and self-doubt. "Fear of failure is what's hard -- it's overwhelming," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I'll never get beyond sitting down and saying, 'This is a disaster, this will never work.' "
Yet, "work" it most certainly does! Considered one of our finest writers (in 1996, he was named to Granta's list of Best Young American Novelists), Canin crafts wonderful, mature stories that resonate with timeless, universal themes. He is especially skilled at handling the sensitive, emotional terrain of family life -- growing up, marriage, aging, and the complex relationships between fathers and sons. Small wonder The New York Times has called him "one of the most satisfying writers on the contemporary scene." It's an assessment Canin's many fans wholeheartedly endorse.
Good to Know
Although his parents lived in Iowa City, Canin was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while his mother and father were on vacation.
Canin's father was an accomplished violinist who performed and taught throughout the East and Midwest before accepting the position of concertmaster for the San Francisco Symphony.
Canin was mentored by his high school English teacher Danielle Steel, who read several of his stories and encouraged him to continue writing.
In 1998, Canin joined the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the scene of his own literary meltdown. He enjoys teaching and finds the environment far kinder and more supportive than it was in his own student days.
Along with fellow authors Po Bronson and Ethan Watters, Canin cofounded the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a collective workspace for writers filmmakers, and narrative artists.
Canin's novella The Palace Thief was filmed as The Emperor's Club, a 2002 movie starring Kevin Kline.
Some fascinating outtakes from our interview with Ethan Canin:
"I love woodworking and remodeling houses. Our basement looks like a hardware store, and my car is a truck with a ladder rack. I've remodeled three old houses myself, as well as built the backyard office where I write, and I like to do every job at least once, from framing to plumbing to wiring to finish carpentry. It's easier than writing, and the results don't take years."
"In medical school I loved surgery (similar to remodeling houses); in fact, I wanted to be a surgeon rather than an internist but was (reasonably, I think) afraid of the five-year surgical residency with its every-other-night call schedule. Since then, residencies have gotten easier; I sometimes think that if I'd started medical school a few years later than I did, I would have been a surgeon; and if I'd been a surgeon, I'd never have quit to become a writer."
"Playing softball is perhaps my favorite thing to do in the world. Since my childhood summers, which I spent from dawn to dusk on the local baseball diamond, I've always been more glove than bat. I've just always loved fielding, its most graceful combination of thought, luck, and intimate cooperation. Baseball metaphors have been overdone by writers, but there really is nothing like the pivot moment of a double play, or a rising, one-hop relay to the plate, or-in that most graceful of executions-the tightening noose of a three-fielder, choreographed, role-revolving run-down."
"I've always been a pragmatic and physical thinker, starting even before I studied engineering in college. One of my concerns with our culture at the moment is the way in which we've detached ourselves from a physical understanding of our essential inventions. I know nothing more about the operation of a microchip than that it works, and that if it breaks it has to be replaced. Almost nobody does; and nobody can repair one without a set of machines that are themselves built from microchips. I can't picture its gears; I can't, in a pinch, substitute something else in its place, the way as a teen-ager once, on a car trip over the Sierras, I substituted a sock and two pieces of string for a broken engine hose.
Likewise, I'm concerned that our culture has detached itself from our common social purposes. Money, once the reward for achievement, has become the achievement itself. This, in my opinion, is as dangerous a trend as any we face.
"I started America America in early 2001. After 9/11, I stopped working on it for a full two years, and when I came back I was motivated to make it a more overtly political story. History, politics, the nature of power and its costs-all these subjects were occupying my mind.
This novel was brutally difficult. But they all are. That's not news. I nearly gave up any number of times. I wrote a good ten drafts, but it wasn't till perhaps the seventh or eighth that, while teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, I had a student turn in a story he'd re-written in such a way that I realized exactly what I needed to do on my own novel."
Feature Interview
In Summer of 2008, Ethan Canin took some time out to talk with us about his favorite books, authors, and interests. What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer -- and why?
In college, I began as an engineering major. I was taking physics and math and not much else. I thought that the humanities, and certainly the arts, were for the soft-minded; I certainly would never have strayed near an English class. Then one day I happened upon a big red book called The Stories of John Cheever. I was waiting for someone and just found the book on a shelf; I sat down and read the first story, called "Goodbye, My Brother." From that point on, I wanted to be a writer.
What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
I could never list my favorites, but I could list some of the ones that have been most influential to me as a writer. In no particular order:
The Stories of John Cheever. The book that first made me want to write. The elongated rhythms of the sentences. The landscape-like beauty of the prose. I don't know if any other prose writer has equaled Cheever's pure talent for sound.
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
Sunshine, directed by Istvan Szabo. A major work, following the story of three generations of Hungarian Jews, from the early 20th century through the rise of Communism. Ralph Fiennes plays the scion of each generation.
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?
I grew up in a highly musical family. My father was a professional musician, as were most of my uncles, and there was rarely quiet in my house. Perhaps that's why I listen to less music now than most people. But when I'm working on a particular book, I'll sometimes focus on a single piece and listen to it over and over. It's usually classical. For my novel Carry Me Across the Water, it was Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet. For America America, it was the Bach Cello Suites. When I write, I can't listen to anything with lyrics.
What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
Believe it or not, I like reference books. Visual dictionaries are a particular favorite of mine (and are invaluable references for writers). I also love historical timelines, biographies, and how-to books on wood-working and building.
Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
Above my desk I keep a 4' X 8' sheet of extruded polystyrene foam (also known as pink rigid insulation), which I use as a pin-board to display the index cards that I make for each scene. It's the only way for me to keep a complex novel comprehensible. I color-code the plot lines.
I also make sure to write in the morning because I fear writing. This way, fear only ruins the first part of my day.
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
This is my sixth book, and anybody who's written six books, published or not, has struggled. In my twenties, after writing perhaps half a dozen short stories, I came to the conclusion that I'd failed as a writer. Since I'd already had a great deal of scientific education, I decided to go to medical school. When I finished medical school, I did an internship in internal medicine and earned my physician's license in the state of California. But then, after a great deal of thought, I decided to go back again to writing. At that point, I was if anything even more aware of the difficulty of a writing life, and of its long odds-but I'd also been reminded, by my time in medicine if nothing else, that life is a tenuous bet anyway.
What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
What I sometimes tell my students is that for every new writer struggling to be discovered, there's also a young editor, freshly arrived in New York, struggling to discover a new writer.
From Barnes & Noble
A Selection of Barnes & Noble Recommends
This novel by the acclaimed author of Emperor of the Air and The Palace Thief spans four decades of American life. Starting in the Nixon era, America America follows Corey Sifter's progress from his modest roots in western New York to a glittering world of money, ambition, and politics.
Corey's entrée into this realm of promise is the patronage of Liam Metarey, son of a ruthless coal baron who amassed a fortune in the early 1900s. Through Corey's narration, we are drawn into the triumphs and trials of the Metarey family as Liam attempts to orchestrate a presidential nomination for Senator Henry Bonwiller. Thrust into the excitement of the campaign, 16-year-old Corey fetches drinks, parks cars, sets up chairs for press events -- and gets an intimate education in human failings.
A champion of labor and civil rights who opposes the Vietnam War, Bonwiller seems to represent the best traditions of America's liberal coalition. But as both Liam and Corey discover, the senator's moral weakness threatens not only his candidacy but their own hopes and ambitions as well. While rumors of Bonwiller's shady business dealings are held in check by the long arm of Metarey influence, the furor set in motion by the accidental death of a young secretary linked to the candidate is not so easily contained.
Tracing the rise and fall of a politician and a family, and the passing of an idealistic era, Canin's novel moves between the present and the past as Corey chronicles his growth to middle age, his marriage to one of Liam's daughters, and his career as publisher of his hometown newspaper. As he mentors a high school intern at the paper, Corey is prompted to question his own role in the sordid affair that put an end to the senator's presidential bid. Layered with Corey's poignant recognition of what it means to be flawed and fallible, Canin's masterfully crafted plotlines converge to bring this complex tale to its startling, inescapable conclusion.
About the Author
For an author who confesses that he finds the process of writing agony -- "I hate it, I really do" -- Ethan Canin has met with extraordinary success. The author of six works of fiction, including the story collections Emperor of the Air and The Palace Thief and the novels For Kings and Planets and Carry Me Across the Water, Canin is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished contemporary American writers.
"To me, a novel is the story of a life," Canin has explained. "That's what interests me. The guy who works in the laundromat, the professor, what happened to them? Where did they make their mistakes? Why didn't they take that job? Why didn't they marry someone else? You could spend the rest of your life thinking about that."
Ethan Canin was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He received early encouragement for his writing from a teacher at his prep school, the bestselling author Danielle Steel. A graduate of Stanford University, he received a master's in fine arts from the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop before shifting gears to enroll in Harvard Medical School. Canin continued to work as a physician as he wrote and published his first books.
Currently, he serves on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives with his wife and children in Iowa and California.
From Our Booksellers
In an election year where the media takes front and center, a book like this -- that encompasses all the scandal, conspiracy, and deceptions of generations -- told through the clear and unflinching voice of an old-school seeker of truth, demands to be read. A timely and lucid story of what it means to be political vs. what it means to be true, and the shifting nature of both through the filter of what we loosely call morality.
--Steve Russell, Tucson, AZ
Walt Whitman captured the American spirit with his poetry, and Ethan Canin captures it in his novel. This is a story about the American Dream: about men whowork hard and strive to create a better world for their children, about ambition and the failures and successes that accompany it. It is a wonderful story about the people who are the backbone of this country, and how they have watched it change from a land dotted with farms to one dotted with strip malls. This is truly an American tale.
--Patricia Sanders, Towson, MD
Sweeping in scope, Canin's novel is an intricate portrait of the coming-of-age of a boy and the nation around him.
--Doug Britt, Chicago, IL
Intelligent and gracefully crafted, this novel is a reflection of the past, a correlation of the present, and a prediction of the future of our politics. Relevant and incrediblysatisfying.
--J. C. Barb, Fayetteville, GA
From Reviewers
Ethan Canin's new novel is a powerful lament that haunts us like a latter-day ghost of The Great Gatsby. Like Gatsby, it deals with an orgiastic rupture in the American dream. If F. Scott Fitzgerald anatomized the Jazz Age and delivered its own corrupt and luscious poetry, Canin gives us a poisoned lullaby of the Nixon era.... The language is often supple, can leap from impressionistic poetry to a coroner's report, and can whiplash through time, from the 1970s to 2006. --Publishers Weekly
From the Publisher
From Ethan Canin, bestselling author of The Palace Thief, comes a stunning novel, set in a small town during the Nixon era and today, about America and family, politics and tragedy, and the impact of fate on a young man’s life.
In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family’s generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president of the United States. Before long, Corey finds himself involved with one of the Metarey daughters as well, and he begins to leave behind the world of his upbringing. As the Bonwiller campaign gains momentum, Corey finds himself caught up in a complex web of events in which loyalty, politics, sex, and gratitude conflict with morality, love, and the truth.
America America is a beautiful novel about America as it was and is, a remarkable exploration of how vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and fate.
Publishers Weekly
Canin's marvelous tale of Corey Sifter, a young working-class man who goes to work for a powerful family and ends up entangled in a political debacle, is wonderfully realized by Robertson Dean, whose deep bass tone is at once powerful and intimate. Told from Sifter's perspective as an older man, Dean captures every possible emotion that saturates Sifter's tone, be it regret or affection, and it's hard not to be riveted. His shifts in tone and dialect for many characters are subtle, his pacing is steady. Dean is quite possibly the quintessential narrator. A Random House hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 21). (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Amy Ford - Library Journal
Canin's new work about class, politics, money, and media in the Nixon era through the present day will resonate powerfully with readers in this presidential election year. Corey Sifter, a working-class boy from a small New York town, is hired by the Metareys, the wealthiest family in Saline, to be a man-of-all-trades. His work ethic endears him to the Metareys, who treat him as one of the family, even paying for his prep school tuition. As both an insider and an outsider, Corey is in a unique position to observe the political maneuverings of Liam Metarey and his campaign to elect Sen. Henry Bonwiller to the presidency. However, Bonwiller's personal failings ruin not only his political career but also the finances and family life of the Metareys. This saga of politics and family is a superb achievement; Canin (The Palace Thief) interleaves past and present to create a classical tragedy from the very first page. This engrossing novel would be a good book club selection and is highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ2/1/08.]
Kirkus Reviews
A dynasty shattered, a presidential campaign in ruins; a newspaper publisher revisits his youth to better understand an old scandal. This novel of character, Canin's first since Carry Me Across The Water (2001), is powerful and haunting, a major work. Narrator Corey Sifter is the middle-aged publisher of a regional daily in upstate New York. In 2006 he attends the funeral of the ancient Henry Bonwiller, former U.S. senator, the last of the liberal lions. After this low-key start we move back to 1971. Corey is 16, son of a plumber, a true craftsman. They live in Saline, a company town dominated by the Metareys, one of America's great capitalist families. The original Metarey, a Scottish immigrant and ruthless coal baron, has been succeeded by his son Liam, a far kinder man, well-liked. Liam sees a disciplined worker in Corey, self-discipline being the bedrock of character, and hires him as a part-time groundskeeper, then pays his way at a prestigious boarding school as Corey begins a tentative relationship with one of Liam's daughters. Liam is also masterminding the fiercely anti-war Bonwiller's run for the White House; soon Bonwiller is the Democratic frontrunner, but danger lurks. A young woman has been found in the snow, intoxicated, frozen to death. Bonwiller's name is linked to hers, though nobody knows the details. Corey, in a minor way, participates in a cover-up. Only years later, after the birth of his first daughter, does he realize he'd been involved with "something unforgivably wrong." Canin employs with great skill Corey's double vision: the bedazzled loyalty of the teenager, the chastened worldview of the parent. Bonwiller's campaign implodes; the consequences for theMetareys are brutal. The novel is not flawless (Liam, the central character, proves elusive) but the detail work is quite wonderful: The rhythms of a great estate, and the dynamics of a landowning family, are captured with Tolstoyan exactitude. It's the journey, not the arrival, that matters, and the journey is an enthralling one. Agent: Maxine Groffsky/Maxine Groffsky Literary Agency
Loading...Product Details
- ISBN:
0679456805
- ISBN-13: 9780679456803
- Format: Hardcover, 336pp
- Publisher: Random House Adult Trade Publishing Group
- Pub. Date: June 2008
- Sales Rank: 7,178
Reading Group Guide
Questions for Discussion1. Corey Sifter grows up over the course of this book. Which character do you see as the most significant influence on his personal evolution?
2. What motivates Corey to continue questioning the series of events that lead to Senator Bonwiller's downfall: his journalist's curiosity, a sense of loyalty, or his own contemplative nature?
3. Trieste Millbury shows enormous potential as a reporter during her time interning at the newspaper. She also provides a rapt audience for Corey's rehashing of past events. How is she similar to the teenaged Corey? How is she different?
4. When JoEllen Charney enters Bonwiller's world he is well on his way to successfully capturing the Democratic nomination. What does their liaison suggest about the ambitions and assumptions of those who pursue power?
5. Who or what do you think is ultimately responsible for incriminating Bonwiller?
6. How realistically does the book portray political indiscretions? Were you reminded of actual events past or present?
7. Which character's duplicity or innocence did you find the most surprising, and why?
8. Who is the unnamed man with a limp who appears after Bonwiller's funeral? Why do you think Canin chose not to reveal his identity?
9. Christian and Clara's sibling rivalry is hinted at but never fully explained. What do you think motivated it? Did they turn out to be different as adults than you expected them to be?
Further Reading
The Palace Thief by Ethan Canin
For Kings and Planets by Ethan Canin
The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
Read an Excerpt
But the politics of Carrol County aren't easily apparent, and to those who don't live up here they must be an absolute mystery that is further veiled by a habit of silence. We don't like to talk much, or to argue at all -- we just think there's too much work to be done. And we certainly don't like to talk politics, especially with a stranger — which, in these parts, means anyone the speaker hasn't known since elementary school. And in fact, this taciturn habit of ours might be the very thing that saved Henry Bonwiller when all his troubles began. For thirty years he protected the people of Carrol County. And when it was the people's turn, they protected him in return. loading...
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