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America America is a sweeping, epic story that more fully explores themes Canin has written about previously — class, politics, fatherhood, wealth, and power — in a seamless and beautiful multigenerational American saga. Both an important work and a page-turning summer read, especially in this election year, it is a powerful reminder about what is great, and what is broken, within our country. Recommended by Jill Owens, Powells.com
Review-A-Day
"It's refreshing — and almost quaint — to see someone try to write a Great American Novel in the 21st century. These days, writers are more apt to pursue the Great American Screenplay or the Not-So-Great American Ironic, Postmodern Fiction. But Ethan Canin's sixth book, with its flag-waving title, America America, is a big, ambitious, old-fashioned, quintessentially American novel about politics, power, ambition, class, ethics and loyalty." Heller McAlpin, Los Angeles Times (read the entire Los Angeles Times review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
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 familys 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. 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. Ethan Canins stunning novel is about America as it was and is, a remarkable exploration of how vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and fate.
Review:
"America America" is Ethan Canin's best novel, but its timing is unnerving. His ruminative story begins with a funeral for the country's greatest liberal senator, whose presidential ambitions were smashed years earlier by the death of a young campaign aide in a drunk-driving accident. The novel really isn't about Sen. Ted Kennedy, but the resemblance is impossible to ignore, and Kennedy's recent announcement... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) that he has a malignant brain tumor has already started, for many of us, the process of reflection that "America America" records in such sensitive detail. The middle-aged narrator, Corey Sifter, was an eager, observant teenager during Sen. Bonwiller's campaign for the presidential nomination in 1972. Now publisher of a small newspaper, Corey looks back on the events of that time, amazed by the shady, private way power brokers and journalists once conducted the nation's politics. He was 16, living in a town near Buffalo, N.Y., "that was almost entirely built and owned by a single family, the Metareys." Despite their vast wealth and influence, the Metareys had, over several generations, become modest and beneficent lords. They drove ordinary cars, shopped in the same stores as their employees and sent their children to the public schools. Corey tells us that the patriarch, Liam Metarey, "was a generous, civic-minded, and altruistic patron of the whole community," with a strong interest in shaping government from behind the scenes. He got Henry Bonwiller elected to the Senate and tried with all his might and money to get him elected president. That disastrous effort becomes the backdrop of this complex novel. Canin carefully splices his fictional characters into the news of the 1960s and '70s — a masterful feat of literary Photoshop. The Vietnam War is tearing the country apart and wearing down President Nixon; Sen. Edward Muskie hasn't cried yet in the New Hampshire snowstorm, but Bonwiller's people already believe their man can beat him for the Democratic nomination. Liam Metarey's house serves as the Bonwiller headquarters, and we see the campaign from a highly impressionistic and limited point of view. After all, Corey, the son of solid working-class parents, is just a high school sophomore during this heady political time. He gets a job as a groundskeeper on the Metarey estate, which gives him a venue, he notes, to observe "everything that was happening so openly, and yet so mysteriously, in front of me." While the nation's eyes are on Sen. Bonwiller, we focus on Liam Metarey, an introspective kingmaker more comfortable fixing his tractor than counseling legislators. Wearing his noblesse oblige like an old flannel shirt, he takes a fatherly interest in the boy, and before long he's treating him as a son and sometimes even a confidant. "I'd lost track of where I'd come from," Corey admits. "And because of the Metareys' generosity — I call it that, though I could as easily call it their peculiarity, or, as my wife used to say, their nasty sport — because of how the Metareys let me into their existence, I think I first took it inside myself, at the age of sixteen, that such an existence might someday be mine." His ambitious feelings are further complicated by his attraction to one of the beautiful Metarey daughters, an attraction her father seems to encourage despite the yawning distance between their two families. Canin, who teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has written before about the seductive and transformative power of people with extraordinary wealth, but never with such sensitivity. His overly lush "For Kings and Planets" (1998) described a wide-eyed boy from Missouri who goes to New York and befriends a dazzling, affluent student at Columbia University. Maybe "America America" presents a more intricate and mature exploration of this theme because the author no longer seems so spellbound by money. That emotional distance allows Canin to draw the rich and poor as vastly more interesting and multivalent characters. "America America" isn't hawking any particular partisan agenda, but like other great political novels, it's a story in which the audacity of hope confronts the tenacity of power — and loses. As Corey looks back on his teenage self and the men who plotted to take the White House that year, the novel becomes a reflection on a young man's maturity and the moral calculus of democratic government. "I've never known another politician, and have never again in my life come so close to a man of history like Senator Bonwiller," Corey says. "I took every incident as a fable, every milestone as a fortuitous lesson on how to act in this new and public world. ... I didn't like him much, even then, but I suppose in those days there was nothing I wouldn't do for him." Sen. Bonwiller is celebrated as the man who did "more for the causes of civil rights and labor than anyone in congressional history." But what troubled Corey then and continues to haunt him as an adult is the contrast between "public idealism and such personal ruthlessness," between the character needed to win an election and the character needed to lead a nation. Once the office has been attained, Corey notes, "then a politician must make a transformation that he may have no more ability to make than he has to grow wings and fly. He must change his personal ambition into ambition for his country." One has to accept — even enjoy — a fair amount of such wisdom in "America America." In addition to his role as a teacher in the country's most prestigious writing school, Canin is a physician, and perhaps those two offices of supreme authority are responsible for a narrator who tends to lecture. That's fine with me, so long as the lecturer is this insightful and moving. We've waited a long time for a worthy successor to Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," and it couldn't have arrived at a more auspicious moment than this season of potentially epochal political change. Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com. Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Review:
"This novel of character...is powerful and haunting, a major work....It's the journey, not the arrival, that matters, and the journey is an enthralling one." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"Ethan Canin's best novel... Canin, who teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has written before about the seductive and transformative power of people with extraordinary wealth, but never with such sensitivity.... We've waited a long time for a worthy successor to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and it couldn't have arrived at a more auspicious moment than this season of potentially epochal political change." Ron Charles, Washington Post
Review:
"[A] summer novel that will have you turning pages faster than Barack Obama is pocketing delegates....America America is a timely, engaging novel about power and influence in the land of opportunity. In Canin's adept hands, the tale makes for a lively summer read against a backdrop of true political meanderings that, we can only hope, never escalates to the tragedy and intensity of Canin's Saline, N.Y." Rocky Mountain News
Ethan Canin is the author of six books, 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. He is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers Workshop and divides his time between Iowa and northern Michigan. He is also a physician.
Aimala02, January 20, 2010 (view all comments by Aimala02)
One day 16-year old Corey Sifter is living a quiet, sheltered life with his mother and father in the town of Saline, New York. The next day he is offered a job as a groundskeeper on the estate of Liam Metarey, the wealthiest man in the County. Suddenly, Corey is surrounded by wealth, power and prestige, a life completely different from the one he's known. When Mr. Metarey decides to manage the campaign of Senator Bonwiller in his run for the presidency, Corey sees a side of American life he knows nothing about, politics.
The author does a wonderful job painting the details of the pain and difficulties, joys and sorrows that make up Corey's journey from the 16 year old working class boy to the successful journalist and publisher, father and husband he becomes. He does this while pulling off the difficult trick of taking fictional characters and placing them among real people and events in America's history. He weaves history and fiction seamlessly together: Senator Bonwiller vies for the nomination of the Democratic party against Muskie and Humphrey. President Richard Nixon is in office. The Vietnam War rages and affects the people of Corey's town, making this era of our collective history a very real part of the story, not just background.
Ethan Canin has written a rich, complex story about power, loyalty, love, corruption and relationships. The style of “America America” is somewhat reminiscent of Richard Russo, (one of my favorite authors) in that it is set in a small town during a pivotal time in America and spans generations. America is changing on scales both small and large. Changes that profoundly affect the main characters. It is a beautifully written, compelling story that is difficult to put down but the reader would do well to read it slowly, savoring its depths and nuances.
ryanpjj, November 25, 2009 (view all comments by ryanpjj)
I had never heard of Ethan Canin before finding this book in my local library. I picked it up when I read the review on the back of the book by Robert Russo when he said something like "read this book and weep, not only for what we have lost, but for how we lost it". Elegaic!
This is an amazing piece of work - epic and homely simultaneously. It is a wonderfully homespun tale, paradoxically replete with internationally known characters and deprecatingly observed historical context, reminiscent in style of Scott-Fitzgerald at his laconic, Gatsby-esq best and yet plotted like a Ludlum blockbuster, a character or historical twist every few pages. Yes, there is that keen sense of loss for both a personal childhood/society and a national era, but there is an uplifting thread of the narrator's humanity and acceptance of necessary change that links that lost past with the present's compromises and avoids any danger of maudlin retrospective. This novel is nothing less than the prose homage to Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Read it while listening to LZ's Kashmir and be uplifted!
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Product details
480 pages
Random House -
English9780679456803
Reviews:
"Staff Pick"
by Jill Owens,
America America is a sweeping, epic story that more fully explores themes Canin has written about previously — class, politics, fatherhood, wealth, and power — in a seamless and beautiful multigenerational American saga. Both an important work and a page-turning summer read, especially in this election year, it is a powerful reminder about what is great, and what is broken, within our country.
by Jill Owens
"Review A Day"
by Heller McAlpin, Los Angeles Times,
"It's refreshing — and almost quaint — to see someone try to write a Great American Novel in the 21st century. These days, writers are more apt to pursue the Great American Screenplay or the Not-So-Great American Ironic, Postmodern Fiction. But Ethan Canin's sixth book, with its flag-waving title, America America, is a big, ambitious, old-fashioned, quintessentially American novel about politics, power, ambition, class, ethics and loyalty." (read the entire Los Angeles Times review)
"Review"
by Kirkus Reviews,
"This novel of character...is powerful and haunting, a major work....It's the journey, not the arrival, that matters, and the journey is an enthralling one."
"Review"
by Ron Charles, Washington Post,
"Ethan Canin's best novel... Canin, who teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has written before about the seductive and transformative power of people with extraordinary wealth, but never with such sensitivity.... We've waited a long time for a worthy successor to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and it couldn't have arrived at a more auspicious moment than this season of potentially epochal political change."
"Review"
by Rocky Mountain News,
"[A] summer novel that will have you turning pages faster than Barack Obama is pocketing delegates....America America is a timely, engaging novel about power and influence in the land of opportunity. In Canin's adept hands, the tale makes for a lively summer read against a backdrop of true political meanderings that, we can only hope, never escalates to the tragedy and intensity of Canin's Saline, N.Y."
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