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.

PRAISE FOR AMERICA AMERICA

“A brilliant, serious book for serious readers.”

–San Diego Union Tribune

“A complicated, many-layered epic of class, politics, sex, death, and social history…Its reach is wide and its touch often masterly.”

–John Updike in The New Yorker

“Though I’ve always loved Ethan Canin’s work, I still wasn’t prepared for America America, as rich, ambitious, intelligent, emotionally satisfying and important a work of fiction as we’re likely to get this year.”

   –Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls

“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."

–Washington Post

“The beginning of June heralds the arrival of the fat summer read, meant for the porch, the hammock, the beach. Ethan Canin’s America America is just such a book, the satisfying, compulsively readable saga of a northeastern coal dynasty…What a story it is.”

–Entertainment Weekly

An intoxicating big book - in both size and ambition.

Thrilling. . .Luminous.

–Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A big, ambitious, old-fashioned, quintessentially American novel about politics, power, ambition, class, ethics and loyalty… Bravo to Canin for tackling the American Dream, which we're forever running off the road and then trying to resuscitate.”

–Los Angeles Times

“Status, money, and politics intersect in this ambitious tale of a 1970s yard boy who becomes entangled in the web of a powerful New York family. Canin is at the top of his game.”

–People

“Beautifully written. . .Heartbreaking.”

–USA Today

“Gooily satisfying…intelligently observed, elegantly written…much more than a novel about politics. It’s both a coming-of-age story and a melancholy look back at a small town and a time when cynicism about politicians and journalists hadn’t yet become accepted shorthand. It’s a perfect story for an election year, but one that will be read long after November.”

–Christian Science Monitor

An epic worthy of comparison to All the King's Men.

–NewCity Chicago

“America America is a grand novel, with a wide scope and small anguishes…The writing is exquisite, the depiction of the fading days of a certain American dream haunting.”

–Miami Herald “Between the Covers”

“A very ambitious take on the great American novel–about class, wealth, politics, history, power, innocence and corruption, all the things that ought to be in a great American novel. It’s beautiful to read, filled with Ethan Canin’s brilliant small summaries of a time or a place. It’s complicated, at times triumphant, at times sad.”

–Linda Wertheimer, National Public Radio

“Even the title is invigorating, a splash of nostalgia and hope…Take this to the beach.”

–O Magazine

“A magnificent new novel with enormous sweep and power.  I’ve been following Ethan Canin’s career since his first book. America America is the crowning glory of his writing life. I love this book.”

–Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides

“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. . .

An epic look at life, love and legacy.”

–Rocky Mountain News

“A superb novel that beautifully illustrates the fundamental unknowability

of our loved ones.”

–Paste Magazine

“Ethan Canin could hardly wish for higher praise than this: His big, carefully crafted novel earns the right to its name.”

—New York Observer

“A serious, sweeping, generations-spanning epic…An ambitious work that excels in imagining – rather than revisiting – this America on the verge.”

—New York Sun

“At year's end, America America might not have won the National Book Award, but it should have.”

–Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

“An arresting American political legend, intricately–and suspensefully–structured, gracefully written, and enhanced by thoughtful insights and intuitions in regard to its strong idiosyncratic characters.  Altogether an admirable book.”

–Peter Matthiessen, author of Shadow Country

“[A] riveting and thought-provoking political novel . . ., a pointed history lesson and a timeless meditation on fate and self-determination.

[Canin’s] best and most affecting work. “

–Miami Herald

“A powerful lament that haunts us like a latter-day ghost of The Great Gatsby. [A] splendid novel.”

–Publishers Weekly, Signature Review

“It is always a deep pleasure to read Ethan Canin’s fine, calm, illuminating prose, and how well that prose serves this sweeping story of ambition and treachery.  Canin is a writer who so quietly seems to know everything.” 

 –Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World

“A superb achievement.”

–Library Journal, Starred Review

“Captures that lovely green light of endless possibility that so entranced Fitzgerald, and also entrances Ethan Canin, his successor in the nuanced portrayal of man’s endless capacity for regret.”

–Cox News Service

"One of the best writers at work today."

–Lorrie Moore, author of Birds of America

“Powerful and haunting, a major work.”

—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

“Striking. . . Sweeping, multileveled. . .America America has that pull, that something that could make it a classic.”

–The Buffalo News

"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)
(hide most of this 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

"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

"[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

From the bestselling author of "The Palace Thief" and "Carry Me Across the Water" comes a stunning novel, set in the Nixon era and today, about a great family, a political tragedy, and the impact of fate on history.

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.

Ethan Canin is the author of six books 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. He is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa, California, and northern Michigan.