Customer Reviews

America America: A Novel

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

It is no accident that the author of this novel is a faculty member of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. America America is interesting in structure and style.

There are three elliptical story lines. All are narrated by Corey Sifter, a native of a small town in Western New York. One ellipse deals with Corey's working class youth in the early 1970s and his gradual absorption as family retainer to the Metareys, the local gentry. The second ellipse concerns Corey's adolescence and young adulthood as he breaks away from his small town roots. The third, set in 2006, involves Corey's adult life as a newspaper publisher resettled in his old hometown, reflecting on events of the past. The points at which these three ellipses intersect form the center of the story: the rise and the mystery surrounding the fall of a hometown politician who aspires to - and nearly does -- capture the 1972 Democratic Party nomination for President.

This structural device gives Corey the freedom to move backward and forward in time and to speak with mixed voices: naïve and trusting teen, battle-scarred political veteran, mentoring journalist. We see his world as it was and as it has become, capturing the many nuances of the transition from twentieth century to the 21st. The triple narrative device, and the resultant shift from one perspective to another, also gives the author the opportunity to color in his portrait of the times one bit at a time, filling in his outlines and illuminating his narrative with unexpected strokes until the whole picture emerges on the page.

So what's the story about? It's about the presidential campaign, passingly. It's about work and ambition. It's about loyalty, to place and to person. It's about the freedom that wealth enables, and the responsibilities and tragedies that it imposes. It's about parents and their children, and the subtle inheritances that pass through generations. It's about character and integrity: their surprising appearances and their equally surprising absences.

This is not a beach book. For me it was a front porch rocking chair book. It also would make a good window seat during a summer thunderstorm book. Not all the questions raised are answered, and not all the characters are well understood. It's nice to have something to think about on warm summer nights.

In a 2005 Washington Monthly essay entitled "Why Americans Can't Write Political Fiction," Christopher Lehmann laments the dearth of enduring works of literature that have as their subject democratic politics --- what he calls "the country's national epic." Robert Penn Warren's classic ALL THE KING'S MEN is likely the first that comes to mind, and for some the short stories and novels (THE CONGRESSMAN WHO LOVED FLAUBERT and ECHO HOUSE among the most noteworthy) of the grossly underappreciated Ward Just may follow close behind, and yet it's hardly a long list. In his latest novel, Ethan Canin takes a grab for this elusive brass ring. And while he doesn't quite attain it, he nonetheless has produced an admirable and appealing work.

Set in the small western New York town of Saline, AMERICA AMERICA weaves together two main threads: the story of Henry Bonwiller, a liberal senator from New York, who pursues the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, only to be undone by his own arrogance and moral blindness, and the coming of age of Corey Sifter, a local teenager whose circumstance brings him into the orbit of Bonwiller's bright political sun.

Corey, the novel's narrator, is now the middle-aged publisher of the local newspaper viewing the story's principal events from a distance of 35 years, shortly after Bonwiller has died, his political career a distant memory. Corey is the only child of a plumber and homemaker, and in 1971, at age 16, he is hired to work part-time at Aberdeen West, the estate of the Metarey family, whose wealth helped to build the town's economy and whose benevolence now sustains it. Corey's arrival at the estate coincides with Bonwiller's decision to run for president, and the young man becomes a bystander as the campaign unfolds. As his role subtly shifts from that of a handyman for the Metareys to low-level campaign assistant, Corey slowly is exposed to political life in all its undeniable, adrenaline-filled appeal.

Liam Metarey, son of a ruthless, union-busting coal and lumber baron who emigrated from Scotland and established the family fortune, serves as Bonwiller's principal campaign adviser, as well as mentor and surrogate father to Corey. Metarey is the novel's moral center, tutoring Corey on the ways of the world and teaching him, if only indirectly, about the compromises that too often must be made in politics and in life. He's a man, as Corey describes him, "with unparalleled access to the world but who still somehow retained a sense of justice, and whose life was in large part measured by his gifts to the community."

Where Canin's novel ultimately disappoints is in its portrayal of Henry Bonwiller. We learn that he is an ardently anti-war, pro-union politician who is beloved by working class people like Corey's parents. Despite the compassion he displays in his political life, at his core is an ethical black hole that allows him to embark on an affair with JoEllen Charney, a small town beauty pageant winner and legal secretary some 25 years his junior. What's missing from the story is the perspective of a narrator with an ability to fully grasp Bonwiller's complexity; his power to inspire unswerving devotion in his followers while his life lurches toward self-destruction. Realistically, Corey is not privy to the backroom meetings between Metarey, Bonwiller and the campaign's advisers, and so his observations of Bonwiller's campaign are mostly filtered through the perceptions of Metarey, shared in frequent conversations with his protégé. At best, the mature Corey is left to muse over his surprise that "mass politics is an emotional struggle above all, a primal battle that is more charismatic and animalistic than either ethical or reasoned," or how at times in politics "the ritual of deference precedes the auction of influence, and eventually the orgy of slaughter."

Everything about Canin's elegiac novel is ambitious, from the echoing words of its title to his willingness to embrace large themes --- class differences, politics and morality, ambition and failure --- to its generational sweep across a turbulent period of recent American history. Perhaps one of the problems such a talented writer encounters in crafting a political novel worthy of its subject matter lies in the intimacy anyone who watches CNN or MSNBC already feels to the process and those enmeshed in it. If Canin's effort falls just short, it's not for want of trying. AMERICA AMERICA is a serious, engaging story that may cause us in this election year to reflect more thoughtfully on the heavy price political life sometimes exacts from its practitioners.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

A novel about politics, small towns, family, and the inner-workings of all those things.

I am reminded of a blend between "All the King's Men" and "Brideshead Revisited". I am also reminded of the present.

The time is the early 1970s. There is a presidential election. People are tired of the U.S.'s presence in Vietnam. On the scene is Henry Bonwiller, a charismatic liberal who becomes a frontman for the democratic nomination. In Bonwiller, we see a political stooge, a mouthpiece of the smarter and purer-of-heart liberal capitalist Liam Metarey, who is Bonwiller's campaign manager. Bonwiller doesn't get the nomination: there is a tragedy, some gross errors of judgment. There are suggestions of the all too common missteps of high profile politicians over the last couple generations. The question is asked: what really happened. Who played what part in the events? Who was changed by events and how?

The message of hope and change during a time of profound societal disenchantment rings eerily familiar during our present election-time. The inner-workings of the political machine; the "right" person at the right time, the ebb and flow of support and media coverage: all of it fickle and haphazard and almost accidental. But inside that complex machinery are good, if imperfect, well-meaning people.

Narrated in first-person by Corey Sifter, now a newspaper publisher, but during Bonwillers presidential run, he was a young man of modest means, employed by the Metarey family, and an unwitting witness to an unfolding of a uniquely American drama.

I enjoyed the characters, the action, the story's momentum. Though it forced me to pay attention, I even liked the chronological shifts, the slow unfolding of the backstory, the stories of the lives of the people, another kind of complex machinery.

From John Howard Prin, author of Secret Keeping: Overcoming Hidden Habits and Addictions

What is all the hype about? I must be living on a different planet than the readers who love and admire this book. Barnes & Noble even calls AMERICA, AMERICA "unputdownable." Sorry, but I slogged through this overwritten tome and put it down many times, only to pick it up again because I kept thinking, "I must be missing something that others see, and appreciate, so clearly."

No such luck. I just finished the last page, having given the book every chance to win me over. As a reader of hundreds of novels (I'm in my 60s and a lifelong lover of fiction), it disappoints on every level but one. That level is Canin's word-for-word, line-by-line phrasing, which has a cadence and sensitivity that kept me involved in the early pages.

Aside from that exception, I regret to say that the storytelling is messy and meandering, jammed with too many subplots and characters. I was also put off by Canin's third-person point-of-view "memory" style of telling what happens rather than showing what happens (putting the reader in the scene), which is Rule #1 for fiction writers.

For starters, I stayed with the budding love story in the beginning pages between Corey, the main character, and Christian, one of two sisters, but that was rudely dropped about a third of the way through. Dozens of scenes later I learned that Corey had married one of the sisters (Christian?). That generated a mild level of suspense that I hoped would pay off, but much later still -- after describing his unnamed wife in snippets of third-person narration that held me at a distance -- Corey reveals her name is Clara (the second sister). Huh??? We learn nothing about why such a surprise occurred, nor does Canin let us observe the interactions of the three characters due to the "memory-style" narration that neither dramatizes nor explains.

Then there's the jumble of the main plot about Senator Bonwiller (at least I think it's the main plot, or is the main storyline about patriarch Liam Metarey's imposing influence on young Corey?). The Senator's story thread hangs on the Chappaquiddick-like scandal of young and sexy JoEllen Charney's untimely death while in a car with the drunk Senator. I found all this diffuse and repetitive. Other mushy plotlines centered on Corey's father and mother, and that of a young female journalism intern and her father. None of these tied together well and I struggled throughout to keep my suspension of disbelief alive.

By now you surely get the gist of my disappointment in this wishing-it-weren't-so review. I don't intend to trash Ethan Canin or his work -- really, I don't. Perhaps you'll be one of those 4-star or 5-star readers who live on some other planet, and I'm happy for you if you are. My hope is that everybody who invests the time to read a highly-acclaimed novel of 450 pages with such a lofty title is satisfied.

Once again, I'm astonished by the hyped-up critical response to this extraordinarily average book. If you've lived with any awareness, even the dullest awareness, of events in our political history, then none of the events in the book will surprise you in any way. There are no revelations here, none. It's as if Canin made a composite of our politicians, in the guise of Henry Bonwiller, only to describe his actions in the most mundane, unimaginative and non-probing way. I see no depth to this, no point in the storytelling. Characters are utterly stock types. Many of them do not sound in the least authentic (particularly Trieste. I don't really know what function she serves dramatically; or perhaps I should say that she serves only the most rudimentary dramatic purpose. And her voice does not in any way sound like an actual teenager. She does, though, sound an awful lot like Corey with all the 'sirs'.). Bonwiller is described by Canin (or by Corey) over and over as a champion of social justice, and yet all we see dramatized is his hubris. Liam Metarey is too good to be real. Corey is passive and reactive; I do not for a second believe that that boy, with his reactive, one-note responses to events around him, grew up to be this narrator. I did not believe these characters, I did not feel they were whole, real people (except for Corey's father, perhaps. But that's it). Canin's prose is very plain and unembellished, which might be the best thing you can say for the book. A pleasant read for an airplane ride, maybe, or at your summer cottage. It will pass the time. But not satisfying beyond that.

This lovely novel was the first I have read by Ethan Canin. As the story progressed I found myself more and more satisfied with the feeling, the sense of the novel and the time and place it evoked.

Corey Sifter is the blue-collar son of a plumber and handyman, living in a one-company town in New York during the Nixon years. This is Cory's coming of age story seen in the flashbacks of his middle-age as he looks back on his youth. Towards the end of high school Corey is employed on the estate of Liam Metary, a wealthy and influential powerbroker and the owner of almost everything in Saline, New York. Corey is not only taken in by the Metary family and exposed to the lifestyle of his wealthy neighbors, but is witness behind the scenes to the rise of Senator Henry Bonwiller as he becomes a contender for the Democratic nomination in 1974. Cory's love and respect for Liam Metary is tested as he sees first-hand what happens to keep Senator Bonwiller's reputation clean and his candidacy protected. Corey's relationship with other members of the Metary family are also shaped by these powerful events.

The narration is first person, as Cory Sifter, happily married and the father of three grown daughters looks back on those remarkable years. Canin describes a time and a presidential nomination campaign that has many parallels to the campaign we have just gone through. "One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead." Senator Bonwiller's campaign parallels that of Ted Kennedy and the tragic way in which his presidential aspirations came to an end.

Much of my enjoyment of the book had to do with the middle-aged Sifter's reflections on life. As the father of three grown sons I appreciated the wry wisdom and generous view of his past that only comes with the accumulation of years. "Not only are our parents buried cryptically inside each of us, but ... we are buried just as cryptically inside each of them and ... we may look in either direction to see the secrets of our children and of ourselves."

The story is fascinating and timely, the writing is evocative and heart-breakingly beautiful at times. It is indeed a story of America, of immigrants and how they shaped the lives of their great-grandchildren, of the landscape that was taken from the first Americans and the dynamics of the political system that sees power affirmed or transferred peacefully every four years. All of these themes and many more are twined skillfully into a thoroughly enjoyable novel. I am looking forward now to reading Canin's other works and discovering more about a new favorite author.

Man, this was a long book. I stuck with it because I wanted to see how it all turns out. I wasn't disappointed. But it was a challenge. The author jumps around from the past to the present, and at times was hard to decide what was happening. Things really picked up about 2/3 of the way through, and it was much easier to stick with it at that point. Prior to that, the author meanders through various scenes, setting the stage for the big event that changes the course of several peoples' lives. I can't say that I would recommend this book except to a very dedicated reader or a fan of American history. Which I am. Having said that, it was just ok.

In America America, a young man, Corey Sifter is swept up into the lives of a small town's most wealthy and powerful family. Corey comes from a working class home and accepts a job on the Metarey Family's estate in the late 1960's. Before he knows it, the family patriarch takes him under his wing offering him advice about succeeding in life and the chance to further himself by attending a prestigious private boarding school. The story is told through alternating chapters in at least three different time periods (all at once!); Corey in high school, Corey in college, and Corey as a middle-age adult. The tale is told mostly through Corey's eyes, but every now and then strays to one of the lesser characters' point of view.

The book centers on a political campaign (of Senator Bonwiller) run during Nixon's second presidential campaign and focuses on the Metarey family's and therefore Corey's involvement with the campaign.

There are many facets to this book. It is modern historical fiction and contains a portrait of the proverbial American Dream. A Scottish man (Eoghan Metarey) coming to America and rising from nothing to become wealthy and powerful through hard work (and perhaps some questionable decisions). And then the legacy he leaves behind for his family. The book centers a great deal on what one generation can learn from the next and how each generation affects another. It also portrays the political world of the late 1960's, early 70's before the world of the computer age when newspapers and reporters were an integral part of the campaign. Also, the lengths politicians will go during a campaign (not that any of this has changed much, just the medium through which the information is disseminated has). The American Dream is also shown through Corey's family where he has the opportunity to learn more and have more of an education than his father did. There is an interesting storyline about the relationship with Corey and his father toward the end of the book.

It's hard for me to decide if I liked this book or not. I think it is very well written and I think many of the characters are developed well. I like the way Canin creates the relationships in the book between Corey and his father, Corey and Liam Metarey, and Corey and the Metarey daughters. A good section of the book deals with the political campaign and I found some of these parts to be very boring and I wondered if I would actually be able to get to the end of the book. Through much of the book, Corey refers to his spouse as "my wife" and not by name, so we're not entirely sure which character he has chosen to marry until quite close to the end of the book. There is also an "incident" that is talked about in much of the book that really has too much of a build up. I wasn't that into the Senator's character or his affair with a young woman and the ensuing incident.

The timing of the book is good with this being an election year and with as close as the primaries are, its sort of fun to read a bit about politics. I think overall this book is probably 4 out of 5 if I'm impartial about it. But for my personal tastes, I think it was a bit long and not quite as gripping as I might like (I'm also usually not very engrossed by politics) so it could be a 3.5. If you like the author, Richard Russo, I would recommend this one. It's themes reminded me a great deal of Bridge of Sighs and Empire Falls.

This book is very well written in 1st person so much so that even though it was fiction, throughout the book it had me convinced it could possibly be true. Ethan Cain brought me right into this story about Corey Sifter and Liam Metarey I didn't want it to end. I felt this was the story of any one of us who for a short time in our life had the opportunity to see how "the other side" lived.

A great story with a beginning that draws you in, a middle that keeps you turning the pages and an end that is quite satisfying in every respect.

The characters are familiar yet presented refreshingly and develop and grow over the course of the novel.