Amazon.com Review
A truly gifted short-story writer, Ethan Canin faltered when it came to his second novel, the turgid
For Kings and Planets. This time around, though, the author has found an ingenious solution to his problems with the longer form.
Carry Me Across the Water is essentially a book of short stories posing as a novel, and here's the surprise--it's pretty effective. The protagonist, August Kleinman, is a wealthy old man looking back on the span of his life. He recalls his early youth in Vienna as the son of a cultured Jewish family; his flight to America in the 1930s with his mother; his war years in the Pacific; his career as the beer king of Pittsburgh; his love for his wife and alienation from his children. This may sound relatively straightforward. Yet Canin shatters this portrait into a series of compelling vignettes, each rearing up unexpectedly and without the crude restraints of chronology.
This format of random flashbacks allows the author to handle a sprawling novel--and a complex life. At the same time, these compartmentalized moments are kept from seeming too small by means of an expansive prose style, which sometimes suggest Mark Helprin in high gear: "Downriver he could see the fierce furnaces throwing blue-black smoke into the air, the crude ore of the land being transformed by human ingenuity into girders and beams that were then floated downstream to ports and train yards and trucking depots, a vast delta of commerce that fanned out from there to all the great hubs of the earth." Throughout, Canin tempers his grandiloquence with a short-story writer's sensitivity to the details of character, and accomplishes exactly what he intended: an involving montage of 20th-century life. --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
August Kleinman, the protagonist of Canin's (For Kings and Planets) latest novel, is 78 years old, rich and wise from a life filled with accomplishments and heartache. Yet as this spare, beautifully realized story opens, he is marveling at the fierce force he discovered in himself one afternoon when he was 18. That day, on his way to watch a friend from his Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Queens practice football at Fordham University, Kleinman slipped into the locker room and impulsively donned a uniform. He can still feel the way he soared through the air and the jolt of the tackle he landed before he was caught. Looking back, Kleinman can clearly see that it has been the sudden flare of this instinctive intelligence and fight, this drive to persist and assert his existence, that has shaped his life, bringing both abundance and loss. Canin deftly laces together the defining stories of Kleinman's life from fleeing Nazi Germany as a child with his mother to fighting the Japanese in World War II, building his fortune, enduring the death of his beloved wife and then his difficult relationship with one grown son. Each story contributes another instance of the fighting spirit and impulse to soar that so characterizes Kleinman. However, what is finally galvanizing and moving about Kleinman's life is not his individuality but his complexity. He is capable of being touched, and he yearns to protect and nurture what he finds good. This work has a resonance and precision that can come only when native storytelling ability and craftsmanship search out the deepest truths. Canin deserves a wide readership because he shows that truth even the truth that comes with age and experience is not boring.
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