Customer Reviews

For Kings and Planets

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I bought this book partly because I was intrigued by the comments on this page. People seem to have either loved this book or hated it. (Sign of an important piece of art, if you look back through recent history) And the reviews from major professional reviewers have been equally hot or cold. (I've listed a few here so you see what I mean.) The two best reviewers, in my opinion (Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the NY Times and Alan Cheuse of NPR) both loved it unequivocally, but Rand Cooper (whoever he is) really hated it in his review in the Times Book Review, and Salon did too. So I bought it (used,I admit, but the paperback wasn't out yet and I spend too much on books). So here is my opinion: I consider myself a well-read person (a book a week for the past twenty years), and I would say that this book is one of the two or three most powerful, intelligent, courageous novels that I have read in as long as I can remember. Others I would put in this category are Philip Roth's "American Pastoral" and Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead". It is gorgeously written, psychologically complex, and emotionally unflinching. I just don't see, in the end, why the reviews seem to be so split. It occured to me that younger reviewers might not like the book because it is not hip. That's okay, but if you are, like me, looking for a mature, thoughtful, character-driven novel, then I would say this is a book for you. I could't recomend it more highly.

Here, for your interest, are some of the contrary reviews:

Cristopher Lehmann-Haupt (The New York Times)   Shimmering...luminous...For Kings and Planets leaves you wounded and healed.   Rand Richards Cooper (NYTimes Book Review)   . . .[A] greedy monster of a novel that swallows up its creator's virtues and leaves only weaknesses on display. . . .[it has a] discomfort with form: a welter of narrative summary; important characters who exist solely as props for the protagoist; a bland and pedantic narrative voice.   San Jose Mercury News "For Kings and Planets" is wide and deep, intelligent, subtle but clear, and profoundly satisfying. A wonderful book by a major American writer.

Newsday  To this year's list of outstanding American novels, we must now add Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets. Never before has Canin been so surehanded a storyteller. Given the achievement of For Kings and Planets, Scott Fitzgerald himself would have been honored by his company. Canin's novel speaks with a hard-earned grace worthy of the master.

Elizabeth Judd, SALON Magazine "Canin pretends that the fate of Orno's soul is up for grabs, when no one -- not even the world's biggest hayseed -- could mistake which way the wind is blowing. Apparently, the moral of "For Kings and Planets" is not that nice guys finish first or last, but that they speak in clichés and graduate at the middle of their dental school class."

Alan Cheuse (NPR All Things Considered) "The most mature and accomplished novelist of his generation. For Kings and Planets stands head and shoulders above the crowd."

There you have it.

I like Canin's short stories, and I really wanted to like this book. I read it in a couple of days, including the last half on a plane, and I must say that by the time I got home from the airport I had pretty much forgotten the whole thing. While Canin is an above-average writer, he treads no new ground here, and with all due respect to my fellow reviewers, to suggest that this novel is a 5 star masterpiece is like eating a nice hot dog for lunch, and proclaiming it the best meal you've ever eaten.

The book, like one reviewer put it, is like a tried and true story of the country mouse and the city mouse. Arno Tarcher comes to Manhattan to attend Columbia, ashamed of his modest beginnings in Missouri, and embarrassed by his parents as he introduces them to his new, sophisticated big city friend Marshall Emerson. The beginning of the novel, including Arno's gradual introduction to college and to NYC, were for me the strongest aspects of the novel. When Marshall starts rubbing off on Arno, as the latter begins staying up all night drinking brandy with pseudo-intellectual Eastern European beatniks at the same cafe every night, I thought the whole thing got a little ridiculous.

Arno to me was the only real well-drawn character in the book. The other characters seemed cardboard and put in the story oftentimes just to act as foils to Arno's small town, Missouri values. Why Marshall goes after Arno's Russian girlfriend, and why he cuts out to spoil a family wedding celebration at Cape Cod, are a mystery that we're just supposed to chalk up to his unpredictability and flamboyance. Then Marshall becomes a Hollywood writer and producer (more evidence of his phoniness, get it?) even though there wasn't a shred of evidence in the plot that he'd ever watched a movie or tv show, much less had any interest in working in Hollywood. Ultimately you really don't care, as you read along to the end just to see the culmination of a very predictable romance. This is definitely not Canin's best effort, the NY Times called it almost "banal." Form your own opinions, but consider yourself warned.

Beautifully written yet painfully spare, the events in "For Kings and Planets" whoosh by the reader like a subway train. For me the style worked, and it didn't work: It worked in the sense that evoked a certain kind of nostalgia; Canin writes peering back into the past, and his ability to boil down affairs and big moments into singular pages is impressive, to be sure. Less can be more.

But less can be less, too, and at times there just doesn't seem to be much excuse for the sheer lack of dialogue in the book. Canin's characters can barely breathe, he does so much of the talking for them. On the book's opening page two women are mentioned, and you'd guess they figure prominently, but only one of them actually has a speaking "part" in the book, and a small one at that. I can appreciate that Canin is guiding us to package this knowledge as a hazy fling that our main character, Orno Tarcher, once had, but still. At times, it just isn't enough.

The story is not complicated: There is Orno, an earnest Midwestern kid and Marshall, a brilliant, depressed New Yorker. They become friends when they meet Columbia University, mostly by chance, and then remain friends ever as Marshall drifts away into other circles. Canin draws Orno very nicely as a decent kid with a tad too much give in his personality. He takes it on the chin from Marshall a few too many times. And Marshall seems more than willing to throw the punch. And there is Simone, Marshall's sister, a sweet, considerate girl with less brilliance than Marshall but twice as much maturity. Orno recognizes those qualities in her and falls in love.

The book appeals to a certain taste. These days, the "in" thing is to delve and delve and delve into a scene or a character or a subject until it's been turned inside out. Canin rejects that. He has great instincts; the book is well thought-out, and well executed. It takes a lot more effort to write a book this way than it does to write a 1000-page tome that just goes on and on. Canin is after crafting realistic characters. That means that not every burden of the week is included.

Did some of the critics have a tough time with this one? Sure they did, because many of them are from the Marshall Emerson set, and it's not in their natural prediliction to side with someone without nihilism and sarcasm. Books like these are hard for the critical community for two reasons:

1. They want more ugliness to get their hands around, more pure, mean drama, more villanous behavior, more tension, more rivalry, presumably because it equals their life.

2. They see earnestness as a naivete, as intellectually underwhelming.

Thus, they disapprove of some of Marshall's changes late in the book, but they disapprove because they, like Orno, saw the Marshall they wanted to see, not the one Canin was quietly creating. Canin craftily shows us just he wants to show us, revealing Marshall's layers slowly, but clearly. There's much more, and in a sense less, there than we first believed.

Are we disappointed with how Marshall turns out? You bet we are. That's part of the point, and what a lot of critics failed to understand. It's clear to me some mistook their disappointment that Canin didn't uphold the jaded academic "standard" of greatness as poor or boring writing.

But "For Kings and Planets" is neither poor nor boring, it's simply a curve ball; for once here's a colorful genius that, we figure, will probably fail, but in a spectacular, weird, grand way that befits an intellectual giant. Orno, we sense, half expects it, too.

The trick, then, is that Marshall has invented half of his greatness, maybe because he wanted to be great, but didn't know how to be, and, in the end, is pretty blase like all the other wasted geniuses out there. Like the book that Marshall writes, the words are there, but not the music; Marshall has the knowledge to lead a great life, but not the style.

Thankfully, Dr. Canin knows the music to make this story sing.

Dr. Canin is able to write beautiful prose, but unfortunately he doesn't always bother. When he achieves it, he often repeats the beauty until it is no longer beautiful, as if afraid we didn't see it the first time. He can create fascinating characters, although most of these characters fall short of fascinating. Exhibiting little faith in his readers' intelligence, Canin often provides narrative explainations of what has just happened. Maybe it is necessary; the plot isn't riveting and except for the character of Marshall, the characters seem to exist in the way that furniture does. Marshall is genuinely fascinating, but we see him infrequently and through the eyes of another character who has irritatingly dim vision.

If the novel is essentially about the attraction regular, honest folk have to glitter, illusion, magic and city life, it isn't as profound an exploration of that subject as it might be. The characters are all ruined as they step into worlds of pretense and illusion of various forms, but we don't feel much for them, at least I didn't.

The main character only feebly and intermittently exhibits any backbone or willingness to challenge Marshall; the message is that illusion wins every time. He gives in to Marshall one time too many and comes back for emotional whippings after being betrayed so often we begin to wonder if the main character likes the abuse. Somehow this doesn't seem to be the intended message, and while well written (except for the stilted dialogue and weird insistence on calling one particular character by his first and last names, then dropping it abruptly) this book left me hungry. There are things to think about and there is good use of language, but there is a so-what feeling to the book as a whole.

For me, the main problem was that it was hard to forget that this was a book. People don't talk the way the author suggests. It was hard to forget this is fiction and it was very hard to forget that Dr. Canin is a physician. We are told that the dull, the undisciplined and foolish are relegated to lives as engineers and dentists, or worse, and that only the best and brightest can be doctors. If this is the best Dr. Canin can do with a novel, it is good that he has day job skills he thinks so highly of.

Beautifully written yet painfully spare, the events in "For Kings and Planets" whoosh by the reader like a subway train. For me the style worked, and it didn't work: It worked in the sense that evoked a certain kind of nostalgia; Canin writes peering back into the past, and his ability to boil down affairs and big moments into singular pages is impressive, to be sure. Less can be more.

But less can be less, too, and there just doesn't seem to be much excuse for the sheer lack of dialogue in the book. Canin's characters can barely breathe, he does so much of the talking for them. On the book's opneing page two women are mentioned, and you'd guess they figure prominently, but only one of them actually has a speaking "part" in the book, and a small one at that. I can appreciate that Canin is guiding us to package this knowledge as a hazy fling that our main character, Orno Tarcher, once had, but still. At times, it just smacks of laziness.

The story is not complicated: There is Orno, an earnest Midwestern kid and Marshall, a brilliant, depressed New Yorker. They become friends when they meet Columbia University, mostly by chance, and then remain friends ever as Marshall drifts away into other circles. Canin draws Orno very nicely as a decent kid with a tad too much give in his personality. He takes it on the chin from Marshall a few too many times. And Marshall seems more than willing to throw the punch. And there is Simone, Marshall's sister, a sweet, considerate girl with less brilliance than Marshall but twice as much maturity. Orno recognizes those qualities in her and falls in love.

The book appeals to a certain taste. These days, the "in" thing is to delve and delve and delve into a scene or a character or a subject until it's been turned inside out. Canin rejects that. He has great instincts; the book is well thought-out, and well executed. It takes a lot more effort to write a book this way than it does to write a 1000-page tome that just goes on and on. Canin is after crafting realistic characters. That means that not every burden of the week is included.

And yet, and yet...the book is a little flat. It reads too fast for a story of a life lived. Orno is simply bounced from place to place, while Marshall just disappears for large quantities of the book. While that's certainly in character for Marshall, it takes away our main pleasure in reading the book; Orno is deliberately played up as the put-upon guy, and if there isn't anybody interesting to put something upon him, we're left waiting.

And yet I'm torn back in the other direction, because I understand Canin's motives and his style and the book really does earn the sadness that pervades it. In Canin's small glimpses of Marshall's young and adult life, one does yearn to have had his advantages, his talents. And when Canin begins to reveal what isn't there for Marshall, it still doesn't change how we feel about that life, and it doesn't change for Orno, either. Even though every person in any life has struggles, we still see the grass as always greener. We still can't understand why others struggle when they're so blessed.

Our book group concluded that this is the weakest of Canin's stories. I loved Blue River and Emperor of the Air, as did others in the group who have read them. We agreed that For Kings and Planets starts out well but loses momentum in the second half and sputters to a ho-hum finish.

I really loved this book-- and I'm surprised by the polarity of reviews here. Some of the criticism amazes me; Canin is criticized for writing about family conflict: "tension between family members is normal," chides one reviewer. Is this to say that writers should only tackle abnormal subjects? Others seem to criticize him for not being Waugh, Updike, or whomever.

I found this book a delight. It gave me the same feeling I had reading "A Separate Peace" 30 years ago. It artfully accounts the trials and traumas of the college experience; the remarkably diverse cultures we have within the boundaries of this country; the benefits, dangers, and costs of friendship; the deceit one will use to mask reality and build a facade.

This is the first work I've read of Canin's. If this truly is Canin's worst, as several here say, I can't wait to get my hands on his other works.

This is the story of Orno, a self-proclaimed hayseed from Missouri, who moves to New York City to attend Columbia University. There he meets Marshall, a man who changes the course of his life.

Marshall is a genius with the gift of eidetic memory. He's a rogue student, voyeur, classic alcoholic/drug addict, and maybe even manic-depressive. Orno is magnetized to him like an alter ego, and consequently, Marshall is also drawn to Orno, recognizing in him the qualities he lacks in spite of his seemingly privileged background. They attend many of the same classes, date the same women and eventually, after he makes the decision to attend dental school (much to Marshall's disapproval), Orno falls in love with Marshall's more stable and wise sister. Belittling his own stable yet naïve background, Orno tries to make his way in an unfamiliar world, mistaking the dysfunction of the Emerson family for sophistication. Triumphant, Orno manages to hold onto his integrity, learns to appreciate his own father and is an earnest and likeable character.

For Kings and Planets is a love story (exploring love between friends, siblings, parents and children and lovers), and ultimately a coming of age tale. Beautifully-written, a fast read and I highly recommend.

From the author of "I'm Living Your Dream Life," McKenna Publishing Group.

Because we know and use fiction craft, authors can often see behind the curtain of another author's book. That's why I loved the fine thread of suspense by which Ethan Canin kept me reading to find out what would happen to his enigmatic characters who behaved as if they weren't sure who they were, and therefore the reader isn't sure. Canin kept them on the elusive edge of excess and poetry and irrationality. I couldn't stop reading until I knew if they'd fall off. For me it's rare to find a novel I can't put down -- perhaps because I've been reading them since I was six. It's rare to find descriptions that linger after the book is read. This was my first Canin. Next time I want to be engrossed, I'll pick up another of his books.

J. R. Lankford
Author, The Crowning Circle

"For Kings and Planets" is a great novel, and Ethan Canin is certainly among the best writers of this generation. His ability to combine flawless prose with an inciteful view into what motivates people living in the latter part of the 20th century makes him a treasure. I just wish he'd hurry up and get finished with his next book.