America America: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Ethan Canin (Author)
Key Phrases: walnut orchards, fly pools, casting pools, Henry Bonwiller, Liam Metarey, Senator Bonwiller (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Reviewed by Jerome Charyn: Ethan Canin's new novel is a powerful lament that haunts us like a latter-day ghost of The Great Gatsby. Like Gatsby, it deals with an orgiastic rupture in the American dream. If F. Scott Fitzgerald anatomized the Jazz Age and delivered its own corrupt and luscious poetry, Canin gives us a poisoned lullaby of the Nixon era. Canin's narrator, Corey Sifter, is a kind of Nick Carraway (but with working-class origins), who finds his way into the land of the rich. Corey is 16 in 1971; he lives in a little town in western New York State that used to belong to the Erie and Seneca Indians, but is now ruled by Liam Metarey, a tycoon of Scottish descent whose holdings cover a third of the county. Liam is a very complicated man. Riddled with guilt over his father's rapacious gathering of wealth, he longs, like some benevolent laird, to reverse America's politics of greed. He sets about creating his own president, Henry Bonwiller, a United States senator from New York who is a champion of the working man and wants to get America out of Vietnam. He also "adopts" Corey, the son of a plumber and sidewalk contractor who "always smelled of lime." Corey becomes a caretaker of Liam's grounds and mingles with his dysfunctional family. The Metareys, he tells us, "lived all year on their estate and we lived on land that had once been their horse pastures." Corey soon becomes involved in Bonwiller's presidential campaign. But Bonwiller is a deeply flawed candidate--a megalomaniac, a drunkard and a philanderer. He has a fling with a local beauty pageant queen, JoEllen Charney, who is a younger replica of his wife. And a little before the Iowa caucuses, JoEllen is found dead, "encased in ice in an apple orchard." Bonwiller abandoned her during a car accident, but it's never made clear how she died. The entire novel seems to take place "behind a window of warped black glass." This is the great strength of the writing. The language is often supple, can leap from impressionistic poetry to a coroner's report, and can whiplash through time, from the 1970s to 2006, when Corey has become the publisher of a small independent newspaper and is married to one of Liam's daughters. Like Nick Carraway, Corey isn't always a reliable narrator: we have to trust his own imaginings about JoEllen and the coverup surrounding her death. Yet he too lurks behind that window of black glass. His own intern, Trieste Millbury, a high school student who lives in a trailer, realizes how Corey has fallen into the myth of the Metareys and blinded himself to their own blinding power. But together Trieste and Corey form a marvelous chorus, commenting upon and reliving the splintered action of this splendid novel.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

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 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.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679456805
• ISBN-13: 978-0679456803
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #62,334 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars And Crown Thy Good, July 8, 2008

By	T. Slaven (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A serious, engaging story on the price of political life, June 30, 2008

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

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

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars American Machinations, June 24, 2008

By	Linda J. Sexauer "alaskabookworm" (Anchorage, Alaska) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.