Ethan Canin's strong, serious 'America America' echoes American classics

June 29, 2008

In “America America,” Ethan Canin's fourth novel, he suspensefully retraces the parallel histories of two upstate New York families on very different socioeconomic levels. That by itself might be enough – it's an engrossing book – but he is after bigger game.

America, America Ethan Canin Random House, 480 pages, $27 Reviewed by James Leigh

Its observer-narrator is the only person who is part of both families – born into one, virtually adopted by the other. He is a 61-year-old small-town newspaper publisher named Corey Sifter, and that's what he does: sift a lifetime's memories through a refined and judicious intelligence.

He is the only child of a union master plumber and a sweet woman who dreamed as a girl of being an actress; they embody those classic virtues sometimes called – with good reason, the novel suggests – “old-fashioned.” Hard work, an unPuritanical decency, and respect for one's social betters (if they deserve it): These are bred into Corey. His father works for Liam Metarey, a steward of inherited wealth and the biggest man in this part of the state. Metarey shares the Sifters' belief in hard work, and fills his spare time making mechanical repairs he could easily pay others to do. Approving of the 16-year-old Corey's painstaking work habits, Metarey hires him to work at his estate, Aberdeen West. Corey's mother sees this as bettering himself; his father doesn't object. After Corey accepts, his life will never be the same.

Liam Metarey is effectively the hero of “America America.” His grandfather immigrated from Scotland in 1881 as a bond servant, bringing 6-year-old Eoghan. Once the debt of their passage is paid off by work, they start a hardware store. From that point, Eoghan, a “merciless pirate,” builds the fortune he will leave to Liam, who also inherits his energy and entrepreneurial knack, plus the leisure to be philanthropic – a good man.

Sharing the novel's center stage with Metarey is his good friend Senator Henry Bonwiller, a progressive with star quality, and, like Metarey, a genuine friend of the working man. Mainly directed by Metarey, the rise of Bonwiller's presidential ambitions also involves Metarey's whole family – his sardonic wife, two contrasting daughters and a lovable but unconventional son, as well as the latter's stand-in, Corey. In creating Bonwiller, Canin appears to echo the stories of the younger Teddy Kennedy, Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, producing an archetype who talks the talk and walks the walk. Canin inserts the senator into the 1972 Democratic primary, between Edmund Muskie and George McGovern in the early running. When Muskie is sandbagged by false information supplied by the Nixon camp, Bonwiller becomes the front-runner.

Corey has a bird's-eye view of Bonwiller (as his backup chauffeur) and of the Metarey clan, and his loyalty is rewarded when Metarey pays his way through a private school and college. It's a giant boost up the ladder, but the inevitable distancing from his own parents is a poignant counterweight to his own progress. All of this is told via a complex of flashbacks from the “now” of the book, 2006, in a sadder-but-wiser tone reminiscent of Nick Carraway's in “The Great Gatsby.” And as in “Gatsby,” at the dramatic center of the novel is the fall of a charismatic figure, at once good and corrupt. In “America America,” Canin aims at a genuinely tragic novel about the falling away of “the beliefs that made this country great,” as the familiar trope has it. Or, as Corey imagines Trieste Millbury, his prodigious intern at the paper, saying, “With each generation we regress closer to the mean.”

Though permeated with sympathy for working people, the novel is also conservative in the sense of exalting earlier, less-fashionable virtues as Canin conceives them – honest labor, good workmanship, personal loyalty between classes. Metarey ultimately gives up much of his property for a nature conservancy, and takes Bonwiller's disgrace as his own. “America America” is also drenched in a sense of narrowing possibilities, shrunken hopes and mortality. Of stylish current-day irony there is scarcely a trace. This is a brilliant, serious book for serious readers.

The glue that holds “America America” together is Corey Sifter's insightful perspective on the creative (and destructive) tensions between classes, between the big political world and the small, personal one. If he occasionally verges on a pretentious solemnity, he is after all a character as well as a narrator – a character growing up and changing, a man asking major questions: How and why do good people do bad things? But the novel is finely detailed, at times intensely moving and it flinches from nothing. Perhaps Corey's father sums up its theme most succinctly: “That's the way progress is. It's always half-criminal.”

****SHIRT James Leigh is a musician, journalist, novelist and retired professor of English.

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