Author's epic novel about powerful clan is perfect for intense campaign year

By Jennie Camp, Special to the Rocky

Published June 26, 2008 at 6 p.m.

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Photo by Fred Gerr

Ethan Canin is the author of six books of fiction, including the best-selling story collection "The Palace Thief."

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Wearied by daily headlines about the race for the presidency?

How about instead looking in on a wealthy New York senator whose life and leanings are reminiscent of the Kennedy clan's bid for Camelot? Toss in the grand estate of a politically powerful family, turn the clocks back to the political turmoil of the early 1970s, stir up a secret tryst with a young campaign worker, and - to secure your interest - let the poor girl turn up fatally frozen in an orchard as all eyes turn with increasing suspicion toward the senator.

Add those elements and you have a summer novel that will have you turning pages faster than Barack Obama is pocketing delegates.

Ethan Canin's America America is an epic look at life, love and legacy in an election year. With a 2008 election year that undoubtedly will find a page in history books, what better way to get in the mood?

Canin's narrator is young Corey Sifter, the son of an electrician in the small town of Saline, N.Y. Corey is first employed as a yard boy on the Metarey family estate, a rambling 100,000-acre triangle of land culled by the political dealings of family patriarch Eoghan Metarey. Born to a local farrier, Eoghan Metarey is an astute businessman who, by his mid-30s, has partnered with John D. Rockefeller in oil wells, laid railroads linking Albany with Washington, and mined the richest coal seam in Nova Scotia. When Corey Sifter arrives on the scene, it is Liam Metarey, Eoghan's son, who takes care of the town of Saline.

For Corey, the son of working-class parents, the Metarey life is a whole new world of power, opportunity and, ultimately, tragedy. Corey soon becomes romantically involved with one of the Metarey daughters; Liam Metarey kindly offers to pay for Corey's education at a private boarding school, and Corey is eventually employed as an aide and driver to Senator Bonwiller, a politician backed financially by the Metarey clan. As the Bonwiller presidential bid picks up steam, Corey steps out farther and farther from the world of his upbringing and into the powerful and often underhanded world of the privileged.

When Corey receives from then-deceased Liam Metarey the money to pay for his college education, we hear in Corey's ponderings the lasting effects of generational influences:

"Mr. Metarey's financial gift didn't cover everything, as he easily could have; but it covered a good deal, and often over the next four years as I worked at the circulation desk of the student library to pay off what remained of my tuition, I thought of him, speaking to me from across the years. He would have told me that work is good. . . . He would have told me that it is wrong to be given too much, that fortune of all kinds weakens the spirit. He would have told me that a man cannot overcome his past but that he cannot not try; that, with care, the wounds of one generation are diluted in the one that follows, and again in the one after that, so that, if we are lucky, we can bring forth in our children the things for which we have strived ourselves. But we cannot make them want what we want. They, too, will strive."

As details of the death of a young campaign worker, JoEllen Charney, and her extramarital affair with Senator Bonwiller surface gradually through the novel, we realize that Corey's earlier innocence has matured into a kind of self-protectiveness. After we listen to Corey blandly answer questions from a supposed FBI agent late in the novel regarding JoEllen's death, for example, Corey surprises us by astutely skimming through the agent's car to discover that he actually is a member of the Secret Service and, therefore, employed by the president - a detail that further complicates the underpinnings of Senator Bonwiller's determined bid for the presidency.

Corey narrates the tale of his connections with the Metareys and Senator Bonwiller 30-some years later, after he is married to a Metarey daughter, the father of three grown girls and publisher of the Saline Speaker-Sentinel. Canin masterfully carries us across time and generations, shifting neatly between Corey's past and present and - when warranted - from character to character as details of an ill-fated presidential bid and its tragic consequences are carefully unveiled.

Canin is the author of six books of fiction, including the best-selling story collection The Palace Thief. His language in America America is at once both quietly poetic and unselfconscious enough to allow the narrative to flow steadily forward without the impediments of visible literary technique. Consider, for example, Canin's description of Liam Metarey's sudden, tragic death - a moment that is laden for Corey with symbolism of a life left behind and a new life ahead for the choosing:

"The black plume was already spreading over the land . . . [B]y the time [the firemen] reached the clearing, the plane was a roiling mass of flame and acrid black smoke that billowed over itself and flooded the sky. In the spreading gloom, the twin leaping spires of flame sent shadows dancing against the trees. The smoke kept pouring. A human being couldn't even approach it - I know because I tried to. The oaks near the impact had been immolated, and the stinking cloud bellowed horrifically now from the center of its own clearing. Around it stood a circle of larches with their needles burnt off."

America America is a timely, engaging novel about power and influence in the land of opportunity.

In Canin's adept hands, the tale makes for a lively summer read against a backdrop of true political meanderings that, we can only hope, never escalates to the tragedy and intensity of Canin's Saline, N.Y.

Jennie Camp's reviews and short stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review and other publications. She lives in Platteville.

America America

* By Ethan Canin. Random House, 458 pages, $27.

* Grade: A

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