America America

My favorite English teacher gave me a copy of Ethan Canin’s Emperor of the Air[1988] when it first came out. Certain details from those short stories have stayed in my mind for years: the golfing fanatic who makes little putting motions with his hands during pauses in conversation; the daughter whose mother is caught shoplifting; the old man who kisses his wife after a long period of parallel living, and “has the feeling of a miracle.” It sits on my shelf beside Richard Yates’ Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, my two favorite short story collections side by side. Both are the work of graceful writers with an unbelievably keen observing eye. What makes Ethan Canin stand out even more is that his collection was published when he was 27 and a medical student. It was his first book, but what a stake in the ground it was.

America America is a jewel that sparkles just as dazzlingly, but testifies as well to the depth and reflectiveness of maturity. His hair, in the photo, has whitened a bit. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Worskshop as well as practicing medicine. It was a pleasure to get reacquainted again in the pages of this book, which came out in June.

As its title suggests, this is a double vision of America, full of contrasts – past and present, idealism and pragmatism, optimism and heartbreak. The action, told in retrospect by newspaper editor Corey Sifter, takes place during the Nixon era. It’s pre-Watergate, during the Vietnam War and Nixon’s second bid for the presidency, and a New York senator, a man of “public idealism and personal ruthlessness,” has decided to run for president. Corey, then a high school student, works for the wealthy family backing the senator’s campaign. For a fuller summary of the action, and some good discussion of the novel, check out reviews in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Sun; both are excellent.

The book is intricately plotted, and though it took me awhile to get into it, once I found a groove I couldn’t put it down. It’s suspenseful, thoughtful, and filled with the same sort of gems that made Emporer of the Air such a joy to read. These characters are real people, with their share of eccentricities, all of them unfolded by a writer who has observed people with careful and loving attention and is prepared to celebrate them all: a plumber who becomes a voracious reader at the end of his life; a granite miner who’s lost his voice and has to write everything, misspelled but testifying to a shrewd intelligence; a wealthy man wrestling with his legacy.

This story is fiction, but the action is woven seamlessly into a fabric of real historical events and characters. The point of view spins around between present and past, picking up the story at different points along the continuum, and it’s masterfully done; somehow I always knew where I was being set down. But I never lost my frame of reference in my own present, so I found myself asking how the blows to trust that occurred in the timeframe of this story have shaped us: our politics, education, media, views on wealth and class.

I wish I could do the book justice, but there’s too much to it. I’ll just let the book speak for itself, and conclude with one of many passages that will be running through my mind during this campaign season:

One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead… For a man on the rise in politics, power first comes through character — that combination of station and forcefulness that produces not just intimidation, which is power’s crudest form, but flattery, too, which is one of its more refined. After that, power begins to grow from its own essence, rising no longer exclusively from the man but from the office itself. And this is where some balance must be found between its attainment and its allotment, between the unquenchable desire of any politician to rise, and the often humbling requirement that one’s station must now be used to some benefit. And here, of course, is where corruption begins…