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America America
Ethan Canin, 2008
Random House
336 pp.

In Brief
From Ethan Canin, bestselling author of The Palace Thief, comes a stunning novel, set in a small town during the Nixon era and today, about America and family, politics and tragedy, and the impact of fate on a young man’s life.

In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family’s generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president of the United States. Before long, Corey finds himself involved with one of the Metarey daughters as well, and he begins to leave behind the world of his upbringing. As the Bonwiller campaign gains momentum, Corey finds himself caught up in a complex web of events in which loyalty, politics, sex, and gratitude conflict with morality, love, and the truth.

America America is a beautiful novel about America as it was and is, a remarkable exploration of how vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and fate. (From the publishers.)

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About the Author

• Birth—7/19/1960
• Where—Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
• Reared—San Francisco, California
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., University of
   Iowa; M.D., Harvard University
• Awards—California Book Award
• Currently—Iowa City, Iowa   


Born in Michigan and raised in California, Ethan Canin entered Stanford University dead set on an engineering career. Then, in junior year he took an English course that changed the direction of his dreams. Exposed for the first time to the brilliant short stories of John Cheever, he underwent a true epiphany. He changed majors and determined there and then to become a writer.

Canin proved sufficiently gifted to be accepted into the world-famous Iowa Writers' Workshop, but between the daunting competition and a severe case of writer's block, he developed serious doubts about his abilities. Discouraged, he enrolled in Harvard Medical School shortly after receiving his M.F.A. "It was a real failure of the imagination," he confessed in an interview with Stanford Magazine. "I just couldn't think of another job."

Perversely, Canin's muse returned in medical school. A few of his stories appeared in Atlantic Monthly, resulting in a book deal with Houghton Mifflin. In 1988, the short story collection Emperor of the Air was published to glowing reviews. (Writing in The New York Times, critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt observed "The way these stories transcend the ordinariness of human voices is ... startling.")

Canin spent the next few years conflicted over what he wanted to do with his life. He received his M.D. from Harvard and, for a while at least, successfully combined writing with the practice of medicine. But after the enthusiastic response to 1994's The Palace Thief, he found it increasingly difficult to juggle two careers. Finally, after much soul-searching, he made the decision to give up doctoring to become a full-time writer.

Although he is best known for short stories and novellas, Canin has also written full-length fiction—most notably the deceptively small and spare Carry Me Across the Water, proclaimed by the London Daily Telegraph as "[t]he most wise and beautiful novel of 2001." This story of a scrappy, 78-year-old Jewish-American who sets out to right a tragic mistake from his past is considered by many to be the author's finest work. In 2008, Canin published America America, an ambitious novel John Updike called "a complicated, many-layered epic of class, politics, sex, death, and social history...shuttling between the twenty-first-century present and the crowded events of 1971-72." Begun in early 2001, and stalled after the tragic events of 9/11, the story underwent ten rewrites before Canin finally finished it.

Canin writes slowly and with great deliberation, polishing phrases with grace, elegance, and an accumulation of detail his hero John Cheever would surely approve. Yet, despite his success, he admits that writing for him is hard work. He has repeatedly stated that the process is "exquisitely difficult," a misery rooted in fear and self-doubt. "Fear of failure is what's hard -- it's overwhelming," he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "I'll never get beyond sitting down and saying, 'This is a disaster, this will never work.' "

Yet, "work" it most certainly does! Considered one of our finest writers (in 1996, he was named to Granta's list of Best Young American Novelists), Canin crafts wonderful, mature stories that resonate with timeless, universal themes. He is especially skilled at handling the sensitive, emotional terrain of family life—growing up, marriage, aging, and the complex relationships between fathers and sons. Small wonder The New York Times has called him "one of the most satisfying writers on the contemporary scene." It's an assessment Canin's many fans wholeheartedly endorse.

Extras
• Although his parents lived in Iowa City, Canin was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while his mother and father were on vacation.

• Canin's father was an accomplished violinist who performed and taught throughout the East and Midwest before accepting the position of concertmaster for the San Francisco Symphony.

• Canin was mentored by his high school English teacher Danielle Steel, who read several of his stories and encouraged him to continue writing.

• In 1998, Canin joined the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the scene of his own literary meltdown. He enjoys teaching and finds the environment far kinder and more supportive than it was in his own student days.

• Along with fellow authors Po Bronson and Ethan Watters, Canin cofounded the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a collective workspace for writers filmmakers, and narrative artists.

• Canin's novella The Palace Thief was filmed as The Emperor's Club, a 2002 movie starring Kevin Kline.


• The following is from a 2008 Barnes & Noble interview:

"I love woodworking and remodeling houses. Our basement looks like a hardware store, and my car is a truck with a ladder rack. I've remodeled three old houses myself, as well as built the backyard office where I write, and I like to do every job at least once, from framing to plumbing to wiring to finish carpentry. It's easier than writing, and the results don't take years."

"In medical school I loved surgery (similar to remodeling houses); in fact, I wanted to be a surgeon rather than an internist but was (reasonably, I think) afraid of the five-year surgical residency with its every-other-night call schedule. Since then, residencies have gotten easier; I sometimes think that if I'd started medical school a few years later than I did, I would have been a surgeon; and if I'd been a surgeon, I'd never have quit to become a writer."

"Playing softball is perhaps my favorite thing to do in the world. Since my childhood summers, which I spent from dawn to dusk on the local baseball diamond, I've always been more glove than bat. I've just always loved fielding, its most graceful combination of thought, luck, and intimate cooperation. Baseball metaphors have been overdone by writers, but there really is nothing like the pivot moment of a double play, or a rising, one-hop relay to the plate, or-in that most graceful of executions-the tightening noose of a three-fielder, choreographed, role-revolving run-down."

"I've always been a pragmatic and physical thinker, starting even before I studied engineering in college. One of my concerns with our culture at the moment is the way in which we've detached ourselves from a physical understanding of our essential inventions. I know nothing more about the operation of a microchip than that it works, and that if it breaks it has to be replaced. Almost nobody does; and nobody can repair one without a set of machines that are themselves built from microchips. I can't picture its gears; I can't, in a pinch, substitute something else in its place, the way as a teen-ager once, on a car trip over the Sierras, I substituted a sock and two pieces of string for a broken engine hose.

Likewise, I'm concerned that our culture has detached itself from our common social purposes. Money, once the reward for achievement, has become the achievement itself. This, in my opinion, is as dangerous a trend as any we face.

"I started America America in early 2001. After 9/11, I stopped working on it for a full two years, and when I came back I was motivated to make it a more overtly political story. History, politics, the nature of power and its costs-all these subjects were occupying my mind.

This novel was brutally difficult. But they all are. That's not news. I nearly gave up any number of times. I wrote a good ten drafts, but it wasn't till perhaps the seventh or eighth that, while teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, I had a student turn in a story he'd re-written in such a way that I realized exactly what I needed to do on my own novel."


Q: What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer?

A: In college, I began as an engineering major. I was taking physics and math and not much else. I thought that the humanities, and certainly the arts, were for the soft-minded; I certainly would never have strayed near an English class. Then one day I happened upon a big red book called The Stories of John Cheever. I was waiting for someone and just found the book on a shelf; I sat down and read the first story, called "Goodbye, My Brother." From that point on, I wanted to be a writer. (From Barnes & Noble.)

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Critics Say. . .
There are some wonderful, deeply affecting moments here, detailing the relationship between the narrator, Corey Sifter, and his family, but they are unfortunately submerged in a bloated, maladroit narrative that relies on clumsily withheld secrets for suspense and that encumbers the story of Corey’s coming-of-age with ponderous and unconvincing meditations on matters like noblesse oblige, the responsibilities of privilege and working-class resentment of the rich.....Mr. Canin manages to make Corey’s affectionate relationship with his parents believable and often touching, and he also succeeds, for the most part, in making Corey’s middle-aged ruminations feel palpable and real.... Mr. Canin writes about these matters with a sympathetic understanding of his characters’ sense of life as a dialectic between hope and loss, expectation and disappointment, idealism and compromise, and an appreciation of the ways in which a single choice or two can change the trajectory of an entire life. When it comes to Corey’s relationship with the Metarey family and their involvement with Senator Bonwiller, however, Mr. Canin tends to fall back on tired tropes about class and aristocratic paternalism and working-class values.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


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.... 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.... 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.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


A brilliant, serious book for serious readers.”
San Diego Union Tribune


Intelligently observed, elegantly written…A perfect story for an election year, but one that will be read long after November.”
Christian Science Monitor


A complicated, many-layered epic of class, politics, sex, death, and social history…Its reach is wide and its touch often masterly.
John Updike - The New Yorker Magazine


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.... 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.
Publishers Weekly


Canin asks important questions about wealth, power, and ambition in his latest novel, but critics' feelings about America America depended largely on their reaction to Canin's narrator, Corey, a passive and inexpressive figure. While the Washington Post declared confidently that " America America is Ethan Canin's best novel"; a number of other reviewers opined that Corey's inability to feel (or communicate) any kind of passion about his life's tale was a fatal flaw that left the reader feeling as cold as Corey himself. While many reviewers admired Canin for tackling so ambitious a project, there was also a strong sense that, despite its gorgeous writing, America America does not measure up to the many literary classics, "including F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men" it evokes.
Booksmarks Magazine

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Book Club Discussion Questions

1. Corey Sifter grows up over the course of this book. Which character do you see as the most significant influence on his personal evolution?

2. What motivates Corey to continue questioning the series of events that lead to Senator Bonwiller's downfall: his journalist's curiosity, a sense of loyalty, or his own contemplative nature?

3. Trieste Millbury shows enormous potential as a reporter during her time interning at the newspaper. She also provides a rapt audience for Corey's rehashing of past events. How is she similar to the teenaged Corey? How is she different?

4. When JoEllen Charney enters Bonwiller's world he is well on his way to successfully capturing the Democratic nomination. What does their liaison suggest about the ambitions and assumptions of those who pursue power?

5. Who or what do you think is ultimately responsible for incriminating Bonwiller?

6. How realistically does the book portray political indiscretions? Were you reminded of actual events past or present?

7. Which character's duplicity or innocence did you find the most surprising, and why?

8. Who is the unnamed man with a limp who appears after Bonwiller's funeral? Why do you think Canin chose not to reveal his identity?

9. Christian and Clara's sibling rivalry is hinted at but never fully explained. What do you think motivated it? Did they turn out to be different as adults than you expected them to be? (Questions provided by the publisher.)