Palace Thief (Canin)

The Palace Thief: Stories
Ethan Canin, 1994
Random House
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812976175

Summary
"Character is destiny," wrote Heraclitus—and in this collection of four unforgettable stories, we meet people struggling to understand themselves and the unexpected turns their lives have taken.

In "Accountant," a quintessential company man becomes obsessed with the phenomenal success of a reckless childhood friend. "Batorsag and Szerelem"” tells the story of a boy’s fascination with the mysterious life and invented language of his brother, a math prodigy. In "City of Broken Hearts," a divorced father tries to fathom the patterns of modern relationships. And in "The Palace Thief," a history teacher at an exclusive boarding school reflects on the vicissitudes of a lifetime connection with a student scoundrel.

A remarkable achievement by one of America’s finest writers, this brilliant volume reveals the moments of insight that illuminate everyday lives. (From the publisher.)

The title story, "The Palace Thief" was made into the 2002 film, The Emperor's Club with Kevin Kline.

Author Bio
• Birth—July 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
From a 2008 Barnes & Noble interview:

• 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.

• In his own words:

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.

• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer here is his response:

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.

(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Each plot is dramatic, its characters highly engaging, the suspense sustained and irresistible. Altogether, the collection is a commanding performance that surpasses the author's two previous books.... In The Palace Thief, Mr. Canin, who is doing a medical residency in San Francisco, has fully delivered on the rich promise of these earlier books. While his subject matter is highly contemporary—fantasy baseball camps, divorce, the difficulty parents and children have communicating, the relevance of education to success in business—Mr. Canin's dependence on vivid characters and dramatic plots can be called traditional. The stories are so satisfyingly specific that you don't search them for transcendent meaning.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times

Extraordinary for its craft and emotional effect.... [Ethan Canin is] a writer of enormous talent and charm.
Washington Post

These four long stories are not only splendid reading material; they are stunning art, the kind if art that, blessed with an adamant yet unadorned intelligence, capers at the edge of life's deepest mysteries.
Dallas Morning News

Canin, whose short-story collection Emperor of the Air was justly feted, as his novel Blue River was not, here offers four brilliant longer stories, each seamlessly structured and with prose and characters to linger over. The book's ostensible theme is Heraclitus's observation that character is fate, which is all well and good until we try to understand the meaning of either term. Take Mr. Hundert, the honorable boys' school teacher who in the title story tries to make sense of a student's rise from a cheating dullard to an industrial and political leader. As for the question of character, hardly does a protagonist gain a slippery hold on the essence of another person's character, when a forced self-evaluation occurs: in "City of Broken Hearts" a recently divorced man considers his son as alien but in fact, the youth is the one person who sees through—and redeems—his father's bluff boorish exterior. Canin keeps readers so thoroughly engaged that the anticipation of resolution is almost like dread, as in the beautiful and wrenching "Batorsag and Szerelem,"' in which the narrator recalls the gradual revelation of his family's painful secrets and a quiet secret of his own, the most painful and insidious of all.
Publishers Weekly

In each story, Canin proves himself adept at articulating moments of profound embarrassment followed by flashes of self-knowledge that are either invigorating or demoralizing. Moving and memorable. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

Canin's return to short fiction should be a cause for welcome—yet isn't, disappointingly. In four adipose, rhetorical, quite forced long stories, he continues—as in his unfortunate last book, the novel Blue River (1991)—to strive for "wise" adult tonalities. But these rich, deep voices all but neglect the small flashes of humaneness and helpless knowledge that made Canin's debut collection, Emperor of the Air (1988), remarkable—turning him into a writer who builds high, fussy, false ceilings without walls to support them. Upon an unstartling theme—that we repeat as adults what we do as children—each story here plays out a variation. In the baldest, the title piece, a powerful captain of industry still is moved to impress his elderly prep-school teacher with his temerity and moral sleaze. In "Accountant," an old friend's later-life success throws a careful man to the edge of his rectitude. In "City of Broken Hearts," a middle-aged father learns something about trust and love from his college-aged son. And in "Batorsag and Szerelem," a boy observes in his elder genius brother what seem like signs of schizophrenia but are instead sexual misapprehensions. It's here that the book is most ragged but also most genuine-seeming: the younger boy has available to him an X-raying psychology no grown-up character in Canin ever does (Canin must be the ultimate "kid-brother" writer)—and it's frustrating that this quicksilver perceptiveness is given so little play in the stories, which are bulked-up instead with grown-up characters that are invariably slow, large, and overwide. The stories thus always seem to be wearing their parent's clothes—an effect that reaches into the prose itself, a simulacrum of Cheeverian and Peter Tayloresque modulation that in Canin's hands is just pomp and circumstance.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
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• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
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