America America (Canin) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
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.
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...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..
Bookmarks Magazine