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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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America
America by Ethan Canin |
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Rating: |
**** |
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(Highly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Contradictions Ethan
Canin’s new novel, America
America, presents the complexity and contradictions of human behavior
through characters that develop more deeply with each turned page. For a
500-page novel, there’s little, if any, bloat. Canin uses his narrator, Corey
Sifter, as an Everyman who found himself in the right places at the right
times, and it is through Corey, that we come to understand the other key
characters. Set in upstate New York from the early 1970s to the present, this
is a novel of class, politics, family and ambition. Here’s an excerpt, pp.
18-20: During my childhood it was Liam
Metarey who took care of the town. The fact that he so closely resembled his
father didn't hurt his cause with the old-timers, either, who seemed to
believe that God had offered special safeguard for them in the form of two
nearly identical-looking old-world Scottish saviors. Both Metareys were tall,
restless men with a narrow nose bent severely at the apex and Gaelic
cheekbones pushing in on darkly staring eyes — eyes that still announce
themselves in every photograph ever taken of either of them. It wasn't their
color so much as their mood and the fact that their soulful look contrasted
so strikingly with the martial cast of the cheeks and nose.
Both men, in fact, looked more like artists than industrialists—at least they
always have to me. More like those old photographs of Kafka in Prague or
Picasso in Paris than like any Rockefeller or Vanderbilt. And
the Metareys always drove ordinary cars, too, and generally wore the same
clothes that are still worn today by the regular citizenry around here. For
Sunday dinners Liam Metarey's wife, June, shopped at Burdick's Market
herself, just as my mother and all the other housewives did. All three of the
Metarey children—the two girls, Christian and Clara, and their brother,
Andrew—attended Martin Van Buren Elementary, then Governor Minuit Junior
High, then Franklin Roosevelt Senior High, like all the rest of us, and they
all walked home on the same path we did. At one point, just before John
Kennedy was inaugurated, Liam Metarey had worked for President Eisenhower as
the secretary of the treasury—I still have a fifty-dollar bill printed with
his angular, left-handed signature —but those few months, as far as I know,
were the only time the family had absented itself from Saline. Otherwise,
they lived all year on their estate and we all lived on land that had once
been their horse pastures. By the time I was born, the Metarey holdings
had already been in decline for more than a decade; but even in that state
they were magnificent. They still included brick furnaces, a paper plant,
the New World Bank of Saline, the iron foundry, a fiberglass boat works in
Buffalo, the two remaining lumber mills, and coal seams and oil wells in
several Canadian provinces. The yacht was gone, but they kept a sailboat on
Lake Erie and owned nearly three hundred houses in Saline and Islington,
which Liam Metarey continued to rent out at rates that even the renters found
reasonable. Two of their spent lime and granite quarries had been converted
into lakes, which they stocked with trout. Port Carrol was half an hour away,
but if you grew up in Saline you learned to fish and row and maybe drive an
outboard on the old Metarey Lime Quarry #3, and you learned to dive off the
high rocks at Granite Mine #1. My father and the other men from the neighborhood
took home quite a few nice browns from Metarey waters, just as they took home
quite a few nice deer and pheasant from Metarey game lands in winter. For
these and other reasons, Liam Metarey was well liked even by the men who
worked for him. My
father was among those men. So had been his father, a miner, and his
brothers, all five of them, who were construction laborers. With his oldest
brother my father had run a sidewalk and foundation business, and one of my
earliest memories is listening from upstairs to the slap of his knee-length
rubber boots against the front corner of our stoop—whap whomp, whap whomp—as
he knocked the mud and hardened bits of concrete onto our grass.
When I heard that, I would run down to greet him. He would come inside for
his bath, and my mother would hand me his glass of tea to bring up to him
before dinner. For much of my childhood, a fine gray powder ran across our
walk, climbed our porch steps, and collected in a pale ring on the woven mat
inside our cramped front hall, which, like my father's skin and my parents'
bedroom, always smelled of lime. But
my father studied every night in that tiny bedroom, and by the fall of my
first year of elementary school he had earned himself a plumbing and
pipe-fitting license. From the time I was old enough to care, that was what
he was: a plumber. He joined a union, too, in the days when there was plenty
of work for a union man. In our neighborhood, plumber was a high-ranking
job—higher than what he'd been doing, certainly, and higher than his own
father had ever reached. Most of his work—most of everybody's work—was for
the Metareys. America
America reveals the flaws of character that make us human, and the spirit
within that raises us above the reality of the present to building a better
future for ourselves and for others. The novel is packed with the tension of
continuity and change, and the contradictions within us that make us
interesting. The writing is outstanding, the structure complex, and the
characters are memorable and fully developed. This is one of the best novels
I’ve read this year. Steve
Hopkins, November 20, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/America America.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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