America America: A Novel | Ethan Canin

America America: A Novel | Ethan Canin | Timely and Timeless

books:

America America: A...

	America America: A Novel Ethan Canin Random House, 2008 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

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.

PRAISE FOR AMERICA AMERICA

?This is a brilliant, serious book for serious readers.?
?San Diego Union Tribune

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

?Status, money, and politics intersect in this ambitious tale of a 1970s yard boy who becomes entangled in the web of a powerful New York family. Canin is at the top of his game.?
?People

?The beginning of June heralds the arrival of the fat summer read, meant for the porch, the hammock, the beach. Ethan Canin?s America America is just such a book, the satisfying, compulsively readable saga of a northeastern coal dynasty?What a story it is.?
?Entertainment Weekly

?Refreshing?America America is a big, ambitious, old-fashioned, quintessentially American novel about politics, power, ambition, class, ethics and loyalty?.Great American Novel or not, America America is an ambitious book about ambition. Bravo to Canin for tackling the American Dream, which we're forever running off the road and then trying to resuscitate.?
?L.A. Times

?Gooily satisfying?intelligently observed, elegantly written?much more than a novel about politics. It?s both a coming-of-age story and a melancholy look back at a small town and a time when cynicism about politicians and journalists hadn?t yet become accepted shorthand. It?s a perfect story for an election year, but one that will be read long after November.?
?Christian Science Monitor

?Even the title is invigorating, a splash of nostalgia and hope?Take this to the beach.?
?O Magazine

?Epic?a summer novel that will have you turning pages faster than Barack Obama is pocketing delegates... America America is a timely, engaging novel about power and influence in the land of opportunity.?
?Rocky Mountain News

?A superb novel that beautifully illustrates the fundamental unknowability
of our loved ones.?
?Paste Magazine

?This is not a light beach book, but it may turn out to be a summer blockbuster.?
?Hartford Courant

?A serious, sweeping, generations-spanning epic?America America is an ambitious work that excels in imagining ? rather than revisiting ? this America on the verge.?
?New York Sun

?Powerful and haunting, a major work?Tolstoyian exactitude?Enthralling.?
?Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

?Though I?ve always loved Ethan Canin?s work, I still wasn?t prepared for America America,
as rich, ambitious, intelligent, emotionally satisfying and important a work of fiction as we?re likely to get this year. Read this novel and weep, not just for all we've lost but how we lost it.?
?Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs

?A powerful lament that haunts us like a latter-day ghost of The Great Gatsby.?
?Publishers Weekly, Signature Review

?An arresting American political legend, intricately?and suspensefully?structured, gracefully written, and enhanced by thoughtful insights and intuitions in regard to its strong idiosyncratic characters. Altogether an admirable book.?
?Peter Matthiessen, author of Shadow Country

?Ethan Canin has written a magnificent new novel with enormous sweep and power.
I?ve been following his career since his first book - America America is the crowning glory
of his writing life. I love this book.?
?Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides

"With an unusually magical entwining of character, voice, and story, Ethan Canin has written one brilliant narrative after another. He is so gifted that he is sometimes taken for granted, but he is one of the best writers at work today."
?Lorrie Moore, author of Birds of America

?It is always a deep pleasure to read Ethan Canin?s fine, calm, illuminating prose,
and how well that prose serves this sweeping story of ambition and treachery.
Canin is a writer who so quietly seems to know everything.?
?Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World

for more information click here

And Crown Thy Good

It is no accident that the author of this novel is a faculty member of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. America America is interesting in structure and style.

There are three elliptical story lines. All are narrated by Corey Sifter, a native of a small town in Western New York. One ellipse deals with Corey's working class youth in the early 1970s and his gradual absorption as family retainer to the Metareys, the local gentry. The second ellipse concerns Corey's adolescence and young adulthood as he breaks away from his small town roots. The third, set in 2006, involves Corey's adult life as a newspaper publisher resettled in his old hometown, reflecting on events of the past. The points at which these three ellipses intersect form the center of the story: the rise and the mystery surrounding the fall of a hometown politician who aspires to - and nearly does -- capture the 1972 Democratic Party nomination for President.

This structural device gives Corey the freedom to move backward and forward in time and to speak with mixed voices: naïve and trusting teen, battle-scarred political veteran, mentoring journalist. We see his world as it was and as it has become, capturing the many nuances of the transition from twentieth century to the 21st. The triple narrative device, and the resultant shift from one perspective to another, also gives the author the opportunity to color in his portrait of the times one bit at a time, filling in his outlines and illuminating his narrative with unexpected strokes until the whole picture emerges on the page.

So what's the story about? It's about the presidential campaign, passingly. It's about work and ambition. It's about loyalty, to place and to person. It's about the freedom that wealth enables, and the responsibilities and tragedies that it imposes. It's about parents and their children, and the subtle inheritances that pass through generations. It's about character and integrity: their surprising appearances and their equally surprising absences.

This is not a beach book. For me it was a front porch rocking chair book. It also would make a good window seat during a summer thunderstorm book. Not all the questions raised are answered, and not all the characters are well understood. It's nice to have something to think about on warm summer nights.

for more information click here

Timely and Timeless

America America is the rarest of books, a serious novel about public as well as private life. In contrast to most literary novelists, who have ceded politics and class to the pulp writers, Canin confronts these issues head on. The result is a book that is not only deeply moving but also highly illuminating, much more so than any work of non-fiction could be. It is all the better that this book arrives in this season of politics. America America is the best work of this author's fine career.

Small Town America, Big Politics

This book has depth and is thought-provoking as the author slowly reveals pieces of a larger mystery, several, actually. It makes you think, wonder and inquire rather than connecting all the dots for you. Without leaving a gaping hole at the end, the book still makes the reader wonder about the circumstances, events, and personalities of all the characters. Canin also weaves nature's beauty to the forefront and really makes you feel connected with the setting of the book. I'm really not very good at writing reviews, but I haven't read a book this well-written, surprising, and stimulating in a long time. I was really drawn in by the characters, the way the "story" unfolded, with snapshot pictures in time that told the story. Pieces of the puzzle slowly come together throughout the book and the author seemingly effortlessly brings it all together. America America didn't enthral me because of its political premise; rather, its characters, the nostalgic time period, small town depiction, the timeless struggle and desire to do better in life, and the course of time and its effects on people really puts you in another place. This book truly transported me to another place and time, and isn't that what reading is all about?

for more information click here

intentionally left vague

Perhaps the whole point of this book is that no-one can know the truth at the bottom of a scandal except the people involved, but I think that Canin makes this point in an unnecessarily confusing way. The time frame shifts from the present (more or less) to various points in Corey Sifter's association with the Metarey's, the wealthy family in town, who become his patron, sending him to private school and then helping to pay his college tuition. He is telling the story to his would-be protegee, an intern at his newspaper who reminds him in many ways of himself at that age.

The story revolves around the presidential campaign of the local liberal senator, Henry Bonwiller. Although the story is set in the 1972 election and in upstate New York rather than Massachusetts, the story is superficially that of Edward Kennedy. There is an affair, a car accident, a dead mistress. Then there is a cover-up, or a misdirection of some kind. But the truth of what actually happened is shrouded from the reader.

This story is told mainly by Sifter, who, although an insider in both the Metarey family and the Bonwiller campaign, is largely kept ignorant of the backroom politicking. The bulk of the story is told in his first-person narrative, and we know only what he knows. Occasionally the narrative shifts to the perspective of the dead mistress, but she is equally ignorant, and what actually happens doesn't become any clearer when told from her point of view. This is an effective, but frustrating technique. I wanted to know what happened!

For all that, though, this is a good book. It's well-written, and the story itself is compelling. It tells of a way of life that changes from one generation to the next and of the influence that one family can have on a whole town.

for more information click here

Am I the only one??? Remi Storm WV

Am I the only one who was reminded of Dominick Dunne's novel: A Season In Purgatory??? Granted, this is a solid well written book but it felt like I had read it before.

reviews: page 1, 2

products you might be interested in