Ethan Canin’s new novel, “America, America,” is about power and ambition: of Henry Bonwiller, a Senator whose life and troubles borrow a great deal from those of Ted Kennedy (both are involved in drunk-driving accidents where a young woman loses her life); of the Metareys, Bonwiller’s dynastically wealthy backers; and of the book’s narrator, Corey Sifter, who served on Bonwiller’s failed presidential campaign as a young staffer.
Sifter recalls the experiences of his youth and young adulthood, when he came to sociopolitical consciousness in a town in upstate New York in the 1960s and ’70s. These recollections are prompted by Bonwiller’s death, at 89, after years of service in the Senate (a champion of the working class, he had a “deep-held sense of what it was like to be excluded from the bounty of this country”) and by another desire: confession.
As a young man, working-class Sifter is taken under the wing of Liam Metarey, the son of the local timber and mining baron, who sends him to boarding school, introduces him to America’s political elite, and shows him a world from which he was once excluded. This exposure served as “the fulcrum I used to lift myself away from my upbringing; to finally push myself, really, by dint of education, into a social class that I at last belong to by accomplishment, even if not by wealth. I’m not proud of that and I’m not ashamed of it.”
As the result of this intervention, Sifter becomes the publisher of the town newspaper and a seasoned observer of the world: “But that’s the way the Speaker-Sentinel is: we like to send our own people on stories, even if the wire services have us bound and tied.”
This is all very promising – a putative Great American Novel, a tapestry of politics, class and intrigue – but it falls somewhat flat. It captures a lot of detail, but Canin is never very convincing. Sifter tries to evoke the political turmoil of the early 1970s, but he sounds like a civics textbook instead: “1972 was a year of change for the Democrats. The Chicago convention in 1968 had left its bitter memories. Mayor Daley’s cops swinging truncheons in the crowds . . . But none of it would have mattered if it weren’t for the election results themselves: Hubert Humphrey, the candidate chosen by the party establishment, went down in a watershed drubbing.”
In an age of conspicuously small American literature, Canin should be commended for the ambition of “America, America” (an ambition that announces itself even in the title.) But he fails to weave the numerous threads he takes up into a solid tapestry, and the largeness of the subject makes the thinness of this book all the more of a pity.
America, America
by Ethan Canin
Random House