KEY POINTS:
There comes a time in the mid-life of every male American writer when he feels compelled to make his big statement about the state of the union. Ethan Canin was best known as a miniaturist of American family life, notably in the slightly surreal and often terrific stories
collected in Emperor of the Air.
With three other quietly-received novels behind him, Canin, who has also worked as a doctor, clearly wanted to make this one shout louder. It takes undeniable guts to call a fat novel America America, a title that suggests a doubling of the hubristic ante of John Dos Passos' American trilogy; it can only be a self-conscious attempt, 25 years after Philip Roth made all such attempts self-conscious, to write The Great American Novel.
In keeping with the scope of his project, Canin writes in big, easy sentences, freighted with earnest intent; the novel has duly won widespread acclaim in America, from John Updike among others, as a worthy heir to Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.
Canin's American story is told by Corey Sifter, the 50-year-old publisher of the Speaker-Sentinel newspaper in a town called Saline ("which if you're an old-timer rhymes with malign, and if you're a newcomer, with machine"), 30 kms east of Lake Erie.
It begins in 2006 with Sifter at the funeral of Henry Bonwiller, a Saline native and long-time New York state senator who, 34 years previously, had made a bid for the Democratic nomination for the presidency as "the best friend the working men of this country have ever had". Sifter, full of idealism, had been a junior aide to Bonwiller back then and had a front-row seat to a campaign that foundered in a scandal he is only now properly beginning to understand.
The funeral is well attended - Bonwiller was 89 - but by the end Sifter is left alone with a man who bends a knee at the graveside and begins to weep. Watching him, Sifter begins to recall his own involvement in the events of three decades before, and a whole impacted autobiography of regret unfolds.
The regret is not only for himself, it is also for his country. Mixing fact and fiction, Canin makes the 1971-72 election, in which Richard Nixon trounced George McGovern, the definitive moment of America's fall from grace, the victory of cynicism over hope. It was, in his reading, the point at which America started to see double (hence the book's title).
Sifter stumbles towards this observation, but when it comes, the idea hits him with the force of tragedy: "Everything you have ever done, every act you've ever had a part in, has another meaning as well, and it is both greater and more terrible than the one you knew one's deeds - those of honour and those of duplicity and those of veniality and those of ruin ... live doubly."
The particular events that concern Sifter have a wider resonance. Bonwiller's campaign for the Democratic nomination was undone in part by a Chappaquiddick moment and the subsequent staged cover-up in which Sifter played an unwitting part. A girlfriend of the senator died of exposure, her body found in an orchard (Johnny Appleseed gone bad). It is only in hindsight that Sifter has properly realised his proximity to her death, that he'd "been involved with something - not that I did something, but that I was involved with something - something unforgivably wrong".
Using the imagined facts of Bonwiller's political failure, Canin slowly distils the essence of Saline society. It is a small-town epic tale, with the pace of the best of John Irving and a good deal of the sedimented detail. Canin is good on the compromises American politicians must make with money (compromises Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would well understand). Bonwiller's presidential bid had been supported by the local grandees, the Metarey family, third-generation Scots immigrants, timber and mining moguls, who run everything in Saline and beyond.
It was Liam Metarey who had conscripted Corey Sifter as a young man to work in their mansion, Aberdeen West. The Metareys, for Sifter, then stood for a version of the American dream; it is with great reluctance that he comes to see that they represent all the murkiness that attends American capital.
Sifter's wife observes that they had made "nasty sport" with his life, and his father believes him to have been "always half criminal", but those are judgments that he only reluctantly comes to agree with. Adopted first as a yard-boy then as a protege by the family, Sifter has spent a lifetime discovering he has sold his soul. His unwitting Faustian agreement, Canin would have us believe, is the true American reality. As such, the book is a process of recovered memory on an epic scale.
Canin never forgets his primary, local realism. He is pitch-perfect in recreating the adolescence of Sifter, plucked from a determinedly working class family to find himself suddenly adrift on the Metareys' fortune, funded through boarding school and college. He captures exactly, too, the ways the quietly Norman Rockwell world of Saline is flogged off in the name of development.
As the story unfolds, Sifter observes of his profession that "silt-panning for truth serves the citizenry only slightly better than a crooked disregard for it".
In this, Canin definitively parts company from his narrator. If it was a Hollywood pitch, America America might come with a subtitle from Jack Nicholson: "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth."
America America
Ethan Canin (Bloomsbury $32.95)
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