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A Novel
by Ethan Canin
Book Reviewed by: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.
From Chapter I
2006
When you’ve been involved in something like this, no matter how long ago it happened, no matter how long it’s been absent from the news, you’re fated, nonetheless, to always search it out. To be on alert for it, somehow, every day of your life. For the small item at the back of the newspaper. For the stranger at the cocktail party or the unfamiliar letter in the mailbox. For the reckoning pause on the other end of the phone line. For the dreadful reappearance of something that, in all likelihood, is never going to return.
I wouldn’t have thought, in fact, that I would be the one to bring it back now, after all this time. That I would be the one to finally try to explain it. What I know of it, at least, even if that’s only a part. I can only guess at the other parts. But I’ve been guessing at them for half my life now, and I think I’ve made some sense of it.
Honestly I don’t know what will come of this—who ...
America America is a great read but a worrisome think, if I may coin a phrase. Ethan Canin writes in the storytelling tradition of Richard
Russo: a slow, detailed, fully realized, and gratifying portrait of small-town America. Yet his uncritical, almost adoring tale of wealth and power bothered me, and I wondered why this novel is being promoted so heavily at this
moment in time ....
The novel is filled with graceful moments .... but falls short in its delineation of its characters.
With his narrator and protagonist, Canin has written himself into a bind. On the
one hand, Corey Sifter must be Everyman ....On the other
hand, Corey must himself be extraordinary in order to justify his inclusion in
the family and his presence at nearly every important moment in their lives. Too
often, Canin resorts to ham-handed ways of conveying character ......continued
Full Review
(801 words)
(Reviewed by Amy Reading).
Senator Henry Bonwiller, the presidential candidate to whom Liam Metarey acts
as closest advisor, is fictional, but the rest of the details of the 1972
Democratic nomination battle are true.
The field was crowded with men—and two women—vying to challenge President
Nixon's re-election effort. Nixon was seen as vulnerable because of the abysmal
state of the Vietnam War. Senator Ed Muskie from Maine was the party
establishment's choice, but his campaign fizzled when a supposedly forged letter
to the Manchester Union Leader claimed that he was prejudiced against
Americans of French-Canadian descent. Muskie refuted the charges in what has
since become known as "the crying speech." Several news outlets reported that ...
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