Ethan Canin's America
Jill Owens, Powells.com
Ethan Canin is the kind of writer that I would imagine makes other writers jealous. He published his first book, Emperor of the Air, at the age of 27 to extraordinary reviews, while he was still a student at Harvard Medical School. The Boston Globe claimed, "The stories prove Canin guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of brilliance." Another story collection and three novels followed, which won him more critical attention and a growing audience. Canin's newest work, America America, is a sweeping, epic novel that more fully explores themes he has written about previously — class, politics, fatherhood, wealth, and power — in a multigenerational American saga.
America America tells two related stories: the tale of Corey Sifter, a lower-class boy who was hired as a jack-of-all-trades by the extremely wealthy Metarey family; and a fictionalized version of the Democratic Primary in 1972. As an adult, Corey is a journalist at a paper in Saline, the small New York town he grew up in. The novel moves back and forth in time between the present and Corey's past, particularly the pivotal years of 1971-1972, when he was a scholarship student at a prestigious boarding school, Liam Metarey's right-hand man, and an occasional driver for Senator Bonwiller, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.
Kirkus calls America America, Ethan Canin's first novel in seven years, "[a] novel of character [that] is powerful and haunting, a major work." Ron Charles, writing in the Washington Post, raves, "Ethan Canin's best novel...[I]t couldn't have arrived at a more auspicious moment than this season of potentially epochal political change." In this interview, Canin discusses his new book, the politics of generosity, class-jumping, and method acting for writing.
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"[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. In Canin's adept hands, the tale makes for a lively summer read against a backdrop of true political meanderings that, we can only hope, never escalates to the tragedy and intensity of Canin's Saline, N.Y." Rocky Mountain News
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"Ethan Canin's best novel...[He] has written before about the seductive and transformative power of people with extraordinary wealth, but never with such sensitivity....We've waited a long time for a worthy successor to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and it couldn't have arrived at a more auspicious moment than this season of potentially epochal political change." Ron Charles, the Washington Post
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"It's [a] testament to Canin's mastery that he's able to encompass the largest possible themes — life and death, war and peace, mortality and transcendence — with such elliptical precision....The novel represents such a powerfully transformative experience — for protagonist and reader alike." Chicago Sun-Times
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"To this year's list of outstanding American novels, we must now add Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets. Never before has Canin been so surehanded a storyteller. Given the achievement of For Kings and Planets, Scott Fitzgerald himself would have been honored by his company. Canin's novel speaks with a hard-earned grace worthy of the master." Newsday
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Jill Owens: In an interview several years ago, you said you started Carry Me across
the Water with a single sentence. How did you start America America?
Ethan Canin: In desperation. I knew I had to start a novel, and I wasn't getting
anywhere. I was searching through old material, and I came upon that scene where
the main characters are on a sailboat, and the sister jumps off the back of
the boat into the water, and I thought it was an okay scene.
America America really started as a book about class, about a boy who jumps
class. This was in early 2001. I was working on that mildly and contentedly,
and then September 11 happened. I'd also been held at gunpoint.
Jill: I read something about that; that was on a book tour?
Canin: Yes, that was in L.A. It was after a reading at Dutton's, which used
to be a great bookstore in L.A. It recently closed, unfortunately. I was having
dinner across the street with Mona Simpson and a couple other friends of
ours. The restaurant was fairly empty, and nine armed men walked in, forced
us under the table, and one of them held a gun right to my head. I had just
left my daughter at home; she was about five years old at the time. The man
said, "I'll blow your fucking head off," basically.
We were under the table for about 10 or 15 minutes, and I was trying to call
911 on my cell phone — which made beeps every time you pressed a number, so
some people were saying not to do it, and some were saying, yes, you should
do it... In any case, we were fine, in the end, and they left without shooting
anybody.
The combination of that and September 11 — September 11 more than that incident
— really stopped me in my tracks. I stopped writing for about two years. It
didn't seem that important to me, as I think happened to most writers at that
point. Then life slowly began to get back to normal.
I became much more political. I'd always been political, but I became interested
in writing something about politics, writing (without sounding presumptuous)
more important books, books about bigger things like history and politics. For
example, in this case, what cost the country is willing to pay for politicians
who have great vision. That became the other theme of this book, at least for
me: How much wrong are we willing to put up with in the service of right?
Books grow on their own. So it became really two stories: a story about a boy
jumping classes, and a story about a great but flawed politician.
I certainly don't have any idea what I'm going to write when I write. I know
that some people do, but I don't.
Jill: When did you start the book? I first read it
in January, when the Democratic primary was becoming so much more closely watched,
and of course the primary season in your book, in 1972, was in a similar situation.
Canin: It was weird. I was looking at the book recently, at a speech Senator
Bonwiller makes about the bridges of hope, and I was struck — I wrote that
maybe three years before I even knew Obama was running.
Jill: That was clairvoyant of you.
Canin: Yes, clairvoyant! There was also a little bit in there about stagflation,
economic stagnation along with inflation, which occurred under Nixon. It rarely
happens; it only happened for the first time in the seventies. That now seems
to be happening again, to a certain degree.
And then of course Eliot Spitzer... Although if you write about a political
scandal, you can pretty much count on being prophetic. [Laughter]
It's interesting that probably one of the most closely analogous scandals was
Gary Condit; his paramour, Chandra Levy, was found murdered, and that to this
day remained unsolved.
Jill: What did you find interesting artistically or aesthetically about writing
about politics?
Canin: I am a political hound. I am obsessive. I love every election year.
I used to follow sports as a kid, and now I follow politics. What could be better?
It's got everything.
Jill: I think you and I started talking about Obama within about two minutes
of meeting each other in L.A.
Canin: Exactly. He in particular is such an exciting candidate. He's about
as gifted a politician — and "politician" has sort of become a pejorative,
but I don't mean it as a pejorative — as gifted a political figure as I've
seen, at least in my adult lifetime.
For various reasons, I've been listening to some old political speeches, and
I was listening to FDR's inaugural a couple of days ago. I have to say, Obama
is a wonderful speaker, but he's still no FDR. FDR is a perfect example: he
was quite a flawed man. He did not treat Jews well. He himself evidently had
several affairs, certainly one long-term affair, not that anybody cared then.
But he had a great vision of generosity for the country. That's the question
you always have to ask: how much are we willing to put up with personal peccadilloes
for that kind of vision?
I like to think of it as the politics of generosity. That's what I've been
thinking of it as, instead of liberalism or conservatism. I think of the great
liberal figures as leading a politics of generosity.
Jill: In addition to Senator Bonwiller, Liam Metarey, in the book, practices
a kind of politics of generosity to Corey and to the larger town, as well.
Canin: Right. That's another American tradition. It's another thing I was thinking
about with this book, that you can have these great political figures like Teddy
Roosevelt and FDR and John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy who come
from the landed gentry. There's no question that they're in the upper classes,
yet they have a sense of togetherness with the common man, and a proper sense
that the country doesn't thrive unless its lower classes thrive.
We are in serious trouble now. The difference between the top wage earners
in this country and the working class is a death knell for our culture. Not
to rant, but it's crazy how much people are earning while working people are
struggling. It's obscene. Do you ever read Bob Herbert in the New York Times?
Jill: I do.
Canin: He had a good piece yesterday about Bernie Sanders, the senator from
Vermont. He polled working-class people in Vermont about how difficult it is
for them right now, and the stories are quite something.
Jill: Didn't one woman describe burning her mother's furniture for heat this
past winter?
Canin: Exactly! It's happening all over. And here's my other pet peeve: money
has become an achievement rather than some kind of contribution. Rather than
the marker of achievement, money has become the achievement itself.
I went to my daughter's sixth-grade graduation a few days ago. They do this
thing where they predict for one another where they'll be in 20 years. It was
striking to me that so many of them — over half the class — predicted that
so-and-so would be CEO of this or that. Only one that I can remember wanted
to be a scientist. They all wanted to be CEOs.
Jill: I'm amazed that sixth-graders even know what CEOs are.
Canin: It's impressive and depressing. It always seems like your own childhood
is better, but we wanted to be ball players, or scientists, or whatever. No
one even thought of being a CEO. Now they probably want to be CFOs, for all
I know.
Jill: You would have been 12 during the 1972 primary. I was wondering
how much your own early impressions, if any, played into the book.
Canin: I was just barely conscious of politics, in an early way. I remember
McGovern, and that's about it. I can remember conversations about McGovern,
and a little bit about Nixon. I mostly did research and reading, a mixture of
articles from that time.
But I do have those early memories. I was living in San Francisco at that point,
and I don't think I knew anyone, or even of anyone, who voted for Nixon. That's
just the kind of place San Francisco is. Now that I live in Iowa, of course,
it's much more diverse politically, which is interesting. It keeps you sharper
to be surrounded by different views.
It was my first political consciousness, and I remember going door to door
with a can, raising money for McGovern. Not that I knew anything about his policies.
I was probably just absorbing my parents' politics.
I've always been fascinated with Nixon, who seems to me to be a key
moral figure of the next 35 years, politically. At the same time, Ted Kennedy
symbolized the great rise of liberalism, but also, because of Chappaquiddick,
he gave conservatism a face of fear that they could plant on what I would again
call the politics of generosity.
Jill: In discussion of the book so far, I I haven't seen people bring
up Kennedy and Chappaquiddick much, which seems an obvious parallel to Senator
Bonwiller in some ways.
Canin: I can't really deny that some of that was what brought me to write.
But I'm a lot more interested in Kennedy because he's probably considered universally
by Republicans and Democrats as the greatest senator in recent years,
and has probably done more, in terms of passed more bills for education and
health care, than any other senator. He's probably done more good than anyone
else in Congress, yet he does have that... I can't speak with any authority
on whether it's a character flaw or an isolated bad decision. Who knows what happened that
night?
Nonetheless, he gave figure to the fear of that generosity, of giving away
too much to the underclasses, and that was in some ways responsible for the
decline of liberalism that has occurred since that time.
Jill: Most of your books are written in first person, and often, as in this new one,
the characters seem to be consciously aware, at least in part, of telling a
story. Do you think about their individual storytelling styles as a part of
their voices?
Canin: Absolutely. To me, the question that defines all of writing is, "What
would the narrator tell you at this moment?" This book, for example, starts
out with the narrator trying to calculate how many people are at the funeral.
It's a funny way to start out a book, except later on, you find out that he
was the guy who used to tell Senator Bowiller how many people were in every
political rally.
I always tell my students, "Don't write about a character. Become that
character, and then write your story." For me, it's almost a physical thing.
I sit at my desk, and it's about thirty seconds of letting the room drop away
and imagining yourself into this other human being. Everything that you would
notice, everything that you would tell, in the order that you would tell it,
is then told.
It's kind of like method acting for writing.
Jill: I was going to ask you that, how you inhabit your characters. I remember
back when I read Emperor of the Air marveling at how well you seemed to describe
being old, when you were still pretty young.
Canin: I used to be a doctor, so I was spending all my time with old people
and the dying. Old, dying people were basically my stock in trade. That's what you
did when you were a medical student and a resident; I don't think I saw a healthy,
young person in all my time there.
That might have been part of it. But it really is almost like throwing your
voice, or throwing your consciousness across the room to someone else. Writing
is essentially about 85 percent misery. That moment of empathy is one of the
few pleasurable things I can take from writing, to imagine life from somebody
else's point of view.
Jill: America America has many strong female characters, but I think the one
that stood out for me the most was Trieste. I like what Corey says about her
at one point, which is essentially, "What does one say to a seventeen-year-old
who talks like that?"
Canin: She was a pleasure to write. It's nice to be able to write an eccentric,
smart character, who is in this case a girl. Have you ever read The Deptford
Trilogy by Robertson Davies?
Jill: No. I've always wanted to read him, though.
Canin: Those are great books, those three novels. If he had stayed alive, I'm
sure he would have won the Nobel Prize at some point (of course, he died a few
years ago). In one of those books, there's a character, Liesl, who is just a
magnificent strong-minded female character. I read those books 15 or 20 years
ago, but that has stayed with me since then, the idea of writing such a strong-minded
woman.
Jill: Corey is frequently uncertain as to the motivations of some of the other
characters, though he generally gives them the benefit of the doubt. How clear
were their motivations, even to you?
Canin: That's part of what I was talking about in terms of inhabiting another
character. Quite intentionally, I let myself know no more than Corey knows,
and I think he still can't fully decipher what happened. He doesn't know what
happened in that apple orchard. He doesn't know what happened with Henry Bonwiller
and JoEllen Charney. He doesn't know how much of this is motivated by Liam Metarey's
desire to end the Vietnam War, both for his own son who is over there and for
all the other sons who are over there.
He doesn't even know whether Metarey was at heart a generous man; he thinks
that he was, but Metarey also does some things that are distinctly ungenerous
and risky for Corey. He doesn't know why Metarey ends up doing what he does
(without giving any plot points away).
I know some people like books with answers, but to me, this is a book that
stays with questions more than answers. I tried to look as closely
as I could from the point of view of the character during the time that all
this happened, and figure out what I could, and I had to leave mystery at the
heart of it.
Jill: Re-reading your earlier work in the context of America America, it seems
a little like you've rolled all these themes that come up in your earlier books
and stories into one sweeping, seamless novel — class, character, power,
ambition, discipline.
Canin: People are going to ask me what this book is about, and I'm going to
quote you on that. [Laughter]
One of the more chagrining aspects of writing is that it's fairly easy to discern
what one's obsessions are, or for someone else to discern my obsessions. Class,
envy, ambition — what else did you say?
Jill: Discipline, power... and you've said generosity. How to live decently
in the world, I think, comes up a lot in your books.
Canin: Yes. I personally happen to love the character of Liam Metarey. I have
a lot of affection for that man, and I think he was a man with enormous talents,
enormous weight, and enormous resources. A sort of ballast of history, trying
to do the right thing. Those figures abound today, from George Soros to Bill
Gates. I don't know what those men's real motivations are, but certainly they're
trying to do good things in the world.
Jill: Liam is humanized, too, because he's so down to earth. He does all his own repairs, for instance,
and never wastes anything, and has the same sort of feeling that Corey does
of almost being undeserving of all this that he's been given.
Canin: That's interesting. I think that's right. It also occurred to me that
people are always of two classes, those who have jumped class. I feel in some
ways that I have jumped class in my lifetime. My brother was the first person
in my family to go to college, and I was the second. I ended up going to Harvard
Medical School, so I really got to see the east coast establishment, the fancy
houses at the Cape, things like that, when I was in my twenties. That made quite
an impression on me.
Now, being a writer, I don't mingle in that society, but I've been exposed
to it, and I feel comfortable enough in it. I think if you've done what I have,
in any way, you always have the feeling of being in two classes at once.
I was reminded of that during Hillary Clinton's campaign, by how comfortable
she seemed in working-class Pennsylvania, with lunch-bucket Democrats. Of course,
her father was a well-to-do businessman, but her grandfather was a lace factory
worker, and before that they were Welsh coalminers, I believe. I think she felt
so comfortable there, though she'd been elevated to this other class for most
of her adult lifetime. I can imagine the comfort she must have felt sliding
back into the class of her ancestors.
There's a permanent discomfort if you've done that class-jumping. It's certainly
true in that first generation, but I think it persists, that class discomfort,
the pressure between the past and the present, at least through two or three
generations.
Jill: It seems to promote self-examination, at least in your characters. Corey
is constantly scrutinizing his own behavior in light of where he comes from
and what he's doing now.
Canin: That to me is what fiction is about. Something interesting happens and
then a morally thoughtful person analyzes it. That's the kind of fiction I like
to read. Something's got to happen, but someone also has to think about what
happened. That's what it comes down to.
I like contemplative narrators myself. I wanted to redeem Henry Bonwiller a
bit. I didn't want there to be an easily nameable villain or an easily nameable
hero. I would hope that people would see both in Henry Bonwiller and Liam Metarey
and Corey. Henry Bonwiller makes a small speech near the end that, to me at
least, redeems much of what he does.
Jill: America America is a traditional, epic American story. I've noticed that
more books like that are being published this year — Siri Hustvedt's The Sorrows
of an American is another, and in a way, so is Andre Dubus III's The Garden of Last
Days. What do you think that says about American writers right now?
Canin: I hadn't noticed it, because I have not read, for example, either of
those two books yet, but I wonder if it circles back to something we were talking
about earlier, which is September 11. I don't know if this is true, but I bet
if you looked at the book publication rate of American writers, there's a dip
there for three years after that. Then I suspect people began to take on more
serious themes, just as the country did. I suppose writers, without acknowledging
it or realizing it, reflect the zeitgeist. In 2000, O. J. and the white Bronco
were the most serious things I could think about. Think of those things now.
Things have gotten a lot more serious now, and we have to think about bigger
things. We're probably witnessing an empire in decline, and certainly that promotes
thinking broadly.
Jill: How do you think your writing has changed over the years?
Canin: I still hate it, most of the time, and I'm deathly afraid of it. I still
have to drag myself to do it. I'm getting just a slight, slight bit more confident
in my ability to pull off something a little larger. In some ways, that's what
this book was for me — a reach towards something bigger. Now that I've made
the reach of this book, I think I could stand on that platform, and reach again.
I'm always trying to learn something new or try something new in each book.
It seems silly, but I remember thinking to myself, "How
am I going to have this guy run for President? How do you even introduce that
idea into a book?"
It seems silly now, because it seems that all you'd have to do would be to write
the sentence, "He decided to run for President," but how do you make
that believable?
I just reviewed Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth on NPR. It's one of the books
I most admire, a magnificently large and imaginative book that truly transports
you. To be able to do that is really something, and that's what I would like
to be able to do in my next one, to stand on this platform and reach again.
Each time you write a book, you're hammering another two-by-four into the tree
and taking another step up the trunk.
Jill: One of your earlier characters talks about having a practical goal but
a secret dream. How have those categories applied to writing and medicine, for
you?
Canin: I guess that's pretty clear to me. Writing was the practical — I'm
sorry, medicine was the practical goal. That was a Freudian slip, wasn't it?
[Laughter] Medicine was practical; writing was the secret dream. It's not so
easy, if you have to pay a mortgage and send your kids to college.
Jill: I didn't realize that you went to Iowa and got
your MFA first, before medical school.
Canin: I was whatever age you are when you're a junior in college, around 20,
and decided one night that I wanted to be a writer. God bless my parents. My
father's a musician, and the last thing he wanted was for me to go into the
arts. He wanted me to have a paying job.
I went to Iowa, but I left defeated as a writer; I figured that was the end
of that. I was happy to have found out I couldn't do it.
Jill: What do you mean by "defeated," exactly? Why did you think
you couldn't do it?
Canin: It was hard; I wasn't good. I got a couple of things published, but
I got paid two copies of the magazine for one story. I did get either $1200
or $1500, I can't remember now, for a story in Redbook, which was a good amount
of money at that time. That was enticing, but not enough.
It was too hard. I just couldn't do it. I didn't have any kind of discipline
then; I was a very undisciplined kid. Only later in my life did I develop any
sort of discipline at all. It takes a number of things to be able to write.
I think I had a decent prose style, early on, but I did not have discipline,
that's for certain.
Now I'm discovering that if you're just standing, 20 or 30 years later,
you're doing okay.
Jill: What is something that no one has asked you about this book yet that
you'd be interested to have readers know?
Canin: You leave certain clues around. I think it's a book you might have to
read twice to pick up all the clues. There are some answers to the mysteries
in the book, but it certainly takes a second reading. I've always loved books
that you get more out of on a second reading.
Jill: I've read it twice now, and I would definitely put this book in that
category.
Canin: It's very gratifying to hear that. I've always admired the work of Alice
Munro, partly because I know that the more I read it, the more I get out of it.
Whereas there is some confusing fiction which, when you read it again, you get
even more confused. There's very little art or discipline or organization behind
it.
William Gass once wrote an essay about experimental fiction that I really like.
It talks about experiment as a true scientific idea, meaning you made a hypothesis
and you tried it to see if it was working. For a long time, experimental fiction
has been synonymous with senseless fiction, but I believe in experimentation.
For example, in these last two novels, America America and Carry Me across
the Water, I was experimenting with how you jump forward and backward in time.
I have my own theories about it. When there's a break between scenes, I think
you shouldn't go from 2:00 on Monday until 3:00 on Monday. You can go from June
1948 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to September 1990 in Brooklyn.
I think the moment of disorientation and then reorientation is actually really
gratifying for a reader. At least, that's what I've always found when I read.
The cost of it for some readers is going to be some confusion, but I think the
gratification of it, to me at least, is worth it. Being disoriented, discombobulated,
and then reoriented.
Jill: I think that's one of the pleasures of fiction generally, the initial
disorientation of someone else's vision and then reorientation into it.
Canin: Exactly. It's the reader's version of the writer's empathic jump.
One thing about this book I'd like people to realize: who the old man is
at the beginning of the book, weeping at the funeral. And Liam Metarey
at one point, at least in my vision of it, is letting Corey know what happened,
in that orchard scene later. He tells Corey in code what happened.
I like to put a number of things like that in there, knowing full well that
few readers will pick them up.
Jill: What have you been reading lately?
Canin: I've been reading All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, because
this book has been compared to that, and I've never read it. I'm 200 pages into
it. I'm reading Away by Amy Bloom, and I'm about 150 pages into that. She's
just killed the john in Seattle, so she hasn't really quite fully started her
trip. I don't know what happens, but I think it gets a little more wild from
here.
Jill: It does.
Canin: I'm going to Seattle tomorrow, so I thought that would be a good time
to read it. I'm reading a novel called The Sand Cafe by Neil MacFarquhar,
a New York Times reporter who happens to be a friend of mine. And two unpublished novels,
one called Jimmy Twice, which will probably be
around within a couple of years, and a novel by another of my old students named
Lewis Robinson called Waterdog. He also wrote Officer Friendly and Other Stories,
which is a wonderful book.
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