Canin pens a great political novel with 'America America'
"America America" is Ethan Canin's best novel, but its timing is unnerving. His ruminative story begins with a funeral for the country's greatest liberal senator, whose presidential ambitions were smashed years earlier by the death of a campaign aide in a drunk-driving accident. The novel isn't about Sen. Ted Kennedy, but the resemblance is impossible to ignore, and Kennedy's recent announcement that he has a malignant brain tumor has started, for many of us, the process of reflection that "America America" records in such sensitive detail.
The middle-aged narrator, Corey Sifter, was an eager, observant teenager during Sen. Bonwiller's campaign for the presidential nomination in 1972. Now publisher of a small newspaper, Corey looks back on the events of that time, amazed by the shady way power brokers and journalists once conducted the nation's politics. He was 16, living in a town near Buffalo, N.Y., "that was almost entirely built and owned by a single family, the Metareys." Despite their vast wealth and influence, the Metareys had, over several generations, become modest and beneficent lords. Corey tells us that the patriarch, Liam Metarey, "was a generous, civic-minded, and altruistic patron of the whole community," with a strong interest in shaping government from behind the scenes. He got Henry Bonwiller elected to the Senate and tried with all his might and money to get him elected president. That disastrous effort becomes the backdrop of this complex novel.
Canin carefully splices his fictional characters into the news of the 1960s and '70s. The Vietnam War is tearing the country apart and wearing down President Nixon; Sen. Edward Muskie hasn't cried yet in the New Hampshire snowstorm, but Bonwiller's people already believe their man can beat him for the Democratic nomination. Liam Metarey's house serves as the Bonwiller headquarters, and we see the campaign from a highly impressionistic and limited point of view. After all, Corey, the son of solid working-class parents, is just a high school sophomore during this heady time. His job as a groundskeeper on the Metarey estate gives him a venue, he notes, to observe "everything that was happening so openly, and yet so mysteriously, in front of me."
While the nation's eyes are on Sen. Bonwiller, we focus on Liam Metarey, an introspective kingmaker. He takes a fatherly interest in Corey, and before long he's treating him as a son and sometimes even a confidant. "I'd lost track of where I'd come from," Corey admits. His ambitious feelings are further complicated by his attraction to one of the beautiful Metarey daughters.
"America America" isn't hawking any particular partisan agenda, but like other great political novels, it's a story in which the audacity of hope confronts the tenacity of power - and loses. Sen. Bonwiller is celebrated as the man who did "more for the causes of civil rights and labor than anyone in congressional history." But what troubled Corey then and continues to haunt him as an adult is the contrast between "public idealism and such personal ruthlessness," between the character needed to win an election and the character needed to lead a nation. Once the office has been attained, Corey notes, "then a politician must make a transformation that he may have no more ability to make than he has to grow wings and fly. He must change his personal ambition into ambition for his country."
One has to accept - even enjoy - a fair amount of such wisdom in "America America." A narrator who tends to lecture is fine with me, so long as the lecturer is this insightful and moving. 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.
"America America"
Author: Ethan Canin
Publisher: Random House, $27