America America by Ethan Canin

My friend Kate, who has never let me down in the book recommendation department (Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose… need I say more?) told me Ethan Canin’s novel was a good read. 450 plus pages in a week is a stretch for me but I made it under the wire. This novel, set in the early 1970s Nixon era, tells the story of Corey Sifter, the only son of working class parents, who works as an errand boy on the estate of the town’s most powerful family, the Metareys. During his time there, as a young teen, then on weekends from boarding school (funded by the Metareys), he becomes involved with the campaign of their Ted Kennedy-esque senator friend Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president. Corey becomes intimately involved with the ins and outs (as well as the down and dirty) of the campaign while also becoming entangled in the lives of the two Metarey daughters. The Kennedy connection carries through the novel in the character of Bonwiller, a ‘for the working man’ beloved liberal whose fatal flaws, alcohol and the involvement in the death of a young campaign worker in a car accident, becomes the ultimate downfall of both his campaign and the dreams of those who believed in him. Canin’s story telling is amazing, he weaves no less than five different time frames of Corey’s life into the story, switching seamlessly (in no particular order) from his teens to the present day, to his boarding school years, college and post-college,. And he writes beautifully about being a son and later, a parent to three daughters: “I’ve watched our own girls move away now – first to sleepovers, then to summer camps, then to college and boyfriends, then to jobs and husbands. I wonder how we’ve fared with them. I wonder which of our idle words have wounded them and which, years later and a thousand miles away, have buoyed them; which of our hopes have lifted them over the daunting obstacles in their lives and which have pressed back against their own ideas of themselves.” This book is a wonderful mix of a compelling, page turner and the thoughtfully written story of a man’s reflection of his life.