FDL Book Salon Welcomes Ethan Canin For America, America

Reading Ethan Canin’s soaring character-driven epic, America America, is like entering a soundtrack of intertwined Billy Joel masterpieces. The Stranger crossed with We Didn’t Start The Fire.

At the heart of this superb novel is the ever-present question: how is political change for the better ever born from such flawed humanity?

Of such questions, an entire generational saga, filled with well-developed characters, backstabbing irony, corruption, avarice, lust…your basic Beltway corruption scandal rolled into small-town America. With a side of robber baron fortunes and destiny tossed in for good measure.

America, America is set against the backdrop of the 1972 presidential election and the rending of national unity over Vietnam in that tumultuous period before Watergate ripped off the national scab. The peek inside the access-driven media circus is particularly illuminating:

To this day, I’m a student of politics, and it never fails to surprise me that journalists, and politicians, and all the people whom my profession now calls opinion makers, can still be swayed with just a few of the right gifts and the right trips, with just a few of the right drinks and the right singers and the right last names, and that the citizenry, in turn, by the millions and millions, can still be brought in line behind them. And it’s only grown worse….And it still surprises me to see, as I have now time and again over the years, the mixture in a single person of such public idealism and such personal ruthlessness.

The intersection of working class son Corey Sifter, the wealthy Metarey family, and powerful Sen. Henry Bonwiller pulls the reader along from the very first page all the way to the complex end that every fully-lived life produces. And along the way, all of the sordid corruption that power and money can bring gets laid out on the pages of Canin’s masterpiece. But it is the astute political observations which struck the loudest chords with me:

One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead…For a man on the rise in politics, power first comes through character — that combination of station and forcefulness that produces not just intimidation, which is power’s crudest form, but flattery, too, which is one of its more refined. After that, power begins to grow from its own essence, rising no longer exclusively from the man but from the office itself. And this is where some balance must be found between attainment and its allotment, between the unquenchable desire in any politician to rise, and the often humbling requirement that one’s station must now be used to some benefit. And here, of course, is where corruption begins; for power contains an irresistible urge to further itself: there is always the next race….

Ethan Canin’s America, America is at once a mourning for what could be but isn’t, a warning against yearning for a champion outside yourself, and even more so a complex glimpse into the heart of the best — and the worst — in all of us. Canin’s comment on emotion in politics stands as perhaps the most perceptive I’ve seen in a long while:

…mass politics is an emotional struggle above all, a primal battle that is more charismatic and animalistic than either ethical or reasoned…

It is that. If you haven’t yet read America, America, you should. It is, truly, one of the best books that I have read in years and will likely stand as a classic work of American fiction for generations to come. It is simply that good. With that, I welcome Ethan Canin to FDL and open the floor for discussion.

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