America America

The national disillusion of the 1970s. In miniature.
Ethan Canin’s fourth novel is, mercifully, less overarching than its portentous title would suggest. Recreating the national disillusion of the 1970s in miniature, Canin’s story focuses on Corey Sifter, a middle-class upstate New York boy who is catapulted into the world of politics when the town patriarch takes him under his wing. From digging holes in Liam Metarey’s lawn, Corey is elevated to a surrogate son, attending a tony prep school on his employer’s dime and even exchanging the occasional furtive kiss with his eldest daughter.

In 1971, Metarey begins laying the groundwork for a presidential run by one Senator Bonwiller, a long-running friend of organized labor positioned somewhat to the left of George McGovern. But history tells us Bonwiller’s campaign is doomed, as does Corey, narrating from the present day, where he has become a newspaperman of some repute. Canin is cagey, verging on coy, about the cause of Bonwiller’s downfall until the book’s final chapters; if any real-life reporter so egregiously buried the lead, he’d be out of a job in an instant. But the allusions to Chappaquiddick fly thick and fast enough that any mildly astute reader can guess where the story is headed, which just makes the charade more superfluous.

Canin, who teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, writes in classic Iowa style: dry, perfectly formed sentences, with a leisurely, measured cadence. Compared to Hunter S. Thompson’s account of the same electoral season, America, America is a bath of warm milk. But the novel’s pastoral feel only sharpens the sense of loss. Canin writes as if from an unsullied patch of ground where better things are still possible, and the country’s promise has not been lost. Rather than a howl of outrage, America, America is a lament, not a call to arms but a call to prayer.