Politics and Prose

America America possesses a broad humanitarian spirit.

by Matt Jakubowski

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Escape the barrage of election-year coverage in every morning paper and take a trip to Saline, N.Y., circa 1970, where Ethan Canin's wistful novel about politics and ambition, America America (Random House), takes place.

Saline is the quiet town where rugged narrator Corey Sifter learns to be stoic, like his blue-collar dad, and to value hard work and family. What eventually separates father from son is that Corey gets to see firsthand how their beloved senator, Henry "Working Man's Hero" Bonwiller, ruins his own shot at the presidency.

Corey sees this while working as a handyman for the wealthy Metarey family, which founded Saline. They treat Corey like a son, since their own is in Vietnam. But life gets ugly after the Metareys bankroll randy old Bonwiller's White House dream.

After private school and college, Corey grows up to become a newspaper publisher and raise his own family. He studies how the trajectory of his life eclipsed his father's, weighing the virtues and dangers of personal and political ambition. He frets that the better life he earned working for the Metareys came, predictably, with a cost: knowledge of evil.

Canin presents generations of Metareys and Sifters, rich and poor, with graceful moves in time that give key revelations a steady resonance. He withholds facts to build suspense, which makes the reading fun. The story jumps lightly along and his characters are likable, if somewhat cardboard. Some major plot points are cliché, and the language falters as he tries to cram in generations of family wisdom.

His strongest writing delivers weighty detail, as in this scene of the Sifters at home before a day at work for the Metareys: "On the stove ledge now [my mother] was fixing sardine sandwiches for my father and me and examining a sheet of stationery that had been engraved with the image of the same oak we were about to work under. I could tell she was reading terms of payment."

The broad humanitarian spirit of the book dictates the plot arc, and Canin serves up strange justice for the men behind the scandal. It's as if in the end Corey is trying to convince himself that belief in virtue can overcome the hard truth about a dark past.

(m_jakubowski@citypaper.net)