AMERICA AMERICA
. Ethan Canin. Random. 458 pages. $27.
Ethan Canin's riveting and thought-provoking political novel arrives at the perfect time -- the summer before a pivotal presidential election -- and reflects wisely on the ongoing clash of public idealism and ruthless ambition. It's a marvelously ambitious book, a pointed history lesson and a timeless meditation on fate and self-determination. Canin, who is on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and author of the novels For Kings and Planets, Blue River and Carry Me Across the Water and two stellar short-story collections, has unleashed all his considerable skills here, and it's our reward that America America turns out to be his best and most affecting work.
The Nixon-era backdrop is at once familiar and strange, a time in which innocence lingers, and what we are fond of calling ''the ingenuity of the American working man'' still matters, at least in the small towns where Mom and Pop man the counter of the hardware store, and the bakery smells of bread fresh from the oven instead of the cool, corporate scent of espresso.
America America is a moving elegy for a faded way of life, then, but it's neither sentimental nor scolding in its exploration of past and present. The good old days may have been lucrative for the robber barons who profited in the new world, but they were clearly less kind to those who suffered and labored in their employ. Modern times bring the convenience of Crate & Barrel and Ikea but herald an end to small-town individuality. Some things, of course, transcend time: human weakness, vanity, venality, ambition.
The novel's introspective narrator is Corey Sifter, publisher of a small newspaper in upstate New York (''We're the last of the local dailies not to have sold to McClatchy or Gannett or Murdoch''). A funeral has inspired Corey to recall his adolescence in Saline (rhymes with malign), ``a town that was almost entirely built and owned by a single family, the Metareys.'' The only child of working-class parents -- his father, a plumber and pipefitter, grew up in a household of miners -- Corey went to work for the Metareys as a teenager, doing odd jobs, developing odd friendships with the two Metarey daughters and learning the ancient art of kingmaking from the well-intentioned patriarch, Liam.
A wealthy landowner who sees himself as a champion of the working man and an idealist strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, Liam Metarey helped elect Democrat Henry Bonwiller to the Senate, and now he aims to push the popular ''Senator Bon'' -- perhaps the last of the great liberal politicians -- into the White House. Union support should be strong: ``[A]nyone who knows the history of the American labor movement knows how pivotal Henry Bonwiller was -- and thus Liam Metarey -- in a good many of its triumphs. It's easy to see what a force those men have been in our lives -- it's easy to see why we revered them.''
But rumors of a nightmarish scandal begin to haunt the campaign; the name of Ted Kennedy will come to mind as secrets unfold. But similarities to sordid history do not propel America America so determinedly forward; Corey's middle-aged deconstruction of his youthful complicity in the terrible event is what matters. He is prompted to assess his behavior by images of his three grown daughters and the presence of a bright young intern, Trieste Millbury, the modern-day version of the ambitious working-class teenager he used to be. His fate, he understands, is ``to know everything you have ever done, every act you've ever had a part in, has another meaning as well, and that it is both greater and more terrible than the one you knew.''
The gaping distance between unimaginable wealth and borderline poverty is familiar territory for Canin, but he intuitively paints Corey's rise to white-collar reality less as a seduction than as the natural evolution of that peculiarly American dream in which sons are more successful than their fathers. Like Liam, Corey sees himself as a man of the people and tells Trieste casually, ''Powerful men are just like everybody else. They put their pants on one leg at a time.'' Yet even Trieste senses the falsehood. Corey and men like him revere men like Sen. Bonwiller and Liam Metarey because of their power and success. But what if the price for either is simply too high?
We cheer the ingenuity of the working man less often these days. The past fades. The Cleary Brothers bakery becomes Starbucks, and the magnificent oaks on the Metarey property fall to make room for a strip mall. What have we learned, then? ''The old verities, mostly,'' Corey says, ''that love for our children is what sustains us; that people are not what they seem; that those we hate bear some wound equal to our own; that power is desperation's salve, and that this fact as much as any is what dooms and dooms us.'' Canin offers this sobering lesson with insight and grace.
Connie Ogle is The Miami Herald's book editor.
