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Personal, political drive Canin

By John Kenyon

It might seem as if Ethan Canin was prescient – or, if you’re cynical, very market savvy – in publishing a political novel about change and hope in a year when such ideals were a driving electoral force.

Canin will take credit for prescience, but any notion that the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop instructor’s latest novel, America, America, was conceived to capitalize on the 2008 electoral season is wrong, he says.

“If you write a political scandal novel, you’ll always be prescient,” he says. As for the timing, however, he adds that he finished the book a year before he wanted to because his publisher, Random House, wanted to release it before this summer’s party conventions.

Canin will read from the novel at 7 p.m. Monday at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St.

Politics wasn’t even part of the story at the outset. In its published form, Canin’s fifth novel and seventh book overall is told by Corey Sifter, an aging newspaper editor who takes the funeral of Sen. Henry Bonwiller as an opportunity to retell a tale from his youth. The story begins when Sifter worked for Massachusetts scion Liam Metarey, who helped to launch and largely funded Bonwiller’s presidential campaign.

Bonwiller is undone by scandal, and Sifter is a witness to – and a somewhat unwitting participant in – some of what transpires. Canin handles this flashback by having Sifter tell his story to Trieste Millbury, a young intern reporter who is about the age Sifter was when the pivotal events took place.

As originally conceived, Sifter was a teacher, Canin says. There was no senator and the character of Trieste was a boy. With about 150 pages completed, Canin, an avowed political junkie, hit upon the idea of introducing politics to the mix.

That was driven in part by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. That event originally stopped Canin from writing all together, the act itself seeming unimportant against such a backdrop, he has said.

“That repelled me and also brought me back,” he says. “I was driven to that interest by 9/11, what fear does to a culture. It’s part of what I think happened to the Great Society. In times of fear, people become less generous.”

There are parallels between Bonwiller’s undoing and that of Sen. Edward Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. Canin says liberalism faced a similar setback at that time and shortly after Sept. 11.

“That incident, Chappaquiddick, gave a face to those who were afraid to give so much away any more,” he says. “Plus, in this case it would take their daughters as well. That was a turning point in the decline in liberalism, or what I call the politics of generosity.”

Though he says Kennedy and Chappaquiddick weren’t on his mind when he came up with the events that derail Bonwiller’s presidential bid, it did eventually factor into the book. Kennedy’s televised speech denying what took place is closely approximated by Bonwiller’s speech after his incident.

Still, Canin says he really had another senator in mind when writing the character, imagining him more like Lyndon Johnson.

“When I do readings, I read the senator with a southern accent, like LBJ,” he says. “Generous but a political Machiavellian.”

Things may once again be shifting in the country. While Canin was writing about a time when liberalism waned, it’s obvious from this month’s election results that it is on the rise yet again. There are echoes of that in Canin’s book, as Bonwiller espouses principles that could have been lifted from Barack Obama’s stump speeches.

“I wrote a speech about bridges of hope years before I’d heard of Obama,” Canin says, touching again on the notion of prescience.

In the book, Bonwiller gives a speech that came to be known as his “Bridges of Hope” speech: “We live alongside too many canyons of hate. Now is the time to cross them. Now is the time to cross them, on bridges of hope.”

If Canin is right, however, current financial difficulties could ground this new wave of liberalism before it even takes off. Talking about his students in the workshop, he says they are very different in some aspects from those he studied with during his own time at the workshop. He graduated with a master’s degree in 1984.

“They’re thinking about whether they want a two-book deal or a three-book deal,” he says. “These are the things of a depression generation, but they grew up relatively prosperous. When I was a student here, I never even thought of writing a book. Now, they are very aware of the marketplace.”

His students did, in a roundabout way, help him with America, America. A key scene that finds young Sifter contemplating class and ambition takes place on the Metarey’s sailboat. In the early version, that scene opened the book. It was a scene that Canin wrote a decade before and put into a pile, something he says he does frequently.

“I teach a 14-week semester. I have them write openings to a story each week and I’ll join them,” he says. “If they get nothing else out of it, they’ll at least have 14 openings in a drawer they can use some day.”

Some have called this Canin’s Great American Novel, but he demurs, saying he simply wrote about what interested him. It is certainly his longest and most involved novel, particularly when compared with his last, the brief Carry Me Across the Water.

“I like books that make sincere attempts at something,” he says. “The mode I get into when I write is a sincere mode. I work out my thinking when I’m writing. You discover (what the book is about) as you go along. You discover what you’re writing in the first draft and write it in the second.”

As he stated earlier, the book is about half political and half personal. The personal half really stems from Canin’s role as a father to three young children. While Sifter’s experience is steeped in political wrangling and class distinctions, above all his perspective is that of a father and mentor.

“It’s about revelations about what you’ve done in light of having kids,” Canin says. “He was a 16-year-old kid. It all must have been deathly exciting. But as a dad, you reconsider everything that you’ve done. The psychological motivation for me was having children. I’m a different writer and a different reader because of kids.”

Canin has famously said that he hates the act of writing. The author, who earned early praise in his career for his novellas and shorter fiction, says he increasingly thinks of the novel as his format.

“Last night I woke up at three in the morning to write because I have an idea,” he says. “Fifteen years ago it would have been a story, but now it’s more novelistic.”

Seven years passed between his last novel and this one. While Sept. 11 played a part in the delay, he says some of it is simply par for most writers, saying they are “louts by nature.”

“If writers had the work ethic of those in medicine, we all would be Joyce Carol Oates,” he says of the wildly prolific novelist.

Canin says he can write a page a day in 45 minutes, but it’s the “three hours of angst around it” that causes delays.

Does that mean another seven year wait for his next book?

“Not if I make my contract,” he responds with a smile.