ETHAN CANIN

Born: July 19, 1960

Birthplace: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Other literary forms

In addition to his acclaimed short-story collections, Ethan Canin is the author of the novels Blue River (1991), For Kings and Planets (1998), Carry Me Across the Water (2001), and America America (2008).

Achievements

Ethan Canin received the the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship (1988), the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award (1989), two National Endowment for the Arts grants (1989 and 1996), the California Book Award/Silver Medal in Fiction (1994), the Lyndhurst Prize (1994-1996), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010).

Biography

Ethan Andrew Canin’s talents as a writer were first recognized by popular romance author Danielle Steel, who taught at Canin’s private high school before her own novels became successful. After high school, Canin attended Stanford University, where he studied physics and then switched to English. After graduating from Stanford in 1982, he went on to get an M.F.A. from the prestigious writing program at the University of Iowa. Discouraged by his experience at the Iowa workshop, where he learned about many of the negative aspects of a writer’s life, and feeling a need to be useful, Canin elected to attend Harvard’s medical school. He was in the midst of his exams at medical school when the publishing company Houghton Mifflin proposed that he prepare a collection of short stories. This volume, Emperor of the Air, became a best seller, rare among short-story collections. Canin’s success has been such that he has published every story he wrote from his first acceptance in 1987. Although he received his M.D. from Harvard in 1992 and was a resident at a San Francisco hospital for a time, Canin left medicine to devote himself exclusively to writing. In 1998, he joined the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Analysis

Ethan Canin’s short stories are characterized by a humorous and empathic approach to his characters and their situations and by a polished literary style. Family life is a favorite subject, although the members of Canin’s families are almost always at odds with one another. Often Canin’s stories turn on the exploration of two characters who, even if friends or members of the same family, approach life with differing values and modes of perception. As the paths of these characters diverge, Canin introduces a larger, more reflective aspect to his stories that allows the reader to consider such issues as sanity and normality, delinquency and conventionality, science and art.

The construction of a viable male identity is a strong concern in Canin’s work. Whether they are concerned with fathers and sons, students and teachers, peers or brothers, Canin’s stories often portray men whose characters or values clash. Of special concern is the contrast between the man who conforms to a fairly traditional role and the man who has chosen a more offbeat and unconventional way of life. Canin’s mavericks can be frightening or they can be inspiring, but they always exist as a possibility in the psyche of his male characters.

The contrast between a scientific, secular America, whose primary value is material well-being, and a more imaginative, rebellious, or spiritual vision of life is also an important theme in Canin’s work. In this theme readers can see the exquisite contrast between the medical and literary sides of Canin himself. In exploring the tensions in contemporary American life, however, Canin avoids an easy, journalistic topicality, so that his stories engage larger moral and philosophical issues and begin to function as timeless parables.

Emperor of the Air

Although the stories in Emperor of the Air feature characters suffering from heart disease, epilepsy, and birth defects, these illnesses serve larger themes involving the tensions between father and son and between the practical mind and the poetic imagination. In “Star Food,” a young boy must resolve his father’s wish that he help in his grocery store and learn to work for a living with the encouragement to dream coming from his mother, who feels that the time the boy spends on the roof looking at the stars will one day make him a great man. Competing perspectives are also the subject of “American Beauty.” In this story, which features characters that return in Canin’s novel Blue River, tensions between the creative Darienne and her two brothers, who are more interested in motorcycle mechanics, also contrast romantic and practical views of the world. Whereas the young boy in “Star Food” is able to balance these two perspectives, the divisions in Darlene’s family end with revelations of psychopathology on the part of the older, dominant brother, who claims his brutal behavior as one of the prerogatives of masculinity.

Male role models are also the topic of “The Year of Getting to Know Us.” The father’s philandering and preoccupation with work and golf have made him an inaccessible parent, and his son reacts with acts of vandalism. Nevertheless, the remote father suggests that his emotional distance is actually, sadly, teaching his son how to be a man. The title story, “Emperor of the Air,” gives readers a brighter look at the father-son relationship but once again explores the tensions between realistic and romantic perspectives. In this story, an old man suffering from heart disease fights to rescue an unhealthy old elm tree from his neighbor, a young man who wants to sacrifice it in the interests of three saplings growing in his yard. This contest between the old generation and the new is complicated by the fact that the old man is a former high school science teacher who has had no children, whereas the young father, who knows nothing about science, has a son. The young father invents for his son a magical story about one of the constellations in the sky, which he identifies as a sword that belongs to “the emperor of the air”; the future, in this story, seems to belong to the imaginative storyteller and not to the realistic man of science. A similar tribute to the poetic imagination, “We Are Nighttime Travelers,” features a retired couple who have grown apart but who rediscover the love that brought them together when the husband begins writing poetry.

The Palace Thief

Canin’s second collection consists of four long stories, each featuring two men who are linked in one way or another but who represent contrasting perspectives and whose lives have widely diverged. “Accountant” is told from the perspective of Abba Roth, whose careful, even voice reveals a deeply conventional man with a steady, if dull, life as an accountant and family man. His opposite is Eugene Peters, a boyhood friend whose free spirit and enthusiasm for auto mechanics have provided him with a lucrative business. In middle age, Roth and Peters both attend a fantasy baseball camp overseen by the great former baseball player Willie Mays. Although Roth is an excellent ballplayer, his inability to get into the spirit of the game ends in Mays’s awarding a pair of prized baseball socks not to the tiresome Roth but to the lively Peters. A resentful Roth steals one of the socks, but this one act of uncharacteristic daring cannot change the fact that he knows he has traded a life with a potential for passion, spontaneity, and adventure for a life of material security and comfort.

“Batorsag and Szerelem” returns to one of Canin’s favorite themes—namely, the tensions between a brilliant and eccentric young man and his admiring kid brother. The title refers to words invented by the older brother, Clive, a math prodigy who has developed a secret language he shares only with his best friend Eddie. The words in the title are eventually associated with sexual secrets in Clive’s life that so shock and upset his previously indulgent parents that their discovery begins what Clive’s brother describes as “the great unturning,” in which he becomes the favored son and the free-spirited Clive the outcast whose great promise is never fulfilled.

Like “Accountant,” the third story, “City of Broken Hearts,” features both baseball and a defeated, middle-aged businessman. Wilson Kohler, who has lost his wife to someone higher up in the company, is a lonely man who seeks consolation by devoting himself to the fortunes of the Boston Red Sox baseball team. Wilson is baffled by the life of his son Brent, an idealistic college student who wears an earring and whose sensitivity to the feminine side has led him to work during his summer vacation at a shelter for battered women. Representative of a new and different generation of men, Brent also has an almost magical role in the life of his father, gently bringing his father out of the past and into a love affair that will give him a new lease on life.

The title story, “The Palace Thief,” is narrated by Hundert, a retired history teacher at a fashionable West Virginia preparatory school. Although he prides himself on his integrity and his role as the molder of the young, Hundert was once manipulated by a powerful senator into making allowances for his ne’er-do-well son, whom Hundert knows to have cheated and whose dishonesty he has never exposed. The unscrupulous son in turn becomes a powerful political and economic force in the state, and he manipulates the now-retired professor into helping him become elected senator. Hundert constantly draws on analogies between his situation and the Augustan age of the Roman Empire, but he does not realize that, far from being a principal player, he is merely a slave, serving the interests of the wealthy and the powerful.

Bibliography

Aarons, Victoria. “Ancient Acts of Love and Betrayal: Ethan Canin’s ‘Batorsag and Szerelem.’” In What Happened to Abraham? Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005. An analysis of one of Canin’s short stories. Aarons argues that Canin draws from a “long tradition of Jewish storytelling,” and she describes him as a writer “for whom the past, grafted upon the present, is itself the medium for the unfolding” of place and character.

Canin, Ethan. “A Conversation with . . . Ethan Canin.” Interview by Lewis Burke Frumkes. Writer 113, no. 5 (May, 2000): 19. Canin discusses his novel For Kings and Planets, how he incorporates his medical knowledge into his fiction, and his future plans. He also provides advice for young writers.

Crawford, Andrea. “For Writers, the Doctor’s Definitely In.” Poets and Writers 37, no. 1 (January/February, 2009): 16-20. Reports on the growing number of physicians writing fiction, singling out Canin as the most prominent among them. Canin explains why medical doctors are becoming creative writers.

Frucht, Abby. “Grand Delusions.” The New York Times, February 20, 1994. Review of The Palace Thief discusses each of the four stories in detail. Although Frucht terms the stories highly intellectual, she does not feel that this distracts from their effectiveness in depicting lives that are disintegrating. She characterizes all four protagonists as “anti-heroes” who seem either foolish or delusional about their lives and find that, instead of the expected safety and security, they are in the midst of a vast psychological minefield.

Gurewich, David. “Breaking Away from the Brat Pack.” The New Leader (March 21, 1988): 21-22. This review of Emperor of the Air examines several stories in detail, pointing out their depiction of the American family as troubled and unsettled. Gurewich does not feel Canin is a trailblazer, noting the similarity to the stories of John Cheever, but also describes Canin as a “postminimalist” who moves the short story into the future.

Leavitt, David. “As Children and Others See It.” The New York Times Book Review, February 14, 1988, 7. In this mixed review of Emperor of the Air, Leavitt, a well-known novelist and short-story writer, discusses a number of the stories in this collection. While suggesting the stories are overly artful and sentimental, Leavitt also praises Canin’s talent as prodigious and admits that he admires his skill and imagination.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. Emperor of the Air. The New York Times, January 23, 1988, p. C34. Important review by the noted critic discusses a number of the stories from Emperor of the Air in detail, praising the stories as remarkable and as preoccupied with matters of ultimate concern—life and death, youth and age, wealth and poverty.

_______. “Errors in Judgment and Ripples Thereof.” The New York Times, February 3, 1994. Review of The Palace Thief singles out the first story, “The Accountant,” as the best of the four and provides a lengthy analysis of it. Notes that although the subject matter is contemporary, characters and plots are traditional. Applauds the collection as a commanding performance that surpasses Canin’s two previous books and calls him one of the most satisfying writers on the contemporary scene.

Michener, Charles. “The Palace Thief.” The New York Times, March 21, 1994, p. 76. Describes the stories as old-fashioned tales that echo past masters Henry James and John O’Hara but praises Canin’s natural assurance of voice, his acuity, the steadiness of his moral compass, and his often humorous detail.

Slay, Jack, Jr. “(Re)Solving the (Math) Problems in Ethan Canin’s ‘Batorsag and Szerelem.’” Critique 47, no. 1 (Fall, 2004): 27-30. Provides solutions to the math problems included in this short story. Also discusses the story’s characters, setting, and closing scene.

Yardley, Jonathan. “Canin’s Mature Miracles.” The Washington Post, January 20, 1988, p. C2. An important review of Emperor of the Air by one of the United States’ most influential literary critics, this essay praises Canin’s maturity. Pointing out especially his insights into the relationship between father and son and also into the mysteries of the solitary, individual psyche, Yardley sums up his achievement by saying that in studying the health of the body, Canin has also discovered much about the human heart.

Margaret Boe Birns