Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Ethan Canin
Ethan Canin has been getting some pretty good notice, so when Carry Me Across the Water became available at Audible.com I figured I would give it a shot. And now I'm not so sure I understand what all the excitement was about.
I'm not saying, mind, that it was a bad book. It's a good book, in fact. It just isn't a great book. By now it's a few weeks since I listened to it, and it isn't resonating in my head, which is one of the ways I can tell how good a book is. There have been a few in the last year or two that didn't leave a glorious first impression but that lingered in my imagination.
Canin tells a big story in this novel, and one with a lot of resonance within itself -- anti-Japanese racism, Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, the nature of love and committment, and more. The viewpoint character is an older man, born in Germany, who came to America as a teenager, served in the Pacific war, married a shicksa, and became a wealthy brewer in Pittsburgh. The backstory is pieced together in memories, more or less in chronological order, tying the reconstruction, in America, of his German life (where his family was also wealthy), with his troubled memories of the war. He is in the last stage of his life, past 75, and has not done badly with his life. He has, however, killed (probably) two men.
Morally, he is probably in the clear on both killings. One was during the war, the other a petty gangster who threatened him, his family, and his business. Of the two, the one that bothers him now is his work as a soldier. This is all nicely done. He has regrets, some of them not the usual, and he makes efforts both to conceal and resolve them. And yet, at the end, I was left unsatisfied.
Now, I don't need a neat resolution to enjoy a novel. I hope that my own novel doesn't have a pat ending. Nevertheless, when the protagonist (I read this long enough ago that I forget the name) finds his act of atonement and resolution, I felt a letdown. Was that all? What had troubled this man so much for so long should have required a more dramatic climax, and should have tied better to the many small problems that had been building through the book.
dmh
I'm not saying, mind, that it was a bad book. It's a good book, in fact. It just isn't a great book. By now it's a few weeks since I listened to it, and it isn't resonating in my head, which is one of the ways I can tell how good a book is. There have been a few in the last year or two that didn't leave a glorious first impression but that lingered in my imagination.
Canin tells a big story in this novel, and one with a lot of resonance within itself -- anti-Japanese racism, Jewish identity and anti-Semitism, the nature of love and committment, and more. The viewpoint character is an older man, born in Germany, who came to America as a teenager, served in the Pacific war, married a shicksa, and became a wealthy brewer in Pittsburgh. The backstory is pieced together in memories, more or less in chronological order, tying the reconstruction, in America, of his German life (where his family was also wealthy), with his troubled memories of the war. He is in the last stage of his life, past 75, and has not done badly with his life. He has, however, killed (probably) two men.
Morally, he is probably in the clear on both killings. One was during the war, the other a petty gangster who threatened him, his family, and his business. Of the two, the one that bothers him now is his work as a soldier. This is all nicely done. He has regrets, some of them not the usual, and he makes efforts both to conceal and resolve them. And yet, at the end, I was left unsatisfied.
Now, I don't need a neat resolution to enjoy a novel. I hope that my own novel doesn't have a pat ending. Nevertheless, when the protagonist (I read this long enough ago that I forget the name) finds his act of atonement and resolution, I felt a letdown. Was that all? What had troubled this man so much for so long should have required a more dramatic climax, and should have tied better to the many small problems that had been building through the book.
dmh
