Breaking Away from the Brat Pack
GUREWICH, DAVRO
Breaking Away from the Brat Pack Emperor of the Air By Ethan Canin Houghton Mifflin. 179 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by David Gurewich Author, "Travels with Dubinsky and Clive" In the title...
...He was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for outstanding first books, and the publisher notes in a press release that he has "sold every story he ever wrote...
...Considering the ripe wisdom that suffuses these often meticulously wrought stories, it is surprising to find out that their author is only 27 years old...
...Maybe in his next bookCaninwill leave a button or two undone...
...Although he resists at first ("...poetry is a barren choice...
...At dinner his mother declares that "next year, starting tonight, is going to be the year of getting to know us better...
...In "Pitch Memory" a widowed kleptomaniac is caught trying to steal a blouse, and her daughter gets her out of the jam with a $100 bribe...
...It'sinyourblood.'" The stab at familial determinism is not bad, it was better done in "The Year of Getting to Know Us...
...You can't get away from it.' Hetappedhischest...
...And if you are not utterly beguiled by the smoothness of it all, you may also notice how confidently Canin switches from one age perspective to another...
...And the ending is a clincher...
...Existential driving around, rebelling without a cause, running away from home to stroll endlessly through K-Marts-these fashionable motifs do not interest him...
...We like different foods and different music, keep our clothing in different drawers, and if it can be said that either of us has aspirations, I believe that they are to a different bliss...
...Like his " nighttime travelers" do...
...They are self-effacing and likable and, well, nice...
...If the proof of this is worked into the story somewhat awkwardly, the maturity of the notion itself is nevertheless impressive...
...He is also in his last year at Harvard Medical School...
...Reviewed by David Gurewich Author, "Travels with Dubinsky and Clive" In the title story of this collection, a 69-year-old retired high school teacher, childless and recently recovered from a myocardial infarction, tries to protect a 250-year-old diseased elm from his nextdoor neighbor's efforts to have it cut down...
...We wake at different hours now, sleep in different corners of the bed...
...You can't help feeling the lost ambition (he wanted to be a pro ballplayer), the quiet despair of an honest man caught in the midst of Southern California's real estate-money-drugs insanity...
...He is also a golf addict and a philanderer...
...Deciphering other men's riddles while the world is full of procreation and war...
...In "The Year of Getting to Know Us" -not the best story in the collection, but clearly one of the most ambitiousthe teenaged narrator is arrested for smashing the school counselor's windows and is brought home...
...He despairs over the alienation between him and his wife of 46 years: "I'd be a bamboozler to say that I have loved her for any more than half of these...
...A sensitive coach-after decades of brutes...
...Is it possible that he has become too technically proficient too soon...
...You just don't know it yet...
...The boy's father is a successful businessman who made a fortune by "being able to see the truth in any situation...
...Although the determination is touching, unease lingers: What are the rending forces assailing this ordinary family...
...Canin's characters do have their moral lapses, but they are unfailingly sensitive, intelligent and reflective...
...The struggle causes him to reflect on his life as it draws to a close: .. .all my adventures had a quality about them of safety and planned success...
...Still, Emperor of the A ir has made Canin something of a literary phenomenon...
...The author is no trailblazer...
...Working in his father's grocery store, he cannot bring himself to detain a woman shoplifter who comes in with mystifying infrequency and picks up nothing fancier than a couple of cartons of pineapple juice...
...His stories are keenly intelligent, and at his best his control seems absolute...
...it lifts him up despite himself, distancing him from his aches and pains...
...He goes out into the cold of a winter night to rediscover the world, and-mirabile dictu-falls in love with his wife again...
...as for conversation-that feast of reason, that flow of the soul-our house is silent as the bone yard...
...One day this narrator discovers poetry-Browning, Whitman, Eliot...
...In "American Beauty," a 16-year-old's elder brother almost smashes their sister's head with a hammer and then tells him: "You would have hit her too...
...I think that's where people like us have to lead the way...
...As in any collection, the quality of the stories varies ("Lies" should have been discarded after the creative-writing workshop for which it might have been written), and there is some duplication of themes...
...his first-person, present tense style has been tempered in the crucible of Raymond Carver's minimalism (perhaps he qualifies as a postminimalist, since his characters open up in the lines rather than between them...
...If something ever goes wrong, you're going to turn into a son of a bitch, just like me...
...I think most people will respond to honesty," says an assistant high school coach in his mid-30s...
...Much as that might delight his old instructors at the University of lowa writing program, I hope it is not the case...
...My personal favorite is "Where We Are Now...
...Another story, "We Are Nighttime Travelers," presents a retired traveling salesman who is afflicted with a plethora of diseases (the stories abound with medical concerns...
...Too many writers slash at the Norman Rockwell picture with savagery-Canin maps out the minute cracks in the paint with careful, surgical precision...
...Canin makes his salvation thoroughly believable: a triumph of human spirit over age, sickness, frailty, bitterness...
...Reading through these stories, you start to recognize that the narratorsthe male ones, at any rate-are essentially the same person at various stages of life...
...Canin's talent is beyond dispute...
...Canin is no brat-packer...
...In my life I have done few things that have frightened me...
...You don't have to get to know me," he says to his son, "because one day you're going to grow up and then you're going to be me...
...In fact, that bothers me a little...
...Rather, they are decent, hard-working, middle-class people, without social pretensions...
...His characters aren't the type to break out into mindless group sex, nor do they constantly see their faces reflected in mirrors between geometrically perfect lines of cocaine...
...As Emperor of the Air depicts it, the American family is troubled and unsettled, yet each member goes to extraordinary lengths to appreciate the concerns of the others...
...His stalwart suburbanites are easily traceable to early Cheever...
...The tone is calm, deliberate: "...though I have thought otherwise, I now think that hope is the essence of all good men...
...Hasn't the author ever seen The Last Picture Show...
...Star Food" focuses on a dreamer of a boy who spends his spare time on rooftops gazing at the sky...
...I am an average man," says the protagonist of "We Are Nighttime Travelers...
...The aforesaid coach is dragged by his wife to shop for a house the couple has no money to buy...
Vol. 71 • March 1988 • No. 5
