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Fear of Failure
Sam Apple
With his new novel, it's time to stop speaking of Ethan Canin only in terms of writers like Cheever and Bellow. The physician-author's literary achievements hold up all on their own � though he may not believe it.
It's hard to read Ethan Canin's new novel, "Carry Me Across the Water," without thinking of Saul Bellow. Canin readily acknowledges that the name of the book's hero, August (Augie) Kleinman, is "a little homage" to Bellow's Augie March. And Kleinman, like so many Bellovian protagonists, is an elderly Jewish man struggling to make sense of a life already lived.
Canin's turn to Jewish subject matter will likely surprise fans of his four previous books. A Jew and a literary star for over a decade, Canin, 41, has never been saddled with that ill-defined but unshakeable title, "Jewish writer." Though Jewish characters have appeared in Canin's past works, such as the short story collection "Emperor of the Air," and the novel "For Kings and Planets," they have been assimilated Jews, their religious or ethnic identities never central to the plots. Indeed, Canin has long been associated not with Bellow but with the quintessentially goyish John Cheever, whose carefully crated tales of suburban strife were models for Canin's first stories.
Canin nevertheless cites Bellow as one of his major influences. "The world that Bellow writes about," Canin told The Report in a recent telephone interview, referring to American Jewish immigrant life in the first half of the 20th century, "is also the world of my parents. Even though I never lived in that culture, it somehow made it into my sense of the past."
Like Bellow's Augie March, Augie Kleinman's appetite for life is too large for the Jewish enclave of his youth. In one of the novel's first scenes, a teenage Kleinman takes the train from his family's bungalow in Queens into New York City to visit a Fordham University football practice. On an impulse, Kleinman puts on a uniform, trots onto the field, and lands a tremendous tackle on a high-stepping Fordham player.
The anecdote works as a neat foreshadowing of the hero's headfirst hurl into America. But though Kleinman leaves religion behind as he marries an Irish Catholic woman and opens a successful brewery in Pennsylvania, Judaism remains central to the novel. Moving back and forth in time with tightly interwoven episodes from Kleinman's life, "Carry Me Across the Water" recounts the story of his childhood escape from Germany after his mother has foreseen the rise of the Nazis. The book also details Kleinman's adolescence spent with a religious and loving stepfather, who eventually gives up trying to make a Jew out of him. When the narrative returns to the present, Kleinman, now 78, is repeatedly reminded of Jewish rituals by his daughter-in-law, a convert who teaches Kleinman that the Hebrew word for sin, "chayt," (sp. ok)means "missing the mark."
"Carry Me Across the Water" might be read as Kleinman's reevaluation of life's purpose in the aftermath of his wife's illness and death. The novel's power lies in Canin's delicate rendering of the always hard-nosed Kleinman's deeply emotional response to his loss. Without his beloved Ginger, he finds the fortune he has amassed strangely irrelevant. Asked by his daughter-in-law on Yom Kippur if he has anything to atone for, Kleinman surprises himself by answering "the hoarding of money." But Kleinman isn't simply depressed. He's engaged in a genuine search for meaning, a search that takes him on a journey to Japan to find the family of a Japanese soldier he killed in World War II.
Though his late-life crisis is the stuff of Bellow, Kleinman would never be mistaken for one of Bellow's creations. Bellow writes about neurotics and intellectuals. Canin, by contrast, has always been more interested in the drama that lies beneath seemingly ordinary life. And whereas Bellow is known for the muscularity of his prose, Canin allows his language to take a backseat to the action.
This difference in style may emerge from the different personalities of the two men. Unlike the outspoken Bellow, Canin is quiet and insecure about his talents. Indeed, the mystery to him is how someone so accomplished can still find so much room for self-doubt. Canin is one of the most critically acclaimed writers of his generation. His first book, "Emperor of the Air," landed on the New York Times bestseller list in 1988 � an almost unheard of achievement for a collection of short stories. Canin teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, the most prestigious writing program in the country. He is tall (almost 6 feet 4inches), handsome, and happily married with two children.
Canin is also a graduate of Harvard Medical School. This surprising insert into his r�sum� is a result, he admits, of his abiding lack of confidence in his fiction. After graduating from the University of Iowa's writing program in 1984, he didn't think he had what it took to become a writer. "It was something of a failure of imagination really," he recalls. "I was a Jewish kid. I had always been good in school. When I tried to be a writer and didn't succeed, I sort of panicked and then hit upon the idea of medicine."
Just how unsuccessful was Canin? Eileen Pollack, a classmate of Canin's at Iowa and a fellow novelist, recalls that Canin had already published several stories when he attended Iowa, and that "everyone knew he was going to be a star." Canin, however, true to character, doesn't remember those stories receiving much attention.
But it was the aspiring writer's timid nature and not his writing that seemingly made him feel ill-suited for success at Iowa. Canin says that his tendency to have narrators who are on the sidelines of his plots looking on "is probably just the prose representation of some psychological truth" about himself. And he describes Iowa's intensely competitive atmosphere at the time as "nasty." Says Pollack: "I have a vivid memory of looking over at Ethan during a particularly irritating argument in one workshop and he had his head down on his arms."
The frustrations of Iowa behind him, Canin was content to devote himself to his medical studies. But when an editor who had read several of his stories called a few years later and asked if he was interested in publishing a collection, his literary ambitions resurfaced. The result was "Emperor of the Air," which Canin sometimes cut class to work on during medical school. Yet despite the book's great success, Canin continued to question the viability of a writing career. He took time off from his studies to work on his first novel, "Blue River," only to return to medicine and eventually begin his residency in internal medicine at San Francisco General Hospital. In 1995, after two years, part of them spent in the AIDS ward, Canin made the difficult decision to give up medicine.
While he says he does not regret trading in his stethoscope for a pen, Canin thinks the time he spent in the hospital has influenced his writing. "I don't think one could write continually slapstick or buoyant stories knowing what I know and seeing what I've seen," he says.
Of course, it's not unusual for even the best writers to doubt themselves. It may even go with the territory. But Canin's seemingly extreme case of self-doubt persists. He says he finds writing to be a struggle, even agony, because of "the possibility of failure, the overwhelming possibility of failure." Unsatisfied, he adds, "in fact, the very slim chance of anything but failure."
Canin's fear of failure was presumably only intensified by the mixed reviews that followed "Blue River." After the acclaim for "Emperor of the Air," he received a large advance to write a novel. Says Joshua Henkin, a novelist who took a class with Canin during this period, "I think it was a hard time for Ethan in that there was a lot of pressure on him. There were all these comparisons to Cheever, which were unfair, of course, because Cheever is Cheever and Ethan was just starting out."
Whatever the reason for Canin's self-doubt, it likely goes hand in hand with the tenderness and honesty that makes his fiction so compelling. Canin's ability to reflect the influences of writers as different as Bellow and Cheever says a great deal both about his versatility, as well as about the interesting place of American Jewish fiction today. But perhaps it's time to stop thinking of Canin only in terms of other writers and to recognize him for what he is: one of the best American writers around. Now if we can only convince him of that.
(November 5, 2001)
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