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My Brother's Keeper?
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19536 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1991 |
1,941 Words |
| Author
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Oliver Conant
Liver Conant is a New York-based reviewer and critic whose
work has appeared in such publications as the New York Times
Book Review, the New Leader, Dissent, and the American Book
Review. |
BLUE RIVER
Ethan Canin
Houghton Mifflin, 1991
220 pp., $19.95
Ethan Canin is the author of the well-received collection of short stories The Emperor of the Air. His medical training is discernible in his short stories, which may in part explain why they attracted so much favorable notice: Reviewers eagerly announced to the world their discovery of a young writer who seemed to be taking his place in a tradition of writing doctors that includes such notables as William Carlos Williams and Anton Chekov. That he was so young (in his twenties at the time) a Harvard graduate, and strikingly handsome--didn't hurt. Now, some three years after The Emperor of the Air, Canin has published Blue River, his first novel, which traces the complicated permutations of the relationship of two brothers: a relationship compounded by deep if unarticulated feeling, fervent emulation, long buried guilt, profound disappointment, and--just possibly--the hope of renewal and sustained connection. In almost every way that counts--in its style, the importance of its theme, literary quality--Blue River fulfills the hopes raised by the short stories and exceeds them. With this novel, Ethan Canin has taken his place among the most promising novelists of his generation.
Canin's narrator is Edward Sellers, a successful eye surgeon in his "thirty-first year." Edward lives with his wife, Elizabeth, five-year-old son Jonathan, and dog Abraham in a comfortable house with a swimming pool on a carefully tended two-thirds acre in an affluent California suburb. It's the kind of house "where the refrigerator has two doors and makes its own ice, where the front yard floodlights sense evening with their own circuits." Jonathan is sent to a good school, where Greek and Latin are taught. Edward, whose lucrative practice provides for all this, keeps his money in three local banks.
The modest affluence and security of the life that Edward has made for himself is a far cry from the rather pinched circumstances of his youth in Blue River, the small Wisconsin town where he grew up along with his elder brother, Lawrence, and sister Darienne. In a long, retrospective portion of the narrative entitled "Wisconsin," we learn that Edward's father, a fuel company engineer, embezzled money from his employers and abandoned his family shortly before Edward was born, leaving the task of raising the three children to Edward's mother, a pious woman with some education. Making do on almost no money, she settles her family in a house located
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