FOR KINGS AND PLANETS
By Ethan Canin
Random House, 335 pages, $24.95
Ethan Canin’s body of fiction reminds me of a single polished stone that, at first glance, seems muted and monochromatic. No matter the subject or the characters, it appears to cast a singular thematic glow-the idea that character is fate, as Canin spells it out, citing Heraclitus, in two of the four stories in his 1994 collection “The Palace Thief.” Because so much of his work is superficially alike–stories of men and their fathers, wives, brothers and friends, of the consequences of being in control and letting go-he appears to break no new ground.
Fortunately, it’s not quite that simple. In each story in “The Palace Thief” and his superb debut collection, “Emperor of the Air,” Canin holds his stone to the light, turns it ever so slightly, and suddenly we see new features, angles, depths-variations on a theme. In his short fiction, the variety that Canin has wrung from his potentially trite conceit is astonishing: an old man who turns to poetry to thaw his frozen, 46-year marriage, in “We Are Nighttime Travelers”; a teenager who must choose between running his father’s grocery store and watching the stars from the roof of the store, in “Starfood”; a straight-arrow accountant who breaks quite suddenly out of character, in “The Accountant.”
But when Canin tries to expand his canvas, as with 1991’s “Blue River,” his stone begins to show cracks. He is on familiar ground in “Blue River,” revisiting the two brothers from “American Beauty,” an “Emperor of the Air” story, and showing the seemingly predictable arcs their lives have followed, the fates their characters have bestowed upon them: The “good” brother is now a responsible eye surgeon, while the perennial screwup is a drifter. Ultimately, however, “Blue River” is lacking in surface area; it is as finely wrought as any of Canin’s stories, but it is essentially a one-act play set on an epic stage.
So, too, with Canin’s second novel, “For Kings and Planets.” Again, we have two men, friends this time: small-town Missourian Orno Tarcher and Upper East Side misfit Marshall Emerson, who meet as freshmen at Columbia University. Their story-Orno’s story, actually, with Marshall as an often-unseen but gravity-exerting supporting player-unfolds in a frustratingly episodic manner, right from the Gatsbyesque beginning in which Orno, like a less-discriminating Nick Carraway, is “almost … taken away from himself” by the city, by “the shining stone staircases, the taxicabs, the sea of nighttime lights,” by Marshall and his cigarettes and poetry and bohemian friends.
Character is indeed fate, for though button-down Orno unbends with a natty fedora and a smoking jacket, a Russian girlfriend and a fling or two, it isn’t too long before college is behind him and, over Marshall’s objections, he has settled on a stable, responsible career path. Meanwhile, Marshall, whom Orno has rescued from a suicide attempt, moves to Los Angeles, begins writing a dense, pretentious novel (“Estophius Adams returned to the land of his ancestral past on a day of magni-ficence and fervent heat . . .”), then pursues show-biz writing and cocaine, all the while maintaining a steady patter of glib self-loathing.
Canin’s writing has always been formal and poised, lending his characters a quiet authority. Strongest are his middle-age or elderly unreliable narrators, control freaks who, like Stevens the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” inadvertently let the reader in on what really happened. Canin is at his subtle best in the story “The Palace Thief,” about a retired history teacher who is blind to his inability to learn from his own past.
But “For Kings and Planets” lacks a terribly interesting protagonist. The book does have some lovely passages, scenes that flow over you like quicksilver, usually when Canin is carefully, minutely rhapsodizing the big city (“the afternoons still warm, filled with the last heat left over from Indian summer but no longer truly hot; the evenings colder and bearing the faint smell of water.”). But Canin is operating in the third person, and his central character, whose point of view we share, remains a cipher, or, closer still, a blank. Deadpan and noncommittal, Orno proceeds from scene to scene, life phase to life phase, and at the end of each is rewarded with a tidy revelation about himself-the product of his own musings or someone else’s punctuating declaration, too neat, too easily received. At one point, Marshall tells him: ” `You’re doing things you would never have done if you’d stayed with the world you knew.’ ” Later, Orno is overcome with self-doubt: “He blinked and was looking up at the dark stripe of the river, lit at its edge by the lights of North Bergen, when it came upon him with clarity that his father was right: he had lost his way.” And still later: “He and Marshall had sought each other out as refuge, it now seemed. He himself was a hayseed in the big city and Marshall was probably the real thing, a rueful heart and an ingenious mind together, a battler of his own frightening thoughts.”
Marshall, the tragically beautiful boy from whom Orno is meant to absorb such heat and light, is no less problematic. He’s engrossing in his early scenes, when Canin perfectly captures the heady rush of college-of being away from home and falling under the sway of late nights and cigarettes and alcohol and conversation, of “shadowed faces behind . . . raised tumblers and snifters.” But finally Marshall, with his made-up stories of a boyhood in Turkey, with a head full of poetry and self-destruction, feels tired, and so does his dysfunctional family of upper-class poseurs. He never evolves beyond anything more than a shadowy reflection of Orno-crazy to Orno’s straight.
The equally flawed “Blue River” carries at least the hint of damage and deception behind the narrator’s determinedly placid surface. It contains the promise of secrets revealed. In “For Kings and Planets,” there isn’t even that. Orno maintains an even keel, and, in his by-the-numbers eccentricities, so does Marshall. Canin has always been a welcomedly modest writer, neither flashily stylized nor achingly grandiose, but perhaps it’s time he expanded the scope of his vision. Character is fate, but is anything truly etched in stone?
