Red Room Where the Writers Are

Review Excerpt:

I just completed "America, America" by Ethan Canin. Bump elbows with him here:

It left me stunned and gasping for more.

The story telling skills and flowing descriptions of a bygone era are both remarkably brilliant and splendidly insightful. The tale follows the life of Corey Sifter, beginning in the early 1970s when he is hired by the town's wealthy philanthropist family, the Metareys. What we are able to follow in the book is a blow by blow account of the death of optimistic idealism and a whole generation that was brutally awakened from somnolent innocence, almost overnight. The reader is allowed to watch the building of a political and personal empire and it's ultimate, and resounding downfall, as well as the intimacies within two families of very different and nearly opposite socioeconomic classes.

It is a novel that tells us the ultimate meanings of the words loyalty, integrity, and family. It tells us of the twisted paths and intertwining lanes of fate, vanity, tragedy, and redemption we all must somehow travel in life.

And in the end, it is finally a perfect novel of the extreme importance of survival; the things we carry from our parents, the things our children carry forward from us, and the wisdom of looking for the truth in both directions on nature's delicately, precariously balanced time line.