Why You'll Love This
A working-class boy handed access to American power learns the exact price of that gift — decades later, he's still paying it.
- Great if you want: literary fiction where politics, class, and moral compromise collide
- The experience: slow, ruminative, and quietly devastating — built for patient readers
- The writing: Canin writes with restrained precision; every sentence carries earned weight
- Skip if: you want plot momentum — this lingers more than it drives
About This Book
Set against the political turbulence of early 1970s America, Ethan Canin's novel follows Corey Sifter, a working-class boy from upstate New York who is taken under the wing of the wealthy, influential Metarey family and drawn into the orbit of a charismatic senator's presidential campaign. What begins as a story of unlikely opportunity and social mobility gradually reveals itself as something far more morally complicated — a reckoning with what we owe to those who lift us up, and what we sacrifice when ambition and loyalty pull in opposite directions. Canin is less interested in political intrigue than in the quieter, more lasting damage of compromised ideals.
What makes the novel worth sitting with is Canin's prose, which moves between past and present with measured, almost elegiac control. Corey narrates from middle age, looking back at a defining season with the rueful clarity of someone who has had decades to understand what he could not at the time. That retrospective structure gives the book unusual emotional weight — every scene carries the shadow of consequence. Canin writes with a novelist's patience and a journalist's precision, and the combination makes even small moments feel freighted with meaning.