Analysis
Ethan Canin’s short stories are characterized by a humorous and empathic approach to his characters and their situations and by a polished literary style. Family life is a favorite subject, although the members of Canin’s families are almost always at odds with one another. Often Canin’s stories turn on the exploration of two characters who, even if friends or members of the same family, approach life with differing values and modes of perception. As the paths of these characters diverge, Canin introduces a larger, more reflective aspect to his stories that allows the reader to consider such issues as sanity and normality, delinquency and conventionality, science and art.
The construction of a viable male identity is a strong concern in Canin’s work. Whether they are concerned with fathers and sons, students and teachers, peers or brothers, Canin’s stories often portray men whose characters or values clash. Of special concern is the contrast between the man who conforms to a fairly traditional role and the man who has chosen a more offbeat and unconventional way of life. Canin’s mavericks can be frightening or they can be inspiring, but they always exist as a possibility in the psyche of his male characters.
The contrast between a scientific, secular America, whose primary value is material well-being, and a more imaginative, rebellious, or spiritual vision of life is also an important theme in Canin’s work. In this theme readers can see the exquisite contrast between the medical and literary sides of Canin himself. In exploring the tensions in contemporary American life, however, Canin avoids an easy, journalistic topicality, so that his stories engage larger moral and philosophical issues and begin to function as timeless parables.
Emperor of the Air
Although the stories in Emperor of the Air feature characters suffering from heart disease, epilepsy, and birth defects, these illnesses serve larger themes involving the tensions between father and son and between the practical mind and the poetic imagination. In “Star Food,” a young boy must resolve his father’s wish that he help in his grocery store and learn to work for a living with the encouragement to dream coming from his mother, who feels that the time the boy spends on the roof looking at the stars will one day make him a great man. Competing perspectives are also the subject of “American Beauty.” In this story, which features characters that return in Canin’s novel Blue River, tensions between the creative Darienne and her two brothers, who are more interested in motorcycle mechanics, also contrast romantic and practical views of the world. Whereas the young boy in “Star Food” is able to balance these two perspectives, the divisions in this family end with revelations of psychopathology on the part of the older, dominant brother, who claims his brutal behavior as one of the prerogatives of masculinity.
Male role models are also the topic of “The Year of Getting to Know Us.” The father’s philandering and preoccupation with work and golf have made him an inaccessible parent, and his son reacts with acts of vandalism. Nevertheless, the remote father suggests that his emotional distance is actually, sadly, teaching his son how to be a man. The title story, “Emperor of the Air,” gives readers a brighter look at the father-son relationship but once again explores the tensions between realistic and romantic perspectives. In this story, an old man suffering from heart disease fights to rescue an unhealthy old elm tree from his neighbor, a young man who wants to sacrifice it in the interests of three saplings growing in his yard. This contest between...
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the old generation and the new is complicated by the fact that the old man is a former high school science teacher who has had no children, whereas the young father, who knows nothing about science, has a son. The young father invents for his son a magical story about one of the constellations in the sky, which he identifies as a sword that belongs to “the emperor of the air”; the future, in this story, seems to belong to the imaginative storyteller and not to the realistic man of science. A similar tribute to the poetic imagination, “We Are Nighttime Travelers,” features a retired couple who have grown apart but who rediscover the love that brought them together when the husband takes up writing poetry.
The Palace Thief
Canin’s next collection consists of four long stories, each featuring two men who are linked in one way or another but who represent contrasting perspectives and whose lives have widely diverged. “Accountant” is told from the perspective of Abba Roth, whose careful, even voice reveals a deeply conventional man with a steady, if dull, life as an accountant and family man. His opposite is Eugene Peters, a boyhood friend whose free spirit and enthusiasm for auto mechanics have provided him with a lucrative business. In middle age, Roth and Peters both attend a fantasy baseball camp overseen by the great former baseball player Willie Mays. Although Roth is an excellent ballplayer, his inability to get into the spirit of the game ends in Mays’s awarding a pair of prized baseball socks not to the tiresome Roth but to the lively Peters. A resentful Roth steals one of the socks, but this one act of uncharacteristic daring cannot change the fact that he knows he has traded a life with a potential for passion, spontaneity, and adventure for a life of material security and comfort.
“Batorsag and Szerelem” returns to one of Canin’s favorite themes, namely, the tensions between a brilliant and eccentric young man and his admiring kid brother. The title refers to words invented by the older brother, Clive, a math prodigy who has developed a secret language he shares only with his best friend Eddie. The words in the title are eventually associated with sexual secrets in Clive’s life that so shock and upset his previously indulgent parents that their discovery begins what Clive’s brother describes as “the great unturning,” in which he becomes the favored son and the free-spirited Clive the outcast whose great promise is never fulfilled.
Like “Accountant,” the third story, “City of Broken Hearts,” features both baseball and a defeated, middle-aged businessman. Wilson Kohler, who has lost his wife to someone higher up in the company, is a lonely man who seeks consolation in devoting himself to the fortunes of the Boston Red Sox baseball team. Wilson is baffled by the life of his son Brent, an idealistic college student who wears an earring and whose sensitivity to the feminine side has led him to work during his summer vacation at a shelter for battered women. Representative of a new and different generation of men, Brent also has an almost magical role in the life of his father, gently bringing his father out of the past and into a love affair that will give him a new lease on life,
The title story, “The Palace Thief,” is narrated by Hundert, a retired history teacher at a fashionable West Virginia preparatory school. Although he prides himself on his integrity and his role as the molder of the young, Hundert was once manipulated by a powerful senator into making allowances for his ne’er-do well son, whom Hundert knows to have cheated and whose dishonesty he has never exposed. The unscrupulous son in turn becomes a powerful political and economic force in the state, and also manipulates the now-retired professor into helping him become elected senator. Hundert constantly draws on analogies between his situation and the Augustan age of the Roman Empire, but he does not realize that, far from being a principal player, he is merely a slave, serving the interests of the wealthy and the powerful.
