[In the following positive review of The Palace Thief, Brandmark maintains that what makes Canin “an exceptional writer rather than just a clever one is his combination of wit, compassion and moral seriousness.”]

Ethan Canin writes about men of quiet desperation. Each of these four novellas [in The Palace Thief] reaches its epiphany in the hero's moment of folly or dishonesty, when he realises that the flaw in his character that allowed him this small rebellion is “so large that it cannot properly be called a flaw but my character itself.”

Canin does not always seem comfortable with the limited scope of the novella. Batorsag and Szerelem is too ambitious a coming-of-age story for such a compressed narrative, but The Accountant and The Palace Thief seem perfectly mated to their form. They are about men who have led narrow lives, unimaginative men perhaps, who secretly admire the audacity, recklessness and arrogant ease of those who defeat them.

In The Accountant, the staid and pragmatic Abba Roth looks back complacently on a life devoted to accounting: “I do not mind saying that in the conscientious embrace of the ledger I have done well for myself over the years.” But he cannot bury the anger and envy he feels for a childhood friend who skipped university to become a self-made millionaire. When he is invited by his friend to a baseball “fantasy camp” for successful professional men, Abba wins the game for his team but cannot engage in the inane baseball chatter of an admiring Willie Mays. He covers his awkwardness and his awe of the famous player with a gauche remark, a line he uses to win over clients, and Mays rewards his leggings to Abba's more graceful friend.

Yet the remark, an unconscious response to the absurdity and corruption of the camp and his theft of one of the leggings, shows not just his jealousy and moral outrage but his “impulse for uproar and disorder.” What is remarkable about this novella is the way Canin turns our sympathies around. We may smile at this Prufrockian character at the beginning, but by the end our pity turns to empathy.

The narrator of The Palace Thief has led an even more monastic life. A history teacher at a famous private school, he has dedicated himself to the enlightenment of his boys: “I battled their indolence with discipline, their boorishness with philosophy and the arrogance of their stations with history of great men before them.” He too is defeated by a failure of nerve, an indiscretion that demoralises him. He lets a boy get away with cheating, ostensibly because his own job is on the line, but really because he feels sorry for the cheater. Like the accountant he will never reach the pinnacle of his profession, not because of his moment of dishonesty, but because he never wavered in the rest of his life. He cannot forgive himself for having been weak in the face of corruption.

Canin writes with economy and gentle irony. His cunning plots twist and turn with the quirks of his characters. But what makes him an exceptional writer rather than just a clever one is his combination of wit, compassion and moral seriousness. In the best of these novellas, he manages to be both detached and observant, and deeply involved.