For Kings and Planets: A Novel - Hardcover

Canin, Ethan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679419632 ISBN 13: 9780679419631

Publisher: Random House, 1998

Synopsis

Ethan Canin is one of America's finest writers.  He has been called "brilliant" by the Los Angeles Times, "a tremendous talent" by the Chicago Sun-Times, and "dazzling" by Walker Percy.  The bestselling author of The Palace Thief and Emperor of the Air now gives us this stunning new novel, For Kings and Planets.

"Years later, Orno Tarcher would think of his days in New York as a seduction.  A seduction and a near miss, a time when his memory of the world around him --the shining stone stairwells, the taxicabs, the sea of nighttime lights--was glinting and of heroic proportion.  Like a dream."  So begins this remarkable novel about the lives of two young men and the women they love.

Orno Tarcher arrives in New York City from a small town in Missouri, feeling unsophisticated and disadvantaged by his family's bedrock values.  He meets Marshall Emerson, the charismatic gem of a worldly family, a seductive and brilliant New Yorker who is revealed, as time passes, to be bent on destruction.  The novel explores with depth and sophistication the conflicts of character at the heart of every life, the desire for grandeur and the lure of normalcy, the tension between rivalry and friendship, fathers and sons, love and betrayal.  For Kings and Planets is the story of a man  who thinks of himself as moral, who tests his character against power, deception, and seduction.  It is also the story of a friendship fractured by love.

For Kings and Planets is a remarkable achievement, another fiction classic by the writer who has been called "a worthy successor to...Philip Roth, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Penn Warren."

About this title

Review

Like Philip Roth and Robert Penn Warren, Ethan Canin won the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship for rising stars whose first books hit big. His luminous 1988 story collection, Emperor of the Air remains a must-read, but his second novel, For Kings and Planets, is nonetheless recognizably part of the Canin constellation. He repeatedly features a straight guy (an accountant or other sober type) transfixed by the spectacle of an out-of-control guy (a delinquent and/or child-prodigy brother or brother figure to the main character). This time, it's Orno Tarcher, a Missouri farm boy thunderstruck by his Columbia University classmate Marshall Emerson, a theatrically bratty, sometimes suicidal Manhattan genius. "I grew up with farmers and insurance salesmen," says Orno. "I grew up with Kennedys and insurance salesmen," says Marshall. "I grew up with pigs everywhere," says Orno. "And we had that in common," Marshall replies. (In keeping with their characters, Orno becomes a sensible dentist and Marshall a cynical, coked-up Hollywood producer.)

Canin sensitively evokes Orno's prosaic world--you'd have to read Jane Smiley's The Age of Grief for better fiction about dentistry. But Orno mostly exists to relate Marshall's appealing, appalling antics: his manic raps about his childhood amid the ruins of Istanbul, his sabotage of his own (and Orno's) love life, his Oedipal strife with his chilly, brilliant parents. "Our family seal is a snake twisted in knots," says Marshall's lovely sister. And, reader, Orno marries her. Page for page, Canin's stories better show off his gift for epiphany, but the novel gives him room to develop character, entangle plots, and make a stab at the heart of the family romance. --Tim Appelo

From the Publisher

For Kings and Planets, by Ethan Canin

Many qualities that make a novel masterful are present in Canin's fourth book: richly nuanced characterizations, a sensuous sense of place, easy dialogue, controlled pacing and a story that is a classic parable of the human condition. The narrative vigor of this coming-of-age tale is enhanced by Canin's (Emperor of the Air; The Palace Thief) compassionate view of daunting moral complexities and by his acute sensibility about the strengths and flaws that can determine the future of a promising life.

When Orno Tarcher comes to Columbia University from a tiny Midwestern town, another freshman, sophisticated New Yorker Marshall Emerson, befriends him. The friendship is unlikely: Orno is earnest, naive, plodding ("He felt the word Missouri written on his forehead"), while Marshall, the son of two eminent Columbia professors, is charming, cynical, brilliant and possessed of an astonishing eidetic memory that indelibly records everything he's ever read. Orno is further awed when he meets the rest of Marshall's family, though he is disturbed by the rancorous exchanges between Professor Emerson and his son. Though Marshall abandons him for months at a time, Orno is always freshly seduced when his mercurial friend lures him from diligent study to debauched gatherings and sexual liaisons, bringing Orno into contact with something chaotic and undisciplined in his own nature. Even when he understands Marshall's essential vulnerability and begins to fathom Marshall's manipulative and self-destructive behavior, Orno is envious of his friend's undoubtedly spectacular future. Orno himself is for a long time unable to find his own vocation, but he finally muddles into dentistry, where--as he apologizes to Marshall, who has quit college to write a novel--teeth are "not named for kings or planets. They are merely numbers." By the time Marshall adopts the dissolute life of a major Hollywood producer, Orno has fallen in love with his sister, Simone, and is witness to the last acts of a family tragedy.

While the plot unfolds with tragic inevitability, Canin doesn't force the pace of his narrative, subtly providing Orno with insights appropriate to his strong moral upbringing and slow maturation. Meanwhile, he creates a rich gallery of characters of offers a potently atmospheric evocation of New York City and, to a lesser extent, small communities in Cape Cod and Maine. What will most impress readers of the engrossing narrative, however, is the dignity and integrity with which Canin writes about fallible human lives.

-- Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review), Summer 1998

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679419632
• ISBN 13: 9780679419631
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 335