Blue River - Hardcover

Canin, Ethan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395498546 ISBN 13: 9780395498545

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1991

Synopsis

Two brothers with seemingly opposite personalities follow different paths through life until the paths converge in a sudden process of self-discovery

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Reviews

This eloquent story of two men destined to become "good brother" and "bad brother" is an ambitious but ultimately disappointing novel by the author of the acclaimed 1988 collection Emperor of the Air. Edward, a successful California ophthalmologist, finds a bum on his doorstep one morning, only to realize that it's his estranged brother Lawrence, whose life has gone steadily downhill. Edward manages to get Lawrence out of town, but the meeting has been an overdue awakening for Edward, and the remainder of the story consists of his examination of their shared past, written in a first-person narrative told to a "you" who is Lawrence. "Always do what you're afraid of," Lawrence had advised Edward when they were growing up in Wisconsin. Lawrence got into fights, seduced girls, stole, caused destruction. Edward was studious, active in the community. Each played the part assigned, it seemed by their mother, although Edward now thinks that Lawrence had a secret purpose in behaving as he did. The revelations of Edward's melancholy, truth-seeking exploration may lead to a rapprochement. Along the way, confusion about what happened in the ambiguous past, betrayals and the chaos of their shared history are unfurled with precision and grace. But Canin's attempt to get inside Edward's psyche results in a flattened tone and lack of passion, perhaps intended to provoke the reader into making his own judgment about which brother is good and which is evil. The effect, however, is to distance the reader too thoroughly; the characters' interior landscapes are bleak and the narrative lacks dramatic momentum. In the end, this promising novel is itself somewhat flat and disaffecting. $100,000 ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In track, champion sprinters know better than immediately to train next for the mile and longer. Not in the book world. Canin's fluent, relaxed, and often stunning way with the short story (Emperor of the Air) is all but erased in this pulseless attempt at a novel. Edward Sellers is a Bay Area ophthalmologist, with wife and son and pool and Toyota Land Cruiser, whose Ralph Lauren-like life- -all modulation, russets, and beiges--is threatened when his older brother Lawrence, a loser with a malformed hand and outlaw charisma, shows up at his door, obviously on the run from trouble. Lawrence is soon put on a bus, dispatched--the novel then goes into reverse to describe the fatherless family life of the Sellers boys as they're growing up in Blue River, Wisconsin. Lawrence is a fact- collector, a danger-seeker, a shadowy exemplar to his younger brother Edward; but mysterious pregnancies and arsons soon assemble as an unmistakably ruinous path to Lawrence's door. Edward is moved to tell someone about it--and the havoc of moral ambiguity becomes the book's ultimate theme. It's a theme very late arrived at, though. Most of the story is milky recollection, in which no character other than Lawrence seems palpable or charged. Clich‚ veins the prose (``...the curse of your character and the seed of your downfall, I now think, was your inability to forget the insults and petty defeats of your life''), and is not helped by Canin's decision to write in a first person that's always addressing Lawrence, as in a long letter. It gives the book a whispered, ultimately lethargic tone, muscle-less. Disappointing. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Successful, self-contained Ed, who has a lovely wife, a lovely child, and the lovely, well-appointed home due a doctor, opens the door one day to find a ragged stranger on his doorstep. The stranger turns out to be his older brother, Lawrence, whom he has not seen for years. This unexpected visit prompts Ed to reconsider his childhood, dominated by the rebellious Lawrence, who fights, steals, and, after briefly reforming, shocks the town with a stunning act of violence. As Ed reminisces, Lawrence emerges as complex and thoughtful, a smart boy who encouraged Ed's interest in science and rebelled simply because it was the role assigned him by an anxious mother and a worshipful younger brother who turns out to be a bit duplicitous himself. Canin, author of the much-praised short story collection Emperor of the Air ( LJ 2/1/88), succeeds in creating believable and involving characters in his first novel. If his story structure occasionally seems too pat, his evocative prose occasionally in need of more burnishing, he has produced an affecting work. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/91.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395498546
• ISBN 13: 9780395498545
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 222