A Not-So-Angry Young Man : His High-School Teacher Was Danielle Steel, His Literary Debut a Smash; Why Shouldn’t He Smile?

Think of the worst-case scenario, Ethan Canin’s editor at Houghton Mifflin advised him shortly before his first book, “Emperor of the Air,” came out this spring.

That was easy. What if nobody read it? What if the 27-year-old author’s literary debut came and went unnoticed?

As for the best-case scenario, editor Signey Warner Watson urged the fourth-year Harvard medical student not to think about anything as far-fetched as the best-seller list.

“It’s common knowledge in the industry,” Watson said. “Short stories are difficult to sell,” so much so that “no one seems to know of a collection making the list” in recent memory.

But Canin’s collection, nine stories in 180 carefully crafted pages, not only made the New York Times fiction best-seller list, it soon edged out the latest novel of Canin’s high school English teacher, Danielle Steel. Suddenly, Canin was dining at the posh Carlyle Hotel, even if he was relegated to that establishment’s less-posh cafe because, having gained 18 pounds on his book tour, he was unable to squeeze into a single jacket in his closet.

Here was Canin, on the same day a heated auction was in progress for the paperback rights to his book, downing a second Bloody Mary at lunch and uttering sentences his own fertile imagination could never have invented.

Heading for Europe

“My European publishers are taking me to Europe in the fall,” Canin said, and then laughed at his own momentary pomposity, eyes crinkling comfortably in a face that exudes gentle confidence.

“If I were having a dream, it would be this.”

Another smile, this one quite wistful.

“I’m flabbergasted,” he said of his abrupt success and the torrent of attention. “I don’t know how this has happened.”

Looking back, Canin had probably ordained his future as a writer before he left high school. At Lick-Wilmerding and University High, the two private high schools he attended in San Francisco, teachers like Steel showered praise on Canin and printed his stories in school publications. What they told him, he said, was keep writing. Write every day. Don’t give it up.

Still, Canin said, “I never set out to be a published writer.” The first two stories he published appeared in tiny literary magazines and were submitted by Canin’s instructors at Stanford. When literary agent Maxine Groffsky asked to represent him, Canin worried that he would have to pay her 10% of the $5 and $10 fees he was earning from these small publications.

“I thought, ‘Gosh, do I have to give her 50 cents?’ ”

But even as he earned a master’s and held a teaching and writing fellowship at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Canin could not envision himself writing full time.

“I need to feel useful in some ways,” Canin said. “I feel in a way that I am living off the fat of the land where people can read simply for amusement.”

To the horror of his mother, a painter Canin describes as history’s first Jewish mother who did not want her son to become a doctor--”She wanted me to be an opera singer. That was her great dream”--Canin enrolled at Harvard Medical School.

“I like medicine,” he said. “Even if I was selling a million books a year I would still be a doctor. Medicine is a supremely useful profession. Fiction writing is not.

Medicine Proves Helpful

“Feeling useful in medicine allows me to not feel so stupid when I am making up stories.”

Yet only by their humanity are Canin’s stories related even tangentially to his vocation of medicine. His characters, men and women, span generations. They live in small towns and large, they suffer pains of the heart no cardiac specialist could cure. They face up to frailties, and sometimes cower before them. Moral crises pepper their lives.

Not one of Canin’s characters takes drugs, commits incest, joins a rock ‘n’ roll band or lusts for a fully loaded BMW. Four-letter words do not modify their every thought. No one in Canin’s book contemplates murdering his parents, and no one does time in a psychiatric ward or a detoxification program.

His stories, and his characters, in short, differ markedly from the Brat Pack fiction of so many of his contemporaries. Canin is untroubled that he is compared not to the angry-young-man genre of youthful authors, but to more mature writers--John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Walker Percy.

“What have I got to be angry about?” Canin said.

Canin’s characters clamber out of his mind, he said, voices that demand to be recorded. “They are all made up,” he said, creations of a writer who writes as fast as he types, “and that’s fast.” Though sometimes the grind means he goes months without writing, medical school often allows him to cut class, read the books on his own and devote 45 minutes each available day to what he describes as something akin to automatic writing. One idea per day, Canin said. That is his goal.

Praised for his originality and a quiet compassion that characterizes his stories, Canin concedes these people and their problems must somewhere have been grounded in his own experience.

“I don’t think there is such a thing as pure imagination,” Canin said. “I think it’s a combination of memory and invention,” although, he quickly added, “most of the memory you don’t even know you have.”

For example, in the title story of his book, Canin’s lead character carves open an insect-infested tree and in moments feels the creatures spreading up his hands and arms.

“I thought I had made that up,” Canin said. Then his brother Aram, a doctor in Seattle, reminded him that when they were small, he once tricked Ethan into stepping on an anthill.

“The ants went right up my arm, just like in the story,” he said. In his apartment outside Boston, Canin marvels at how his girlfriend of seven years, journalist Barbara Schuler, can purport to enjoy the process of writing.

“I hate it,” Canin said. In a rare lapse into dogmatism, he declared, “Any writer who says he loves writing is crazy. Or lying.”

Writing, Canin said, “is lonely. To be good, you have to be such a self-editor that it’s unpleasant. You’re filled with doubt, (haunted by) that feeling of foolishness for writing fiction. You wonder, ‘What right do I have to talk about the morals of society?’ ”

Why suffer such anguish? Why not simply practice medicine and be done with it?

“It sounds so silly,” Canin said. “But I just have to do it.”

Canin was stunned speechless, he said, the day Watson called from New York and said Houghton Mifflin wanted to publish his book. He was living in Boston’s Fenway area at the time, where there were drug dealers on the street and it was not uncommon to hear “some guy getting beaten up right outside my door.” Canin was in the middle of medical school.

“I had no conception of what this meant, ‘publishing your book.’ I wasn’t thinking of a book. I was taking exams.”

In fact, Canin had no book. Watson had discovered his short stories in literary journals, and had spent four nights in the New York Public Library, “driving the poor clerks crazy,” as she sought out the body of his work. Watson was enchanted by the gentleness and the accessibility of Canin’s writing, she said. Six of his stories had been published already. Write three more, she told him, and you’ll have a book.

Writing on demand for the first time since graduate school, Canin summoned up some of the rules he had used as a teacher of writing himself.

Looking for Dynamic Words

“One,” he said. “Verbs. You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong, verbs and nouns.”

Canin said also that he borrows from “words that have roots in memory, words that are Anglo Saxon and Germanic, not Latin.” He avoids complicated words, “words like antithesis. It doesn’t mean anything.” He hates pretentious words, “words like utilize. Why say utilize when you can say use? “

He advocates simplicity. “In fiction,” Canin said, “the more shocking or horrifying a scene is, the fewer words you need to describe it.”

Most of all, he urges forgiveness. “You can always tell when a writer doesn’t like his or her characters,” Canin said.

To that end, Canin always assigned his writing students to craft a story about a likeable character.

“They would always write about the captain of the football team,” Canin said. “The guy who was really good looking and got all the girls. Not one of them would realize that that is the unlikeable character. The likeable one is the one with the gimp arm who didn’t get the girls.”

Schuler, Canin’s own longtime female companion, was a fellow student at Stanford who worked at the same restaurant with Canin. They dated, he dumped her, she retreated to China and Canin soon realized his folly. Soon, Schuler will quit her newspaper job and Canin will take a leave of absence from Harvard so both can spend a year writing and studying Spanish in Ecuador. Canin has purchased a lap-top computer for the trip. Already, he said, it contains about 70 pages of his first novel.

“I’m terrified that it will be stolen with my novel in it,” he said.

Like most fiction writers, Canin will not discuss the content of his novel in progress. It is unlikely, however, that it will deal with medicine or medical school.

“People are always asking me, ‘When are you going to write about medicine?’ ” Canin said. “To me, I don’t know, medicine doesn’t seem fictional.”

But here in New York, bookseller Jeanette Watson, owner of Books and Company on Madison Avenue, said she was awaiting the novel no matter what the topic. Canin’s short stories were “luminous,” she said, and though their ascension to the best-seller list was a surprise, given the traditional bias against short stories, it was an honor well deserved.

“People keep asking for his book,” she said. “It seems to touch every age level.”

Canin, however, has another explanation for how his book hit the list.

On the same heady day the paperback rights to “Emperor of the Air” finally sold for more than $200,000 to Harper & Row, Canin looked impish.

“My mother bought truckloads,” he said. “I have lots and lots of friends, and they all bought dozens of copies.”

He laughed and laughed. It was all fairly amazing. Kind of like a dream.