A Voyage That Lacks Continuity

Whenever a talented new writer arrives, reviewers tend to overlook, or at least pardon, the weaknesses or limitations of his first few books. Talent is rare and worth celebrating. At some point, however, a reassessment is due; and when it comes, it often seems, to the writer and to readers both, unduly harsh, because the work being criticized is no worse than what was previously praised.

Has that time come for Ethan Canin? In “Emperor of the Air,” “Blue River,” “The Palace Thief” and “For Kings and Planets,” Canin established himself as one of America’s best younger fiction writers. His trademark has been to confound our every expectation of what a “younger writer” would produce. His stories--he is particularly adept with the shorter forms--display a precocious maturity. They are subtle and polished and quiet even in their moments of power. If Canin ever screeched with teenage angst or fumbled to fit words together, no sign of it remains.

So too with “Carry Me Across the Water,” an exquisitely modulated short novel whose hero, August Kleinman, is 78 years old. We’d bet that Canin would have no trouble entering Kleinman’s mind and making this senior citizen (and the various younger selves he remembers in flashbacks) a compelling character--and we’d collect. Many of the episodes that make up the novel, from combat in World War II to Kleinman’s attempts to change his grandson’s diapers, have the concentrated richness of good short stories.

But a novel isn’t a short story, or even a succession of them; it’s something else, a single, sustained narrative. Any reassessment of Canin will have to note that this novel, at least, doesn’t quite deliver. We may even ask: Is maturity always a good thing? Has Canin, in staking his claim on a wisdom and balance beyond his years, somehow forfeited the younger writer’s natural and appropriate realm: wildness and passion?

Kleinman and his mother are Jews who escape from Germany in 1933, shortly before his father, a wealthy manufacturer, is killed by a mob. In early 1945, Kleinman is an infantryman in the Pacific theater. We know from the beginning of the novel that he encounters a Japanese soldier in a cave, but what happens there--Kleinman emerges with a sheaf of letters written by the man, a gifted artist--Canin withholds until the end.

Similarly, we must wait to learn other important facts. How did Kleinman establish the biggest brewery in Pennsylvania? Why did he (probably) kill a second man? What happened to his wife, Ginger, on a vacation in Barbados that heralded the end of their long and happy marriage? What explains the hostility between Kleinman and his younger son, Jimmy? Canin keeps feeding us hints as he books Kleinman on a jet to Japan, returning the soldier’s effects to his family at last.

It’s the technique of the thriller, applied to a character study. It allows Canin to condense the story, to hit only the highlights, but it deprives us of the old-fashioned pleasure of seeing Kleinman’s character--generous but guarded, politically liberal, tough in a crisis, prone to an “arrogance,” a refusal to take advice, that he secretly regards as his greatest virtue--unfold chronologically.

As it is, the youthful Kleinman is always seen through the eyes of the old one, sorting out the meaning of his life. (What about his lapsed faith?) The past, always shaded and judged by the present, never quite exists in its own right. Secondary characters are picked up and dropped.

What Canin gains in suspense--and even here the long-awaited payoffs don’t always match our expectations--he loses in continuity: When we finally return to the cave in the Pacific, we’ve lost touch with the frightened GI who crawled into it.