For Kings and Planets

Rating:
Summary: Better than the dentist's chair, less than NYC
Review: This is a very long book that covers the life of its two main characters from their first day at Columbia to their early thirties. I understand that Orno and Marshall are supposed to have symbolic value, Orno representing the obtuse, hard working midwest and Marshall the depraved, sophisticated city. And the book is well written, no doubt, Ethan Canin has a very elegant prose style. But I don't buy Orno's relationship with Simone, and I never cared what happens to any of the characters at all. None of them achieve the status of "person", they were all "types." Orno is a dope on page one and he is a dope on page 300. Wouldn't being in New York, particularly the time spent with Marshall, make him a sharp enough guy to know that something is up when his lost child of a best friend takes him to a shed the night before his and Simone's wedding. Particularly when it is revealed that Marshall is accompanied by a woman who is more or less a prostitute. There's a lot of classism and regionalism stuff in the book that is mildly interesting, but were a lesser author to write a book with similar content-well they probably have, I just haven't heard of it. I know Ethan Canin is capable of more after reading Emperor of the Air, so I was dissapointed. It really isn't bad though, just not particularly groundbreaking, nor does it have terribly interesting characters.

Rating:
Summary: Teeth aren't named for Kings and Planets.
Review: This is the story of Orno, a self-proclaimed hayseed from Missouri, who moves to New York City to attend Columbia University. There he meets Marshall, a man who changes the course of his life.

Marshall is a genius with the gift of eidetic memory. He's a rogue student, voyeur, classic alcoholic/drug addict, and maybe even manic-depressive. Orno is magnetized to him like an alter ego, and consequently, Marshall is also drawn to Orno, recognizing in him the qualities he lacks in spite of his seemingly privileged background. They attend many of the same classes, date the same women and eventually, after he makes the decision to attend dental school (much to Marshall's disapproval), Orno falls in love with Marshall's more stable and wise sister. Belittling his own stable yet naïve background, Orno tries to make his way in an unfamiliar world, mistaking the dysfunction of the Emerson family for sophistication. Triumphant, Orno manages to hold onto his integrity, learns to appreciate his own father and is an earnest and likeable character.

For Kings and Planets is a love story (exploring love between friends, siblings, parents and children and lovers), and ultimately a coming of age tale. Beautifully-written, a fast read and I highly recommend.

From the author of "I'm Living Your Dream Life," McKenna Publishing Group.

Rating:
Summary: I can think of younger days....and so can Dr. Canin.
Review: Beautifully written yet painfully spare, the events in "For Kings and Planets" whoosh by the reader like a subway train. For me the style worked, and it didn't work: It worked in the sense that evoked a certain kind of nostalgia; Canin writes peering back into the past, and his ability to boil down affairs and big moments into singular pages is impressive, to be sure. Less can be more.

But less can be less, too, and there just doesn't seem to be much excuse for the sheer lack of dialogue in the book. Canin's characters can barely breathe, he does so much of the talking for them. On the book's opneing page two women are mentioned, and you'd guess they figure prominently, but only one of them actually has a speaking "part" in the book, and a small one at that. I can appreciate that Canin is guiding us to package this knowledge as a hazy fling that our main character, Orno Tarcher, once had, but still. At times, it just smacks of laziness.

The story is not complicated: There is Orno, an earnest Midwestern kid and Marshall, a brilliant, depressed New Yorker. They become friends when they meet Columbia University, mostly by chance, and then remain friends ever as Marshall drifts away into other circles. Canin draws Orno very nicely as a decent kid with a tad too much give in his personality. He takes it on the chin from Marshall a few too many times. And Marshall seems more than willing to throw the punch. And there is Simone, Marshall's sister, a sweet, considerate girl with less brilliance than Marshall but twice as much maturity. Orno recognizes those qualities in her and falls in love.

The book appeals to a certain taste. These days, the "in" thing is to delve and delve and delve into a scene or a character or a subject until it's been turned inside out. Canin rejects that. He has great instincts; the book is well thought-out, and well executed. It takes a lot more effort to write a book this way than it does to write a 1000-page tome that just goes on and on. Canin is after crafting realistic characters. That means that not every burden of the week is included.

And yet, and yet...the book is a little flat. It reads too fast for a story of a life lived. Orno is simply bounced from place to place, while Marshall just disappears for large quantities of the book. While that's certainly in character for Marshall, it takes away our main pleasure in reading the book; Orno is deliberately played up as the put-upon guy, and if there isn't anybody interesting to put something upon him, we're left waiting.

And yet I'm torn back in the other direction, because I understand Canin's motives and his style and the book really does earn the sadness that pervades it. In Canin's small glimpses of Marshall's young and adult life, one does yearn to have had his advantages, his talents. And when Canin begins to reveal what isn't there for Marshall, it still doesn't change how we feel about that life, and it doesn't change for Orno, either. Even though every person in any life has struggles, we still see the grass as always greener. We still can't understand why others struggle when they're so blessed.

Rating:
Summary: A poignant story of "opposites attract"
Review: Ethan Canin has you hooked with the first sentence and after that you are putty in his hands. I could not put this book down for needing to know what was going to happen next in the enduring friendship between two very different men. Orno, the wide eyed innocent who is amazed by the most mundane of New York City and Marshall, the truest of cynics, meet on their first day of their freshman year at Columbia University and thus begins the beautifully written story of their complicated and often painful relatioship. From the beginning it appears that Orno will be the one most affected by their friendship but over time Canin reveals much about Marshall that helps us to understand this elusive character. I've read Canin's short fiction and he has succeeded in bringing the same strength of his characters, his skill at dialogue and his sympathetic understanding of the human condition to his second novel, For Kings and Planets. A definite must read!!

Rating:
Summary: A carefully wrought and engrossing coming of age story
Review: The best writers we have are those who are able to reveal us to ourselves without our ever quite understanding how it happens; we only know that there is a kind of alchemy involved. "For Kings and Planets" is so subtle, so carefully constructed, the characters so thoroughly real, that I finished the book with the desire to read it again in an effort to discover how it was possible for me to learn as much about myself as about Orno, the central character.

After reading Canin's previous books, particularly "The Palace Thief," it was clear to me that the art of the "character driven" story in his hands is a kind of prism through which the subtleties of motivation and choice in his characters' lives could be viewed in such a rich variety of ways that the books deserved to be re-read. The same is true of "For Kings and Planets," and it is in many ways a greater achievement.

Hemingway was fond of the image of boxing and pummelling the great writers he admired. Ethan Canin is not so pugnacious, but he takes on what many consider to be the great American novel, "The Great Gatsby," and with remarkable skill adds to the seminal myth of the idealistic mid-westerner coming to the big city to be captivated, disillusioned and, finally, to grow up. The story of Orno and Marshall is a tapestry of relationships in which Orno is forced to understand that the city and glamour with which he has fallen in love is an elaborate facade which serves only to obscure the solidity of his own soul. It is a love story in which a young man courts a world he desires by disavowing the world from which he comes. He is embarrassed by his own parents, his own "plain" origins; Marshall and all he represents are more glamorous and exciting. It is only when Orno really does fall in love that he is able to see how easily he had been seduced and the importance of what he might have lost.

Canin's prose is stately and precise. He is a beautiful writer and as his characters slowly reveal themselves, as people do in our own worlds, we understand how rare is the ability to engage the reader without melodrama and moral instruction. We, like Orno, are asked to search our own souls for what is already there. This is a superb book by one of the two or three best American writers of our generation.

Rating:
Summary: I can think of younger days....and so can Dr. Canin.
Review: Beautifully written yet painfully spare, the events in "For Kings and Planets" whoosh by the reader like a subway train. For me the style worked, and it didn't work: It worked in the sense that evoked a certain kind of nostalgia; Canin writes peering back into the past, and his ability to boil down affairs and big moments into singular pages is impressive, to be sure. Less can be more.

But less can be less, too, and at times there just doesn't seem to be much excuse for the sheer lack of dialogue in the book. Canin's characters can barely breathe, he does so much of the talking for them. On the book's opening page two women are mentioned, and you'd guess they figure prominently, but only one of them actually has a speaking "part" in the book, and a small one at that. I can appreciate that Canin is guiding us to package this knowledge as a hazy fling that our main character, Orno Tarcher, once had, but still. At times, it just isn't enough.

The story is not complicated: There is Orno, an earnest Midwestern kid and Marshall, a brilliant, depressed New Yorker. They become friends when they meet Columbia University, mostly by chance, and then remain friends ever as Marshall drifts away into other circles. Canin draws Orno very nicely as a decent kid with a tad too much give in his personality. He takes it on the chin from Marshall a few too many times. And Marshall seems more than willing to throw the punch. And there is Simone, Marshall's sister, a sweet, considerate girl with less brilliance than Marshall but twice as much maturity. Orno recognizes those qualities in her and falls in love.

The book appeals to a certain taste. These days, the "in" thing is to delve and delve and delve into a scene or a character or a subject until it's been turned inside out. Canin rejects that. He has great instincts; the book is well thought-out, and well executed. It takes a lot more effort to write a book this way than it does to write a 1000-page tome that just goes on and on. Canin is after crafting realistic characters. That means that not every burden of the week is included.

Did some of the critics have a tough time with this one? Sure they did, because many of them are from the Marshall Emerson set, and it's not in their natural prediliction to side with someone without nihilism and sarcasm. Books like these are hard for the critical community for two reasons:

1. They want more ugliness to get their hands around, more pure, mean drama, more villanous behavior, more tension, more rivalry, presumably because it equals their life.

2. They see earnestness as a naivete, as intellectually underwhelming.

Thus, they disapprove of some of Marshall's changes late in the book, but they disapprove because they, like Orno, saw the Marshall they wanted to see, not the one Canin was quietly creating. Canin craftily shows us just he wants to show us, revealing Marshall's layers slowly, but clearly. There's much more, and in a sense less, there than we first believed.

Are we disappointed with how Marshall turns out? You bet we are. That's part of the point, and what a lot of critics failed to understand. It's clear to me some mistook their disappointment that Canin didn't uphold the jaded academic "standard" of greatness as poor or boring writing.

But "For Kings and Planets" is neither poor nor boring, it's simply a curve ball; for once here's a colorful genius that, we figure, will probably fail, but in a spectacular, weird, grand way that befits an intellectual giant. Orno, we sense, half expects it, too.

The trick, then, is that Marshall has invented half of his greatness, maybe because he wanted to be great, but didn't know how to be, and, in the end, is pretty blase like all the other wasted geniuses out there. Like the book that Marshall writes, the words are there, but not the music; Marshall has the knowledge to lead a great life, but not the style.

Thankfully, Dr. Canin knows the music to make this story sing.

Rating:
Summary: Ramblin...
Review: I liked the book but I didn't love it and wouldn't tell people to run out and buy it, nor would I pass it along now that I own it. I grew to like the main characters enough that I couldn't wait to finish the book. But I ended up feeling somewhat cheated because I wasn't really impacted by any part of it enough to have made it worth my time. Towards the end of the book the story seemed mundane and like typical every day life. Nothing to write a book about. On a final and unrelated note, from the picture on the back of the book, I think the author is a hotty!

Rating:
Summary: Smart People Are [Messed] Up Too
Review: Everything Ethan Canin has written is good - this one is more complex than his other efforts, and probably has narrower appeal. The story is about some Ivy League students and their battles to live up to lives of great promise. The conclusion is worth the wait, as it reveals so much about what pressure can do to distort and destroy lives. Canin writes best about old people looking back on their lives as he did in Emperor of the Air and Carry Me Across The Water. Nevertheless, this is a substantial book that returns good value for the effort it requires to read.

Rating:
Summary: Descriptive albeit sporadic at times
Review: This was my first experience with Ethan Canin. A gifted storyteller, he takes readers through years in the lives of college friends Orno Tarcher and Marshall Emerson. Canin is not subtle in his writing, but he still allows his audience to form conclusions on occasion with little help.

I found it easy to relate to Orno's naive existence and to feel irritated by Marshall's sometimes clear indifference towards Orno and life in general. Some of Marshall's qualities, in fact, may remind readers of JD Salinger's Holden Caulfield (although Marshall is not nearly as vivid or complex). Canin is, on the other hand, guilty of providing too much detail at times and straying from the central theme or idea of the story. But this is a minor flaw that is far outweighed by his lucid descriptions of the characters. Some of these do indeed surface at odd times for inexplicable reasons. However, the ease of Canin's storytelling combines with descriptive language and an interesting plot to make this definitely a recommended read.

Rating:
Summary: Fine thread of suspense
Review: Because we know and use fiction craft, authors can often see behind the curtain of another author's book. That's why I loved the fine thread of suspense by which Ethan Canin kept me reading to find out what would happen to his enigmatic characters who behaved as if they weren't sure who they were, and therefore the reader isn't sure. Canin kept them on the elusive edge of excess and poetry and irrationality. I couldn't stop reading until I knew if they'd fall off. For me it's rare to find a novel I can't put down -- perhaps because I've been reading them since I was six. It's rare to find descriptions that linger after the book is read. This was my first Canin. Next time I want to be engrossed, I'll pick up another of his books.

J. R. Lankford
Author, The Crowning Circle