For Kings and Planets

Rating:
Summary: Sometimes a great dentist
Review: Dr. Canin is able to write beautiful prose, but unfortunately he doesn't always bother. When he achieves it, he often repeats the beauty until it is no longer beautiful, as if afraid we didn't see it the first time. He can create fascinating characters, although most of these characters fall short of fascinating. Exhibiting little faith in his readers' intelligence, Canin often provides narrative explainations of what has just happened. Maybe it is necessary; the plot isn't riveting and except for the character of Marshall, the characters seem to exist in the way that furniture does. Marshall is genuinely fascinating, but we see him infrequently and through the eyes of another character who has irritatingly dim vision.

If the novel is essentially about the attraction regular, honest folk have to glitter, illusion, magic and city life, it isn't as profound an exploration of that subject as it might be. The characters are all ruined as they step into worlds of pretense and illusion of various forms, but we don't feel much for them, at least I didn't.

The main character only feebly and intermittently exhibits any backbone or willingness to challenge Marshall; the message is that illusion wins every time. He gives in to Marshall one time too many and comes back for emotional whippings after being betrayed so often we begin to wonder if the main character likes the abuse. Somehow this doesn't seem to be the intended message, and while well written (except for the stilted dialogue and weird insistence on calling one particular character by his first and last names, then dropping it abruptly) this book left me hungry. There are things to think about and there is good use of language, but there is a so-what feeling to the book as a whole.

For me, the main problem was that it was hard to forget that this was a book. People don't talk the way the author suggests. It was hard to forget this is fiction and it was very hard to forget that Dr. Canin is a physician. We are told that the dull, the undisciplined and foolish are relegated to lives as engineers and dentists, or worse, and that only the best and brightest can be doctors. If this is the best Dr. Canin can do with a novel, it is good that he has day job skills he thinks so highly of.

Rating:
Summary: Subtle, slowly moving conclusion, builds on short stories
Review: This is a wonderful book. It is about the main character's love for the world and and how he overcomes the deceit of a friend to redeem himself and find a place in the world. If you ever feel that the world moves too fast and that others control you and your place, read this book and see how the main characters fundamental midwest values overcome the powerful and deceitful world of a close friend.

Rating:
Summary: the novel I've been waiting for
Review: Having been a serious reader for close to forty years, and having found myself in the doldrums now for the last decade over the slimmed-down, Carver-via-Hemingway-inspired efforts of Ethan Canin's contemporaries, I was overjoyed to discover "For Kings and Planets." It is what a novel is supposed to be--gorgeously written, yes, but also written with the reader in mind (not with the writer in mind, as so many contemporary novels seem to be). It is a novel of character and also of plot--I fell in love with Orno, the hero, as one does in the best of reads. I would have followed him anywhere. For my money, this is the best of Canin's work, certainly superior to Blue River and probably to Emperor of the Air. Of his ouevre, only The Palace Thief might be as good.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best books I've read in a Long time
Review: I was amazed by this book. While so many of the other reader reviews seem to be stuck on the story and the characters that Ethan Canin has either crafted or distroyed, (depending on which review you decide to settle on)what held me transfixed was more his use of language and words. It has been a long time since I have enjoyed and been truly in awe of a mind that could think up such imagery.

Thank you Mr. Canin---as for the rest of the reviewer refocus and start again!

Rating:
Summary: What an irritating, banal, self-satisfied little book!
Review: This is the story of Orno, who goes to college, dentistry school, marries his smarter, more interesting friend's sister and has a baby. I started thinking about that name "Orno." Is Canin slyly signalling to us that he agrees with us that his protagonist is a zero first and last? I wish I believed he were that subtle. (Although Dr. Canin certainly doesn't go to great lengths to hide his contempt for dentists.) The characters are two-dimensional, great swathes of the plot are boring, and all of it is derivative of the work of better writers. The real conflict is between Marshall ("Martial," get it?) and his father. The problem is they're off-screen most of the time, and we have to see everything through Orno's infuriatingly dim eyes. Skip this book, and read "A Secret History" instead. Same plot, much better written.

Rating:
Summary: beautifully written, honest book
Review: I defy you not to be moved by this novel. You discover the world -- of New York, of love -- as Orno discovers it; at first seduced and dazzled by it and by the outsized enthusiasm and depth of information of his friend Marshall, and then in a deeply felt, personal way. Canin writes about the hesitations, the fits and starts, and later, the love, between Orno and Simone with attention and grace. Get through the first fifty pages -- something seems off about them, but you discover in retrospect the reason for that. Don't be swayed by the cynicism of the other reviewers. Come to this book with an open heart -- as it was written.

Rating:
Summary: Resist the urge to burn this book. It's not good enough.
Review: Go back over to the other side of the room and pick this book up off the floor. You can repair the impact area on the drywall later. There are still two ways you can make peace with this book and in doing so justify the time you thought you'd wasted reading it. One is by seeing the book for what it is: an adolescent pocket reader misplaced on the hardback fiction rack by the ignoramus publisher. Just pretend you were sixteen when you read it, and try to misplace it among the fabric of youthful memory.

The other is to see the Author for what he is: a young person who has spent too much time in school studying medicine and writing and not enough time getting knocked around by life the way real novelists always have. He does have talent with words, and perhaps in your lifetime he will mature into a real writer (more likely, he will churn out more pseudo-novels like this one and make a mint doing just what his anti-hero Marshall did, selling screenplays to people like Disney and Tri Star).

Either way, the book falls short of its $24.95 price tag but retains some value as an artifact of our current era of mediocrity, pageantry and disappointment.

But don't take my word for it. Here's what the real critics had to say:

High drama? Hardly. And Canin, with a well-deserved reputation as a short-story writer, seems almost willful in his avoidance of it. In page after page, Orno's quandary is recounted in numbing detail. As if the mounds of raw adolescent Angst needed any assistance in sabotaging the book, Canin goes a step further and takes Marshall, by far the book's more interesting character, offstage for most of the novel. In the early going, Marshall drops from sight for weeks at a time; in the later sections, he is away in Los Angeles, working on screenplays. Marshall is a tricky and somewhat shady figure who could be taking Orno for a rather unpleasant ride, but because he is often absent from the main action, we are left with nothing to scrutinize but Orno's squirmy little confusions. The sensation is akin to reading Portrait of a Lady without either Osmond or Madame Merle. For Kings and Planets' tourist's grasp of New York (one unintentionally funny scene has Orno standing on 129th street hearing a bolt slide inside an apartment building) and its morbid fascination with the inconsequential minutia of young adulthood, the book makes me wish he had stuck to the short stories that made his reputation.

-- Robert Peluso, The Columbus Dispatch

"Canin pretends that the fate of Orno's soul is up for grabs, when no one -- not even the world's biggest hayseed -- could mistake which way the wind is blowing. Apparently, the moral of "For Kings and Planets" is not that nice guys finish first or last, but that they speak in clichés and graduate at the middle of their dental school class."

-- Elizabeth Judd, SALON Magazine

Rating:
Summary: A huge disappointment
Review: I am in my fourth year of english studies in France, and I chose this year to specialize in translation. My work is to translate an English book into French, and as you may have already guess, I took "For kings and Planets". Ethan Canin is absolutely unknown in France, so I can't compare this novel with his previous short stories (which were quite good if I trust the criticism I read of them). But I've been working on his fourth book for almost five months now, and I didn't still succeed in getting interested in Marshall and Orno's adventures. I found this book so boring that I decided to work on it page after page rather than reading it all at once. So, as I stopped at page 80, I'm not the best person to criticize...but Orno is such an insipid character, and Marshall is almost as bad as his antagonist. Who really cares about their lives and their friendship based on their differences? Not me! Nonetheless I just wanted to say, to conclude, that I really enjoy my work on Mr Canin's novel, even if I did not appreciate the book itself.

Rating:
Summary: Wanted to like it so......
Review: Had always considered "Emporer" and 'Palace Thief" to be two of most satisfying collections of short stories I've ever run across - so was terribly excited to read "Kings and Planets" and, like most of these reader reviews are stating, it just didn't work. Normally, I'd say - read it cause he's a brilliant writer, but if you know his stuff then save yourself from this disappointment. ALSO - what was the deal with the damn typeface? - there was this consistent extra space after a certain and often used word which now escapes me - let's just say - I put this whole experience out of my mind!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: In orbit around the charismatic genius.
Review: Many of us find ourselves in the orbit of a charismatic genius, usually to our disadvantage and possible destruction. What drives the the genius, in From Kings and Planets, Marshall Emerson, who consistently envies the ordinary Orno Tarcher because Marshall feels empty? And what keeps the ordinary Orno in Marshall's orbit? What must he do to escape Marshall? This character driven novel explores these questions.