Ethan Canin and Empathy

How the bestselling author of America America made me once again appreciate my father…

Driving home from San Francisco last Friday night, I found myself thinking about my father’s wedding. Coincidentally, my father was married in 1992, the same year both I and my older sister were married. It was, of course, my father’s second wedding, so I flew to Minnesota to attend, as did (as I recall) 6 of my 8 siblings. The master of ceremonies at the reception, Wayne, was one of those warm, smiling, unfailingly genuine people of whom there are far too few in the world, so when he opened the floor to anyone wishing to say a few words about my dad and his new wife, I and my siblings, all of us otherwise painfully shy outside our familial bastion, paraded to the mike. I distinctly recall my older brother Blair, then a soft-spoken man of 34 who already had 8 children of his own, describing, in a deep baritone voice designed to beat back the welling tears, my father’s most consistent lesson to us, the lesson central to all the other lessons he taught: “Put yourself in their shoes.” I was not nearly as successful as Blair in beating back those tears, but my message to the people gathered was similar, as was the message of each of my siblings who went to the mike that night.

That lesson, and the myriad memories that flow from it, passed through my mind as I drove down Highway 280 because that was essentially the same lesson bestselling author Ethan Canin carried to his audience at Bookshop West Portal that night. Canin was reading from his new novel America America, which Richard Russo has called “as rich, ambitious, intelligent, emotionally satisfying, and important a work of fiction as we’re likely to get this year.” Tracing the history of a small upstate New York town and its heroic and flawed favorite sons, the book tells a riveting story of family, community, and political reality. For his reading, Canin chose a collection of passages that follow an affair between a senator, Henry Bonwiller, and a young waitress, JoEllen Charney. After several meetings, the affair takes a revelatory turn for the girl:

Then comes the day he tells her he’s thinking of something big. Later, after he’s dressed, he says he’s not just thinking it, he’s going to do it.

“What,” she says.

“Be president.”

“President of the United States?” It slips from her mouth before she can stop it, like a dog running out the door.

But he laughs! He thinks it’s charming. “No, president of the choral society,” he says, and takes her hand to swing her around in a little jig. When they sit down finally on the bed his mood changes and he tells her an extraordinary thing. She can’t decide whether it’s just a speech or something he really feels. Something he tells only her. He says, “I’m doing this for the black man and the Latino man and the American Indian. For the working people like your father and all the other fathers who send their boys to Southeast Asia for no reason anybody can explain to them. Just out of their goodness and their faith in the country. For the unwed mother in Chicago who’s raising her sister’s kids, too, who gets by on a welfare check and five swing shifts a week at the Uniroyal plant in Gary. Those are the people I’m going to help. Those are the people I’m doing this for. Those are the ones.”

He’s a hero, she decides. Takes his strength and gives it to the country. Those strong arms and that voice and that mind that turns her around on a string sometimes like the mobile in the dentist’s office. He hasn’t said this to anybody else yet. That’s what she decides. And he looked at her face right after he finished saying it. Her face. He turned to her as he sat on the bed. She remembers that so clearly—because this was really something he should have been saying standing up, that's how good it was—and something changed in his face as he knotted his tie and jerked it straight in the collar. Was it her own look? She’s tried and tried, but for the life of her she can’t remember whether she smiled.

In this and the other passages Canin chose—and, indeed, throughout America America—we see a writer skilled at inhabiting his characters—at putting himself in their shoes. Whether it’s JoEllen, neither vixen nor victim, who “decides” what she is going to believe about her powerful lover, or Bonwiller, adulterer and betrayer of the trust who nonetheless champions the cause of the little man, we see and feel the depths of the other, the struggle between the dark places and the light, both the characters’ and our own.

During Q&A, Canin pointed to this sense of empathy as the richest path to invention for a fiction writer. He said there are four things a writer needs to be successful (only three of which I was able to remember):

1. A facility for prose, words, sentence structure
   
2. An ability to get knocked down and pick yourself up again
   
3. [The third, forgotten one]
   
4. An interest in people and real empathy

The message he gives his students along these lines is, “Don’t write your characters, become your characters.” He elaborates in an interview with Jill Owens of Powells.com:

[It] really is almost like throwing your voice, or throwing your consciousness across the room to someone else. Writing is essentially about 85 percent misery. That moment of empathy is one of the few pleasurable things I can take from writing, to imagine life from somebody else's point of view.

For me, this conjures the memory of my father’s description, years ago, of how he would judge whether a place was a good place to live. He would “look at it from a hobo’s point of view,” he said. “A hobo’s got to carry everything he owns with him, so it can’t be too hot in the summer,” he would say, “but it can’t be too cold in the winter either, because he has to sleep outside.” And that, I’m happy to say, is how I ended up being raised in Northern California. Empathy wins again.

A few other highlights from the Canin Q&A:

On Freeing the Imagination
In response to a shamelessly pandering question about how flawless his prose is (“How do you do that???”), Canin veered toward ways to free the imagination. He said he had tried the conventional methods like traveling all over the place and doing dangerous things, and that none of those ever worked. He then mentioned long drives (“especially with a stick shift”) as a good method, noting that there’s something about the consistent attention to the gears and the road combined with long stretches of inattention that allowed his imagination to run. But he said, without fail, the best way to free the imagination is to read. He mentioned a Saul Bellow book he had read multiple times, as well as some other authors I can’t recall.

On Writing through Discovery
In response to a questioner who asked whether he mapped out his novels in advance, Canin told how John Irving famously said he would write one sentence that captured his concept for a novel, then post that one sentence over his keyboard and write the rest of the novel as sort of “sub-thoughts” to that central idea. Canin said he could never write that way, that if he knew where the story was going, he could never finish it.