Vue sur l’Hudson

Like Philip Roth and Robert Penn Warren, Ethan Canin won the Houghton Mifflin Fellowship for rising stars whose first books hit big. His luminous 1988 story collection, Emperor of the Air remains a must-read, but his second novel, For Kings and Planets, is nonetheless recognizably part of the Canin constellation. He repeatedly features a straight guy (an accountant or other sober type) transfixed by the spectacle of an out-of-control guy (a delinquent and/or child-prodigy brother or brother figure to the main character). This time, it’s Orno Tarcher, a Missouri farm boy thunderstruck by his Columbia University classmate Marshall Emerson, a theatrically bratty, sometimes suicidal Manhattan genius. “I grew up with farmers and insurance salesmen,” says Orno. “I grew up with Kennedys and insurance salesmen,” says Marshall. “I grew up with pigs everywhere,” says Orno. “And we had that in common,” Marshall replies. (In keeping with their characters, Orno becomes a sensible dentist and Marshall a cynical, coked-up Hollywood producer.) Canin sensitively evokes Orno’s prosaic world–you’d have to read Jane Smiley’s The Age of Grief for better fiction about dentistry. But Orno mostly exists to relate Marshall’s appealing, appalling antics: his manic raps about his childhood amid the ruins of Istanbul, his sabotage of his own (and Orno’s) love life, his Oedipal strife with his chilly, brilliant parents. “Our family seal is a snake twisted in knots,” says Marshall’s lovely sister. And, reader, Orno marries her. Page for page, Canin’s stories better show off his gift for epiphany, but the novel gives him room to develop character, entangle plots, and make a stab at the heart of the family romance. –Tim Appelo