An American tragedy, heavy on the portents

America America
By Ethan Canin
Random House, 458 pp., $27

The vast Metarey estate in upstate New York, once a place of graciousness and patrician philanthropy, has been demolished to make way for a shopping mall. The great oaks are gone; the bronze replica of an oak tree stands at the entrance.

Ethan Canin's elegiac and minatory attempt at an epic about the ways of power and politics in the United States is itself something of a bronze replica. Its story, one extended interment of idealistic illusions in the 1960s and 1970s, is delivered as orotund lament. The very omission of a comma between "America" and "America" in the title gives it the admonishing sound of a two-ton bell tolling. The characters toll as much as they talk.

Canin's novel centers on Henry Bonwiller, a charismatic Democratic senator: a vague composite of Jack, Robert, and Ted Kennedy with a dash of Bill Clinton thrown in. On the point of clinching the 1972 presidential nomination, he is brought down by a scandal involving a drunken-driving crash in which his young, working-class mistress is fatally injured and left to die in the snow.

Bonwiller, a man of sounding-brass and tinkling-cymbal hollowness, is portrayed by Canin with not much more than a toot and a tinkle. (The senator's flimsy construction is evident in the clarion campaign call written for him by Liam Metarey: "We live alongside too many canyons of hate. . . . Now is the time to cross them, on bridges of hope." It is billed as rivaling the great phrases of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and King.)

Bonwiller, in any case, is the agent rather than the protagonist of this ambitious morality tale. Of the novel's two central figures, one is Metarey, the local patriarch - vastly rich, unstintingly generous, hauntedly introspective, and Bonwiller's principal backer and strategist. The other is Corey Sifter, son of the estate's master plumber.

Metarey singles the boy out to mentor and raise up, sending him to a posh private school, employing him for a variety of errands on the estate and in the campaign, and supplying the example of stoic Roman virtue. A veritable Marcus Aurelius, that is. Yet the book's lesson, foreshadowed along its considerable length and clinched at the end, is that in every Aurelius there's a gene or two of a Tiberius, if not quite a Caligula.

Corey is the narrator. Not at the time of the events he witnessed - mainly during school weekends and summer vacation spent with the Metareys - but in retrospect, as a middle-aged newspaper publisher.

Immediacy is lost. Perspective is gained, perhaps, but it is ponderous; laced with laments for an Arcadia where young Corey surrendered himself to the spell of the Metarey world, where politicians drove up to consult with the candidate and his patron, and the boy did chores for their great reforming cause.

Still more laments for Arcadia, poisoned: rumors, sudden late-night missions, his own unwitting participation in an attempted cover-up of the scandal that broke the campaign and meant tragedy for the Metareys and the end of their dynasty. Years later he puts it all together: the mysteries, the whispers, the criminal involvement of Metarey to protect the noble cause he believed in. And, more widely, the corruption of an American idealism linked to power and wealth.

All too often, "America America" is more a sermon than a novel, heavily weighted to telling, not showing, with the middle-aged editor summoning the perceptions of the teenage boy and modulating them. Neither has much character or drive of his own.

The teenager's voice is all drawn-out admiration jarred by presage (no revelation that is not foreshadowed, which takes the edge off) and bafflement. The older man is sadder but wiser: but about what? Not what he's done but what he's witnessed.

What he's witnessed is written awkwardly at times, and at times viscously. It is awkward to squeeze the fictional Bonwiller into the world of real McGoverns, Humphreys, and Muskies. (At one point young Corey parks Averell Harriman's snazzy sports car up at the Metarey mansion.) It suggests those cutout carnival figures where you stick your head through a hole on top.

The viscosity is more harmful. Corey's middle-aged-retrospective voice delivers great rolling periods whose reverberation overpowers their significance. Here, for example, Corey's final musing: "What have I learned? The old verities, mostly: that love for our children is what sustains us; that people are not what they seem; that those we hate bear some wound equal to our own; that power is desperation's salve, and that this fact as much as any is what dooms and dooms us."

It's hard not to think - perhaps Canin has - of "The Great Gatsby" and its envoi: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Not up to them, though.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.