America, America, by Ethan Canin

American tragedies revisited

The town of Saline in western New York State is Ethan Canin's setting for this absorbing, intelligent novel of class, power and politics. Since the late 19th century, its fortunes have been tied to the Metarey family. Founding father Eoghan was a self-made man and vicious capitalist who nevertheless endowed the town. His son, Liam, liberal, humane and of leftist sympathies, is regarded as Saline's guardian. In the early 1970s, Saline became the stage for a drama with national repercussions in which local newspaper publisher, Corey Sifter, was intimately involved. He is now the only living person who knows the answer to an unsolved crime. Aware of his role as witness, perhaps less so of his motivations, he decides to write a first-person account.

Corey, the son of a plumber, is invited in his 16th year by Liam to work on the idyllic estate, Aberdeen West. He is clever, reliable and enjoys hard work. Metarey invites him into his family, which includes two precocious daughters, Christian and Clara. Corey forms deep, troubling attachments to both.

The Metareys are kind but impregnable. Corey is mesmerised. He and Liam have long conciliatory discussions, and the benign patriarch even pays for his education. But what excites and seduces Corey isn't the boat, the planes and lavish surroundings. It is politics. Liam is the strategist for his old friend, New York Senator Henry Bonwiller's, campaign for the presidency.

In 1971, Americans are angry about the Vietnam war and Nixon looks vulnerable. The Senator's success in the primaries increase. Aberdeen West becomes the scene of extravagant parties and press conferences for influential politicians, corporate heads, journalists and rich Democrats.

Corey observes it all. He listens as he delivers the Bourbon and firewood. He speculates, draws conclusions and ponders "the mixture in a single person of such public idealism and such personal ruthlessness".

"Senator Bon" has been hailed as the last champion of liberalism. Not only has he promised to stop the war, but to nationalise health care, and his voting record confirms his support for civil rights, unions, the poor. Though Corey worships him, he's aware of "the recklessness, the almost metallic vanity" that invites his destruction.

Bonwiller is running virtually unopposed until he's involved in a drunk-driving accident in which his current mistress is killed: another expendable blonde. Panicked, he flees the scene and seeks help from Liam. By chance (and this happens too often) Corey is on hand as the two plot a cover-up. But they are careless criminals, and the body is discovered, wrecking their dreams of power.

Sounds familiar? Canin has developed his story around the scandal of Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne, a brave move after Joyce Carol Oates's Black Water: a complex, sinuous little novel, treating the same material with stunning originality. The female victim is Oates's central character; the tragedy is hers. Oates takes greater risks with structure and language, while Canin aspires to a more conventional novel with broader scope, a bildingsroman about class and exclusion.

His book derives its themes from several American classics: The Great Gatsby; An American Tragedy; American Pastoral; East of Eden – even Nabokov's Ada. Canin's style, though, is all his own: straightforward but elegant, never straining for effect, and without trickery or self-regard. His solid prose also contains some fine lyricism, and an elegiac tone, beautifully sustained.

The novel is too long and, while Canin shows real psychological insight, many extended conversations could have been edited. Ditto for the philosophising. On power, Canin is particularly astute, as well as on Americans' early attachment to the land and its ensuing desecration.

Unsurprisingly, by 2003 Aberdeen West has become a mall. "Progress... it's always half criminal," says Corey's father as they watch Liam's great oaks felled and butchered: a sorrowful re-enactment of the fall from grace of a family, a social ideal – and America itself.

Mary Flanagan's 'Adele' is published by Bloomsbury