America America by Ethan Canin

The guy at the funeral is Corey Sifter, the editor of a local paper in rural New York State. The dead man is Henry Bonwiller, a Democratic senator who ran for his party's presidential nomination in 1972, until the terrible thing jumped out. This terrible thing, you begin to see, is going to be the climax of the novel, and you also begin to see that Corey Sifter was involved in it.

Corey tells you that he was a teenager in the early Seventies, and that he used to work for his father, a pipe-fitter, who himself worked for a man called Liam Metarey, a vastly rich landowner with a big house, a crazed wife, and two beautiful daughters. Then something interesting happened.

Metarey took Corey under his wing, sent him to a posh school and hired him as a limo driver in the vacation.

The guy Corey chauffeured around was Henry Bonwiller, whose nomination bid Metarey was funding. So Corey got caught up in the politics of the summer of 1972 - there's intrigue involving Nixon, McGovern and Muskie, which is pretty interesting.

And then comes the bad thing. I won't tell you the exact details. But think Chappaquiddick — an arrogant senator, a feisty young woman, a car, a cover-up. And then there's more tragedy, and a twist which you might guess, but which will work even if you do. This is a novel that plays around in the margins of history — it's fictional but it rings true. Canin evokes the period very nicely..

But there's more to it than that.

This is a compelling novel for reasons other than the political intrigue and the quality of the plotting. It's about a young man being introduced to, and seduced by, a world beyond his ken — a world of power and poshness and beautiful, half-mad girls. In this way, it has the feel of Brideshead Revisited and The Line of Beauty.

The Metareys, like Waugh's Flytes and Hollinghurst's Feddens, are otherworldly and nuts, but Canin does them well. We watch Corey get sucked in, and wonder which one of the slightly mad daughters he will go for. A good, relaxing read, if you've got the time..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

It is the early 1970s; Nixon is in the White House and Corey Sifter, the young son of working-class parents, is befriended by the powerful Metarey family, whose patriarch is a kingmaker in the world of New York state politics. Corey becomes a yard-boy on the Metarey's grand estate, and soon, through the family's generosity, a student at a private boarding school. Before long, he is a confidant of the Metareys and an aide to the great New York Senator Henry Bonwiller as he runs for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.But as the Bonwiller presidential campaign gains momentum a crime is committed, and Corey is forced to reconcile his part in a complex tangle of morality, politics, gratitude, love and loyalty. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and during one of the most turbulent eras of twentieth-century US politics, "America America" possesses the mastery of pace and voice of classic American fiction. Canin has written a magnificent novel about ambition and family, politics and crime, sex and love, small-town life and big-time power - and, ultimately, how vanity, greatness and tragedy combine to change history and fate.