Rating: 
Summary: I can think of younger days....and so can Dr. Canin.
Review: Beautifully written yet painfully spare, the events in "For Kings and Planets" whoosh by the reader like a subway train. For me the style worked, and it didn't work: It worked in the sense that evoked a certain kind of nostalgia; Canin writes peering back into the past, and his ability to boil down affairs and big moments into singular pages is impressive, to be sure. Less can be more. But less can be less, too, and at times there just doesn't seem to be much excuse for the sheer lack of dialogue in the book. Canin's characters can barely breathe, he does so much of the talking for them. On the book's opening page two women are mentioned, and you'd guess they figure prominently, but only one of them actually has a speaking "part" in the book, and a small one at that. I can appreciate that Canin is guiding us to package this knowledge as a hazy fling that our main character, Orno Tarcher, once had, but still. At times, it just isn't enough. The story is not complicated: There is Orno, an earnest Midwestern kid and Marshall, a brilliant, depressed New Yorker. They become friends when they meet Columbia University, mostly by chance, and then remain friends ever as Marshall drifts away into other circles. Canin draws Orno very nicely as a decent kid with a tad too much give in his personality. He takes it on the chin from Marshall a few too many times. And Marshall seems more than willing to throw the punch. And there is Simone, Marshall's sister, a sweet, considerate girl with less brilliance than Marshall but twice as much maturity. Orno recognizes those qualities in her and falls in love. The book appeals to a certain taste. These days, the "in" thing is to delve and delve and delve into a scene or a character or a subject until it's been turned inside out. Canin rejects that. He has great instincts; the book is well thought-out, and well executed. It takes a lot more effort to write a book this way than it does to write a 1000-page tome that just goes on and on. Canin is after crafting realistic characters. That means that not every burden of the week is included. Did some of the critics have a tough time with this one? Sure they did, because many of them are from the Marshall Emerson set, and it's not in their natural prediliction to side with someone without nihilism and sarcasm. Books like these are hard for the critical community for two reasons: 1. They want more ugliness to get their hands around, more pure, mean drama, more villanous behavior, more tension, more rivalry, presumably because it equals their life. 2. They see earnestness as a naivete, as intellectually underwhelming. Thus, they disapprove of some of Marshall's changes late in the book, but they disapprove because they, like Orno, saw the Marshall they wanted to see, not the one Canin was quietly creating. Canin craftily shows us just he wants to show us, revealing Marshall's layers slowly, but clearly. There's much more, and in a sense less, there than we first believed. Are we disappointed with how Marshall turns out? You bet we are. That's part of the point, and what a lot of critics failed to understand. It's clear to me some mistook their disappointment that Canin didn't uphold the jaded academic "standard" of greatness as poor or boring writing. But "For Kings and Planets" is neither poor nor boring, it's simply a curve ball; for once here's a colorful genius that, we figure, will probably fail, but in a spectacular, weird, grand way that befits an intellectual giant. Orno, we sense, half expects it, too. The trick, then, is that Marshall has invented half of his greatness, maybe because he wanted to be great, but didn't know how to be, and, in the end, is pretty blase like all the other wasted geniuses out there. Like the book that Marshall writes, the words are there, but not the music; Marshall has the knowledge to lead a great life, but not the style. Thankfully, Dr. Canin knows the music to make this story sing.
Rating: 
Summary: Fine thread of suspense
Review: Because we know and use fiction craft, authors can often see behind the curtain of another author's book. That's why I loved the fine thread of suspense by which Ethan Canin kept me reading to find out what would happen to his enigmatic characters who behaved as if they weren't sure who they were, and therefore the reader isn't sure. Canin kept them on the elusive edge of excess and poetry and irrationality. I couldn't stop reading until I knew if they'd fall off. For me it's rare to find a novel I can't put down -- perhaps because I've been reading them since I was six. It's rare to find descriptions that linger after the book is read. This was my first Canin. Next time I want to be engrossed, I'll pick up another of his books. J. R. Lankford
Author, The Crowning Circle
Rating:
Summary: Fine thread of suspense
Review: Because we know and use fiction craft, authors can often see behind the curtain of another author's book. That's why I loved the fine thread of suspense by which Ethan Canin kept me reading to find out what would happen to his enigmatic characters who behaved as if they weren't sure who they were, and therefore the reader isn't sure. Canin kept them on the elusive edge of excess and poetry and irrationality. I couldn't stop reading until I knew if they'd fall off. For me it's rare to find a novel I can't put down -- perhaps because I've been reading them since I was six. It's rare to find descriptions that linger after the book is read. This was my first Canin. Next time I want to be engrossed, I'll pick up another of his books. J. R. Lankford
Author, The Crowning Circle
Rating:
Summary: A poignant story of "opposites attract"
Review: Ethan Canin has you hooked with the first sentence and after that you are putty in his hands. I could not put this book down for needing to know what was going to happen next in the enduring friendship between two very different men. Orno, the wide eyed innocent who is amazed by the most mundane of New York City and Marshall, the truest of cynics, meet on their first day of their freshman year at Columbia University and thus begins the beautifully written story of their complicated and often painful relatioship. From the beginning it appears that Orno will be the one most affected by their friendship but over time Canin reveals much about Marshall that helps us to understand this elusive character. I've read Canin's short fiction and he has succeeded in bringing the same strength of his characters, his skill at dialogue and his sympathetic understanding of the human condition to his second novel, For Kings and Planets. A definite must read!!
Rating: 
Summary: He could do better
Review: Ethan Canin's previous two books were works of genius. I especially enjoyed Emperor of the Air, each story is simple but poignant, almost Carver-esque. Which makes For Kings and Planets so much more of a let down. Instead of the unobstrusive prose, Canin chose to write in flowery prose, something he is simply not good at doing. Writing a novel instead of vignettes is also not Canin's forte, as the plot goes everywhere and the third person is unconvincing. The book is also too preachy, especially about the meaninglessness of education in favor of precocity. I highly recommend Canin's short stories, they will change you. But don't pick this book as your first, because you'll never want to read this guy again. If you like to read about Ivy League schools and precocity, check out Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and Salinger's Franny and Zooey, respectively. About boyhood relationships that turn sour, read Chabon's the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
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Summary: Smart People Are [Messed] Up Too
Review: Everything Ethan Canin has written is good - this one is more complex than his other efforts, and probably has narrower appeal. The story is about some Ivy League students and their battles to live up to lives of great promise. The conclusion is worth the wait, as it reveals so much about what pressure can do to distort and destroy lives. Canin writes best about old people looking back on their lives as he did in Emperor of the Air and Carry Me Across The Water. Nevertheless, this is a substantial book that returns good value for the effort it requires to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Nothing New Here
Review: I like Canin's short stories, and I really wanted to like this book. I read it in a couple of days, including the last half on a plane, and I must say that by the time I got home from the airport I had pretty much forgotten the whole thing. While Canin is an above-average writer, he treads no new ground here, and with all due respect to my fellow reviewers, to suggest that this novel is a 5 star masterpiece is like eating a nice hot dog for lunch, and proclaiming it the best meal you've ever eaten. The book, like one reviewer put it, is like a tried and true story of the country mouse and the city mouse. Arno Tarcher comes to Manhattan to attend Columbia, ashamed of his modest beginnings in Missouri, and embarrassed by his parents as he introduces them to his new, sophisticated big city friend Marshall Emerson. The beginning of the novel, including Arno's gradual introduction to college and to NYC, were for me the strongest aspects of the novel. When Marshall starts rubbing off on Arno, as the latter begins staying up all night drinking brandy with pseudo-intellectual Eastern European beatniks at the same cafe every night, I thought the whole thing got a little ridiculous. Arno to me was the only real well-drawn character in the book. The other characters seemed cardboard and put in the story oftentimes just to act as foils to Arno's small town, Missouri values. Why Marshall goes after Arno's Russian girlfriend, and why he cuts out to spoil a family wedding celebration at Cape Cod, are a mystery that we're just supposed to chalk up to his unpredictability and flamboyance. Then Marshall becomes a Hollywood writer and producer (more evidence of his phoniness, get it?) even though there wasn't a shred of evidence in the plot that he'd ever watched a movie or tv show, much less had any interest in working in Hollywood. Ultimately you really don't care, as you read along to the end just to see the culmination of a very predictable romance. This is definitely not Canin's best effort, the NY Times called it almost "banal." Form your own opinions, but consider yourself warned.
Rating:
Summary: Ramblin...
Review: I liked the book but I didn't love it and wouldn't tell people to run out and buy it, nor would I pass it along now that I own it. I grew to like the main characters enough that I couldn't wait to finish the book. But I ended up feeling somewhat cheated because I wasn't really impacted by any part of it enough to have made it worth my time. Towards the end of the book the story seemed mundane and like typical every day life. Nothing to write a book about. On a final and unrelated note, from the picture on the back of the book, I think the author is a hotty!
Rating:
Summary: My first by Canin-- and not the last
Review: I really loved this book-- and I'm surprised by the polarity of reviews here. Some of the criticism amazes me; Canin is criticized for writing about family conflict: "tension between family members is normal," chides one reviewer. Is this to say that writers should only tackle abnormal subjects? Others seem to criticize him for not being Waugh, Updike, or whomever. I found this book a delight. It gave me the same feeling I had reading "A Separate Peace" 30 years ago. It artfully accounts the trials and traumas of the college experience; the remarkably diverse cultures we have within the boundaries of this country; the benefits, dangers, and costs of friendship; the deceit one will use to mask reality and build a facade. This is the first work I've read of Canin's. If this truly is Canin's worst, as several here say, I can't wait to get my hands on his other works.
Rating:
Summary: Better than the dentist's chair, less than NYC
Review: This is a very long book that covers the life of its two main characters from their first day at Columbia to their early thirties. I understand that Orno and Marshall are supposed to have symbolic value, Orno representing the obtuse, hard working midwest and Marshall the depraved, sophisticated city. And the book is well written, no doubt, Ethan Canin has a very elegant prose style. But I don't buy Orno's relationship with Simone, and I never cared what happens to any of the characters at all. None of them achieve the status of "person", they were all "types." Orno is a dope on page one and he is a dope on page 300. Wouldn't being in New York, particularly the time spent with Marshall, make him a sharp enough guy to know that something is up when his lost child of a best friend takes him to a shed the night before his and Simone's wedding. Particularly when it is revealed that Marshall is accompanied by a woman who is more or less a prostitute. There's a lot of classism and regionalism stuff in the book that is mildly interesting, but were a lesser author to write a book with similar content-well they probably have, I just haven't heard of it. I know Ethan Canin is capable of more after reading Emperor of the Air, so I was dissapointed. It really isn't bad though, just not particularly groundbreaking, nor does it have terribly interesting characters.
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