A truly gifted short-story writer, Ethan Canin faltered when it came to his second novel, the turgid For Kings and Planets. This time around, though, the author has found an ingenious solution to his problems with the longer form. Carry Me Across the Water is essentially a book of short stories posing as a novel, and here's the surprise--it's pretty effective. The protagonist, August Kleinman, is a wealthy old man looking back on the span of his life. He recalls his early youth in Vienna as the son of a cultured Jewish family; his flight to America in the 1930s with his mother; his war years in the Pacific; his career as the beer king of Pittsburgh; his love for his wife and alienation from his children. This may sound relatively straightforward. Yet Canin shatters this portrait into a series of compelling vignettes, each rearing up unexpectedly and without the crude restraints of chronology.

This format of random flashbacks allows the author to handle a sprawling novel--and a complex life. At the same time, these compartmentalized moments are kept from seeming too small by means of an expansive prose style, which sometimes suggest Mark Helprin in high gear: "Downriver he could see the fierce furnaces throwing blue-black smoke into the air, the crude ore of the land being transformed by human ingenuity into girders and beams that were then floated downstream to ports and train yards and trucking depots, a vast delta of commerce that fanned out from there to all the great hubs of the earth." Throughout, Canin tempers his grandiloquence with a short-story writer's sensitivity to the details of character, and accomplishes exactly what he intended: an involving montage of 20th-century life. --Claire Dederer


From Publishers Weekly
August Kleinman, the protagonist of Canin's (For Kings and Planets) latest novel, is 78 years old, rich and wise from a life filled with accomplishments and heartache. Yet as this spare, beautifully realized story opens, he is marveling at the fierce force he discovered in himself one afternoon when he was 18. That day, on his way to watch a friend from his Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Queens practice football at Fordham University, Kleinman slipped into the locker room and impulsively donned a uniform. He can still feel the way he soared through the air and the jolt of the tackle he landed before he was caught. Looking back, Kleinman can clearly see that it has been the sudden flare of this instinctive intelligence and fight, this drive to persist and assert his existence, that has shaped his life, bringing both abundance and loss. Canin deftly laces together the defining stories of Kleinman's life from fleeing Nazi Germany as a child with his mother to fighting the Japanese in World War II, building his fortune, enduring the death of his beloved wife and then his difficult relationship with one grown son. Each story contributes another instance of the fighting spirit and impulse to soar that so characterizes Kleinman. However, what is finally galvanizing and moving about Kleinman's life is not his individuality but his complexity. He is capable of being touched, and he yearns to protect and nurture what he finds good. This work has a resonance and precision that can come only when native storytelling ability and craftsmanship search out the deepest truths. Canin deserves a wide readership because he shows that truth even the truth that comes with age and experience is not boring. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Living alone in a Boston apartment after his wife's death, 78-year-old millionaire beer magnate August Kleinman reviews the defining moments of his life: escape from Nazi Germany as a child, marriage to an Italian Catholic, and the reckless decision to start his own business. But mostly his thoughts turn to World War II and a tragic encounter he had with a young Japanese soldier. For the past 50 years, Kleinman has kept the soldier's letters and drawings and decides to return the keepsakes to the surviving family members in Japan personally. More of a character study than a history lesson, Canin's latest novel (after For Kings and Planets) mentions major postwar events only in passing, instead focusing on family relationships and the simple satisfactions of domesticity. In deference to the values of the World War II generation, the prose style is self-consciously old-fashioned, without a trace of irony or narrative duplicity. This is a well-crafted and frequently affecting novel that only misses the mark in its familiarity. We have heard this story countless times before. Still, Canin's many fans will not be disappointed. Recommended for most fiction collections.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
In Canin's fourth novel, he tells the story of 78-year-old German immigrant August Kleinman. Having recently lost his beloved wife and sensing that the end is near, August flashes back to key moments in his past, struggling to see the patterns that have shaped his life. He escaped Nazi Germany when he was just a boy, and his mother's courage and counsel ("Take the advice of no one") always stayed with him. He fought in World War II, married his high-school sweetheart, had three children, and made a fortune by starting his own brewery. August misses his wife terribly and frets about what to do with his money, but the key moment he returns to again and again is a frightening confrontation he had with a young Japanese soldier in a cave. He ultimately decides to go to Japan, where he intends to make reparations to the family of the young soldier. Canin struggles mightily here to reach for the resonance of fable, but his story remains strangely flat, plagued by problems with pacing and an awkward flashback structure. There are some beautiful passages here, most notably in the wry exchanges between August and his daughter-in-law. But it's baffling and somewhat disheartening to see such an accomplished short-story writer insist on struggling with the longer form. Still, Canin has been coasting on the acclaim and popularity of his first book, the short-story collection Emperor of the Air (1988), for a long time now, and his fans keep coming back for more. There's no doubt they will be asking for his latest book. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

His wife dead, his health fading, August Kleinman knows that his life is dwindling away. As he contemplates his fate, he mourns his beloved spouse, and relives his childhood in prewar Germany. His thoughts drift over his boyhood escape from the Nazis, his military service with the Allies, and his successful business career. But a single image absorbs this 78-year-old man more than all the rest: The face of one enemy soldier. A striking novel about reliving the past and attempting to repair it.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

“Take the advice of no one,” August Kleinman’s mother says to him while August is still a young boy in Germany, and with these words to guide him, he escapes Nazi Germany and goes on to build a fortune, a family, and life on his own terms in America. At the defining moments that reveal character and shape fate — a shocking encounter with a Japanese soldier in a cave during World War II, the audacious decision to start a brewery in Pittsburgh and a violent reaction against threats to its independent success, a vacation in Barbados, during which his beloved wife mysteriously wanders off, the birth of his grandson — August’s instincts are determinative in a way that illuminates how lives unfold at the deepest levels. This is a brilliant, suspenseful, surprising novel by one of America’s finest writers. Publisher’s Weekly called Ethan Canin’s For Kings and Planets “Masterful … a classic parable of the human condition,” and the same can be said about Carry Me Across the Water.

SYNOPSIS

A novel by the author of The Palace Thief and For Kings and Planets.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

August Kleinman is a scrappy, self-made Jewish-American whose stubbornness is a function of his gusto. Kleinman escapes Nazi Germany as a child; grows up in Brooklyn; fights in the South Pacific during World War II; and becomes enormously wealthy as a brewer in Pittsburgh. Now a retired widower in Boston, he embarks on a trip to Japan in order to deliver (after half a century) the love letters of a Japanese soldier he killed during the war. While the core premise is undeniably sentimental, Canin wisely makes his hero alternately enthralled by, and dismissive of, his mission: "This was what his life had distilled itself into—a contest of mysticism and pragmatics." Hardheaded Kleinman meditates on art, death and faith with disarming self-awareness, a testament to the author's breathtaking lyricism. The plot of this book remains tightly-woven, even as it stretches across seven decades and several continents, compressing a remarkable amount of chronology into a relatively short novel. —Jeff Ousborne (Excerpted Review)

Publishers Weekly

August Kleinman, the protagonist of Canin's (For Kings and Planets) latest novel, is 78 years old, rich and wise from a life filled with accomplishments and heartache. Yet as this spare, beautifully realized story opens, he is marveling at the fierce force he discovered in himself one afternoon when he was 18. That day, on his way to watch a friend from his Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Queens practice football at Fordham University, Kleinman slipped into the locker room and impulsively donned a uniform. He can still feel the way he soared through the air and the jolt of the tackle he landed before he was caught. Looking back, Kleinman can clearly see that it has been the sudden flare of this instinctive intelligence and fight, this drive to persist and assert his existence, that has shaped his life, bringing both abundance and loss. Canin deftly laces together the defining stories of Kleinman's life from fleeing Nazi Germany as a child with his mother to fighting the Japanese in World War II, building his fortune, enduring the death of his beloved wife and then his difficult relationship with one grown son. Each story contributes another instance of the fighting spirit and impulse to soar that so characterizes Kleinman. However, what is finally galvanizing and moving about Kleinman's life is not his individuality but his complexity. He is capable of being touched, and he yearns to protect and nurture what he finds good. This work has a resonance and precision that can come only when native storytelling ability and craftsmanship search out the deepest truths. Canin deserves a wide readership because he shows that truth even the truth that comes with age and experience is not boring. (May) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Living alone in a Boston apartment after his wife's death, 78-year-old millionaire beer magnate August Kleinman reviews the defining moments of his life: escape from Nazi Germany as a child, marriage to an Italian Catholic, and the reckless decision to start his own business. But mostly his thoughts turn to World War II and a tragic encounter he had with a young Japanese soldier. For the past 50 years, Kleinman has kept the soldier's letters and drawings and decides to return the keepsakes to the surviving family members in Japan personally. More of a character study than a history lesson, Canin's latest novel (after For Kings and Planets) mentions major postwar events only in passing, instead focusing on family relationships and the simple satisfactions of domesticity. In deference to the values of the World War II generation, the prose style is self-consciously old-fashioned, without a trace of irony or narrative duplicity. This is a well-crafted and frequently affecting novel that only misses the mark in its familiarity. We have heard this story countless times before. Still, Canin's many fans will not be disappointed. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/01.] Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews