Book Review: THE PALACE THIEF by Ethan Canin

The Palace Thief: Stories by Ethan Canin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Part of the reason I became a teacher was because of the Kevin Kline film "The Emperor's Club," and since it was based on the last of the four novellas in this book... I've been looking for this volume for almost as long as I've been teaching (13 years!). How wonderful to come across it on a local secondhand bookseller's page!

Canin's stories are almost musical in their beauty! I don't know what makes doctors such good writers (think Abraham Verghese or Irvin Yalom), but if I had to guess, it may be that constant exposure to mortality gives them a scalpel-sharp appreciation of the weight of each precious day in every person's life. And I love the fact that he throws in classical music references!!! Like this one:
"Sitting at the window in the library...I would look up from Samuelson and allow my mind to wander to the third movement of Berlioz's Requiem, or to the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, wherein the strings, though barely moving, weep for humankind."

A lot of contemporary writers have dated voices: distinctly modern patterns of phrase that come across as efficient instead of poetic, serviceable if a bit shallow, focusing on the destination instead of the journey. Canin, on the other hand, is contemporary but sounds classic; his prose is timeless in its elegance! Just take the opening sentence of "The Palace Thief" (the novella that inspired the film "The Emperor's Club"):

"I tell this story not for my own honor, for there is little of that here, and not as a warning, for a man of my calling learns quickly that all warnings are in vain."

And here's the opening line from "Accountant" :

"I am an accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was small."

Such balance and grace! And it reels you right in.

The four short works inside are more of novellas than short stories, in that they encompass not just brief episodes but entire lives in a few pages, which is no easy task! But they all have to do with the idea that character is destiny, and how enormous the ramifications of what we think are small decisions truly are, decades later. He tells the stories of the everyman: the accountant who lives dangerously for a day, the insecure younger brother and the secret weakness of the superior older one, the middle-aged divorced man and the grown up son who teaches him about seduction, and of course, the History teacher and the student who teaches him a painful lesson. Canin challenges the assumption that the average life is mediocre. "What a noble creature is man," indeed.

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