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When you’ve been involved in something like this, no matter how long ago it happened, no matter how long it’s been absent from the news, you’re fated, nonetheless, to always search it out. To be on alert for it, somehow, every day of your life. For the small item at the back of the newspaper. For the stranger at the cocktail party or the unfamiliar letter in the mailbox. For the reckoning pause on the other end of the phone line. For the dreadful reappearance of something that, in all likelihood, is never going to return.

from America, America, by Ethan Canin

There’s nothing like a potent secret to draw readers into a novel.

I picked up an advance copy of this book (published in June 2008) at a local used book shop back in November, and it’s been sitting on my “get to it soon” reading pile ever since. My stack on the nightstand didn’t have any novels in it, and a few nights ago I needed one–something to fall into, to balance my reading about craft and the enumeration of the forces gathered against Troy in the Illiad. (Though the endnotes insist that these were of great interest to Homer’s audiences, the lists of who came, who begat whom, what weapons they carried, their previous acts of war and how many ships they commanded is tremendously tedious.)

I’m about 150 pages into America, America, and am enjoying it. The novel’s protagonist, Corey Sifter, narrates the novel at a contemplative pace which is often evocative, though some of the foreshadowing is so obvious and repeated so frequently that I’m already guessing some of the events to come. Overall, though, it’s a pleasure to read. Even the repetitiveness can be forgiven, because it seems genuinely to reflect the journey of the narrator.

This opening hooked me, and I’m glad to be along for the ride.