Palace Thief (Canin)

Book Reviews
Each plot is dramatic, its characters highly engaging, the suspense sustained and irresistible. Altogether, the collection is a commanding performance that surpasses the author's two previous books.... In The Palace Thief, Mr. Canin, who is doing a medical residency in San Francisco, has fully delivered on the rich promise of these earlier books. While his subject matter is highly contemporary—fantasy baseball camps, divorce, the difficulty parents and children have communicating, the relevance of education to success in business—Mr. Canin's dependence on vivid characters and dramatic plots can be called traditional. The stories are so satisfyingly specific that you don't search them for transcendent meaning.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times

Extraordinary for its craft and emotional effect.... [Ethan Canin is] a writer of enormous talent and charm.
Washington Post

These four long stories are not only splendid reading material; they are stunning art, the kind if art that, blessed with an adamant yet unadorned intelligence, capers at the edge of life's deepest mysteries.
Dallas Morning News

Canin, whose short-story collection Emperor of the Air was justly feted, as his novel Blue River was not, here offers four brilliant longer stories, each seamlessly structured and with prose and characters to linger over. The book's ostensible theme is Heraclitus's observation that character is fate, which is all well and good until we try to understand the meaning of either term. Take Mr. Hundert, the honorable boys' school teacher who in the title story tries to make sense of a student's rise from a cheating dullard to an industrial and political leader. As for the question of character, hardly does a protagonist gain a slippery hold on the essence of another person's character, when a forced self-evaluation occurs: in "City of Broken Hearts" a recently divorced man considers his son as alien but in fact, the youth is the one person who sees through—and redeems—his father's bluff boorish exterior. Canin keeps readers so thoroughly engaged that the anticipation of resolution is almost like dread, as in the beautiful and wrenching "Batorsag and Szerelem,"' in which the narrator recalls the gradual revelation of his family's painful secrets and a quiet secret of his own, the most painful and insidious of all.
Publishers Weekly

In each story, Canin proves himself adept at articulating moments of profound embarrassment followed by flashes of self-knowledge that are either invigorating or demoralizing. Moving and memorable. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

Canin's return to short fiction should be a cause for welcome—yet isn't, disappointingly. In four adipose, rhetorical, quite forced long stories, he continues—as in his unfortunate last book, the novel Blue River (1991)—to strive for "wise" adult tonalities. But these rich, deep voices all but neglect the small flashes of humaneness and helpless knowledge that made Canin's debut collection, Emperor of the Air (1988), remarkable—turning him into a writer who builds high, fussy, false ceilings without walls to support them. Upon an unstartling theme—that we repeat as adults what we do as children—each story here plays out a variation. In the baldest, the title piece, a powerful captain of industry still is moved to impress his elderly prep-school teacher with his temerity and moral sleaze. In "Accountant," an old friend's later-life success throws a careful man to the edge of his rectitude. In "City of Broken Hearts," a middle-aged father learns something about trust and love from his college-aged son. And in "Batorsag and Szerelem," a boy observes in his elder genius brother what seem like signs of schizophrenia but are instead sexual misapprehensions. It's here that the book is most ragged but also most genuine-seeming: the younger boy has available to him an X-raying psychology no grown-up character in Canin ever does (Canin must be the ultimate "kid-brother" writer)—and it's frustrating that this quicksilver perceptiveness is given so little play in the stories, which are bulked-up instead with grown-up characters that are invariably slow, large, and overwide. The stories thus always seem to be wearing their parent's clothes—an effect that reaches into the prose itself, a simulacrum of Cheeverian and Peter Tayloresque modulation that in Canin's hands is just pomp and circumstance.
Kirkus Reviews