When President George W. Bush debated Senator John Kerry shortly before the 2004 presidential election, some sharp-eyed observers noticed a suspicious, rectangular bulge under Bush's suit. Before the debate was even concluded, the Internet was abuzz with speculation that the president had been wearing a transmitter through which aides were feeding him information. The Bush campaign denied the allegation, of course. But it struck many readers of "The Palace Thief"—the title story of Ethan Canin's best-selling collection, published by Random House in 1994, in which an elite prep school student who cheats in an academic competition grows up to become a politician who cheats in a similar contest by receiving answers to questions through an earpiece—as a case of life imitating art.

"Extraordinary, wasn't it?" the author says of Bush's debate performance four years ago. "Especially when you watch some of his reactions. There was that funny look for a second, as if he was getting information—as if somebody was telling him what to say."

But that real-life parallel to "The Palace Thief" was just one in a series of karmic convergences for Canin, who, at forty-seven, is a lifelong student of presidential politics. After being introduced to the author at an event leading up to the Iowa caucuses, about six weeks before dropping out of the race, John Edwards immediately said, "You wrote Emperor of the Air!" referring to Canin's first book, a story collection published by Houghton Mifflin in 1988 when he was only twenty-seven. Gary Hart, the former senator from Colorado whose 1988 presidential campaign was derailed by a sex scandal, read The Palace Thief and subsequently invited Canin onto his Denver-based radio show to discuss literature and political corruption. (Canin accepted the offer, and the interview was broadcast in 1994.) The author also participated in one of the Renaissance Weekends—annual retreats for "innovative leaders" from diverse fields, once attended by Bill and Hillary Clinton—in the mid-nineties. And in one of the most bizarre coincidences of his literary-political life, Canin was unnerved earlier this year when New York governor Eliot Spitzer, widely viewed as an inevitable presidential candidate someday, was linked to a prostitution ring known as the Emperor's Club—which happens to be the title of the 2002 film version (starring Kevin Kline) of "The Palace Thief."

If character is fate, as a classics professor quotes Heraclitus as saying in that book, then it was destiny that a political junkie like Canin—who scours as many as a dozen newspapers and Web sites each day for the latest campaign news—would eventually write America America, published this month by Random House. His fourth novel, and the first since Carry Me Across the Water (Random House, 2001), America America—the title refers to a line in "America the Beautiful," which in a late scene becomes a kind of funeral dirge—is Canin's magnum opus, a sprawling page-turner that is at once a Gatsby-like meditation on class and a haunting elegy for American liberalism in the early seventies, when it took a beating from which it's still recovering. Corey Sifter, the book's narrator, tells the story of his evolution from plumber's son to newspaper publisher through the patronage of the enlightened aristocrat Liam Metarey, whose backing of a politically admirable but deeply flawed Democratic presidential candidate in 1972 ends in scandal and tragedy. Edmund Muskie, George McGovern, and the ominous, offstage presence of Richard Nixon float through Canin's tale like ghosts, as does the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident, echoed by the story of Henry Bonwiller, a liberal senator from New York State whose bid for the White House is derailed by revelations of his involvement with a young woman who turns up dead.

"It's his best and most ambitious book, no question," says poet Chard deNiord, a longtime friend of Canin's from their days as graduate students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and now one of his most trusted manuscript readers. "Certainly it's the political book he's been waiting to write his whole career. It's also his most carefully woven and crafted book, which he had to reach his current level of maturity—personally and politically—to complete."

Although the seeming ease and clarity that are trademarks of Canin's writing were there from the beginning—his earliest stories often read as if they were written by someone with the midcareer seasoning of, say, John Cheever, to whom he's often compared—they took time to develop. For much of Canin's adult life, he has struggled with bouts of indecision over whether to pursue writing or medicine—or both—as a career. After graduating from Stanford University in 1982 with a degree in English, Canin attended the Writers' Workshop; unhappy with the progress he had made there, he entered Harvard Medical School in 1984. Over the next decade, he vacillated between writing and medicine. He received his MD from Harvard and his California medical license in 1992; that same year he began a residency in internal medicine—which included stints working in emergency rooms—at the University of California, San Francisco, but abandoned the position in 1994. Three years later, and with his usual ambivalence, he accepted an invitation to join the Writers' Workshop faculty, taking another year before finally deciding to make the arrangement permanent.

Canin has always been fascinated by politics. In much of a daylong interview at his lakeside cabin near Elk Rapids, Michigan, where he was spending a week with his wife, Barbara, and their three young daughters, Canin's talk about writing and politics is inextricably linked. His interest in both grows partly out of his heightened sensitivity to issues of class. Canin grew up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family that moved around the Northeast when he was a child, then settled in San Francisco when his father, a music teacher and later a concert violinist, took a job there. His parents sent him, on scholarship, to an elite private school—where, for the first time in his life, he says, "I met people who had maids." Later, as a student at Harvard, he would rub elbows with the sons and daughters of the eastern aristocracy. These experiences left him with an almost Proustian awareness of the double identities produced by social mobility, an awareness that is reflected not only in the perspective of his new novel's narrator, but also, Canin notes, in the stump speeches of this year's presidential candidates.

"If you've moved classes at all in your life, as a lot of Americans have, you're always carrying with you two classes at once: the class of your childhood and your current class," Canin says. "You can see that in John Edwards, who thinks of himself as a poor kid to this day—just as Hillary Clinton, in a funny way, thinks of herself as a Welsh coal miner, because that's her ancestry. Obama has the same thing. Two generations to get from a hut in Kenya to the possible presidency of the United States!"

Canin sees Barack Obama as a potential redeemer of American liberalism, a noble tradition tarnished by a series of scandals, many sexual in nature (Gary Hart and Donna Rice, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Gary Condit and Chandra Levy), that began with Chappaquiddick. "I can't deny that that was probably what got me thinking about the book," Canin says. "Historically it was important; it was just around the time when it became pejorative to call somebody a liberal. I think Ted Kennedy gave an image for the haters of liberalism to focus on, and that was unfortunate. Politics is an emotional question, not a rational question, and the feeling was that he was going to endanger our daughters and save himself—at the cost of us, you know?"

Canin cringes when he considers the possible connections readers could draw between Henry Bonwiller and Edward Kennedy—"partly because I don't want people to think this is a diatribe against Kennedy," whose political contributions he venerates—but he knows they are inevitable. "The larger question in the book has to do with the fact that you have to be grievously wounded as a human being to want that kind of political power, I think. With the Henry Bonwillers of the world—great, public-spirited men, but vain, and with tragic flaws—what are you going to do with a mixed bag like that? The answer in politics is, you just have to live with it."

A public figure like Henry Bonwiller would never dare admit his flaws, but Canin, who is notoriously thin-skinned and intermittently suffers from low-level depression, is the first to admit his own. Canin did little writing as a student at Iowa in the mid-eighties—he still squirms a bit as he tells an anecdote about finding himself at the front of an auditorium with three other students and visiting author John Irving, who was to analyze their manuscripts for an audience of their peers. "Only two of these stories are publishable, so I'll just talk about them," Irving announced, shuffling Canin's story to the bottom of the pile.

In any case, Canin's deep ambivalence about a career in writing may stem from his bewildering multitude of talents, each clamoring for his attention. "I used to call him pathologically well rounded, because he was good at so many things: writing, doctoring, carpentry, plumbing, softball," says an old friend from San Francisco, nonfiction writer Ethan Watters. "If he wasn't such a nice guy, I'd really not like him."

The other major issue for Canin was that writing never seemed like a practical profession. "I remember we went to a poetry reading and he said, ‘I think everybody should go out and get a job,' which was very telling," deNiord says. "He'd just gotten into Harvard Medical School and felt, ‘Now I'm going to do something with my life.' Writing wasn't really working out for him—it seemed like an indulgence, a dilettantish thing to him—and he had a newfound purpose in going off to med school. I really thought he was going to leave writing behind completely at that point."

But it was during medical school, ironically, when Canin began writing in earnest, producing most of the precociously wise short stories that would be collected in Emperor of the Air. The book was a rousing success, both critically and commercially—it was one of the last short fiction debuts to launch a serious assault on the best-seller lists—but Canin continued to waffle between medicine and literature. It was only after he was well into his residency in San Francisco that he finally committed himself exclusively to writing.

But this decision amounted to a self-consignment to hell for Canin, a perfectionist whose literary standards were impossibly high. The novelist and nonfiction writer Po Bronson—with whom Canin and Watters in 1994 established the Grotto, a suite of writers workspaces in San Francisco—recalls his friend's agony. "That pained look on his face was a daily occurrence," Bronson says. "He'd be getting three hundred words a day while I was getting two thousand words a day. He'd write three pages and rip two out. We'd be zipping right along with our stuff, and he'd laugh and shake his head at us. Of course, the reality is that he'd seen great heights that we'd never seen and was holding himself to a different measure."

The level of difficulty in Canin's work only increased as he transitioned from writing mostly short stories to writing novels, a process whose first fruit was Blue River (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), the story of two brothers, one an ophthalmologist, the other a bum. The celebrated title story of The Palace Thief was nearly novella length, and the three books that have
followed—For Kings and Planets, Carry Me Across the Water, and now America America—have steadily increased in complexity and length. "I want to do the hard thing," he says. "Someone said writing a novel is like walking from Vladivostok to Gibraltar on your knees. That's the way I feel about it."

America America has been the longest walk of all. Canin started writing it in 2000, as the story of a teacher and his student, only to realize he was reprising The Palace Thief. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, after which Canin stopped writing altogether for nearly two years. "It seemed silly to write another novel—and it still to some degree seems silly to me, writing fiction—but in the end, it just made me more serious," he says. "It made me think about politics, made me turn to the external world a lot more."

This turning outward is a trend Canin sees among his students at Iowa. "Not to be too grandiose, but because I teach, I see American literature about five years ahead," he says. "In the last decade, two things happened that are bringing about a real shift. One is the Internet, which makes research so much easier; a lot of students are writing about historical events, for example, because they have such easy online access. The other thing that happened is September 11. It's made people realize that there are larger forces out there to think about."

There are larger forces, to be sure, many of which Canin ponders nearly every day as presidential campaign issues and as fodder for fiction: the health care crisis, the persistence of poverty, the opportunities and challenges of globalization. But another force, equally large in Canin's life as a writer, is the question of whether he can continue to write at all.

It is possible, Canin says, that he won't keep writing. Each book leaves him exhausted, racked with anxiety, and uncertain whether he can ever do it again, and right now, America America feels like his Waterloo. "I've written six books, each time thinking it's the end, but I really sometimes think this could be it," he says. "This feels a little different from the others. This feels like a better book than any other I've written, or at least more complex, so therefore I feel maybe more exhausted after it."

The exhaustion is worsened by Canin's standard operating procedure in fiction, which is to imagine and identify with his characters in a way that's reminiscent of method acting. When practiced at the highest levels, this can sap a writer's creative energy.

"A tremendous amount of language that is untouched—sort of clamped by reason—I try to unclamp that a bit by getting into the character," Canin says. "I try to teach my students, ‘Don't write about a character. That never works. Be that character, and then write your own story.' And that's sort of a fundamental rule or truth in fiction writing. Deeply imagine somebody else, and then everything else takes care of itself. Otherwise it's paralyzing. Questions students ask, like, ‘Where should I start the story?' are answered by that. You are that person, so where would that person start it? Anyway, I try to get to that state where it's half unhinged, to see what results. I think [about] the point where I became half unhinged, especially after September 11, and that's when the book started working. But it takes a lot out of you."

This news of Canin's battle fatigue may come as a surprise to his readers, but it's familiar to his friends and former students. "It sounds in keeping with what he always said about the frustrations of being a writer—chiefly that it's a slog that's unending," says Nam Le, a 2005 alumnus of Canin's class and author of The Boat, a short story collection published by Knopf in May. "It's a very unique and unremitting type of pain to write a novel, and he expressed and communicated that quite often. That's not to say there aren't incredible pleasures and satisfactions or that he didn't inspire us to keep going through all the troubles. But he was never shy about expressing the fact that, in his mind, writing wasn't always, in the moment, pleasurable."

Bret Anthony Johnston, the author of the story collection Corpus Christi (Random House, 2004), who was a student at Iowa in 2002 and has since become a friend of Canin's, thinks his old mentor is merely being honest. "I think most writers feel the way he does, and that doubt is what fuels our best writing," Johnston says. "Ethan is very rare in that he speaks candidly, where many other writers try to obfuscate their real feelings. We're all a braid of self-doubt and bravado, and Ethan is just more honest about it than most. I, for one, don't believe for a second that this will be his last book. If I have to go over to his house and drag him to his desk every day, I'll be happy to do that."

For all the author's uncertainty about his future writing, it's clear that his writer's heart is still beating. One night in mid-March, Canin heard the ice groaning on Elk Lake, a sign of the coming thaw. The following afternoon, the ice was still sixteen inches thick under Canin's boots—he measured it himself, jabbing a hole through the surface like an ice fisherman—which meant it was safe for his nine-year-old daughter, Ayla, who was skating figure eights nearby. "Hi, sweetheart," he called. "You look great out there!"

Then he pointed out an odd and disturbing sight: the intact, picked-clean skeleton of a deer, a femur caught fast in the ice. "Must have been killed by coyotes," Canin said. "It started over there"—a spot several yards away bearing traces of blood and skin and hair, like a crime scene—"and then..." He went eerily still for a moment, picturing it, working out the details of what happened, or might have happened, in his head. You could almost see the gears shift as he processed this violent little drama, then set it aside to be recalled later and, maybe, embellished and transfigured for a story.

His closest friends would have recognized it as a classic Canin moment. "There's something about stillness that's important for Ethan," deNiord says. "I've been with him when he's been still for twenty, thirty, forty minutes, just thinking about something. He did that once in a room he was planning to remodel in his house. I realized he was just figuring out what he had to do, step by step by step. He's the same way with fiction, which for Ethan is scientific. He's a puzzle solver. And he is, in the end, a writer. Try as he might, he can't get away from that."

And perhaps even as Canin continues his lovers' quarrel with literature, he's hedging his bets. By the time he returns to Michigan this summer, the deer skeleton will have sunk to the bottom of the lake, but he'll know just where it is. He marked the spot.

Kevin Nance is critic-at-large at the Chicago Sun-Times.