‘Star Food’ by Ethan Canin

Star Food by Ethan Canin, 1985

The magic trick:

A young protagonist caught between two (parents’) worlds

This story ties together the Emperor Of The Air collection (one of the best collections I’ve ever read) so well. The collection is not a novel told in stories, nor does it feature recurring characters throughout its nine stories. But the stories hold together with their themes and often emotionally isolated protagonists. And we have this bookend here with “Star Food” that closes the collection, recalling some of the same ideas and character traits – people searching for earthly answers in the skies – that we saw in the collection’s opening story “Emperor Of The Air.”

The story itself of course stands up on its own as well.

Our teenage protagonist is trying to figure out who he wants to be. What does he believe in? In which direction does he set his moral compass?

The story makes his available paths very clear by attaching them to each of his parents. His father is practical and works hard to achieve tangible gains. His mother seeks an expansive world full of possibilities. Does that oversimplify things in a way that marks the story as not entirely realistic? Yes, but that’s a good thing, in my opinion.

And that’s quite a trick on Canin’s part.

The selection:

The summer I turned eighteen I disappointed both my parents for the first time. This hadn’t happened before, since what disappointed one usually pleased the other. As a child, if I played broom hockey instead of going to school, my mother wept and my father took me outside later to find out how many goals I had scored. On the other hand, I spent Saturday afternoon on the roof of my parents’ grocery store staring up at the clouds instead of counting cracker cartons in the stockroom, my father took me to the back to talk about work and discipline, and my mother told me later to keep looking for things that no one else saw.

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