It's never too late to learn

August Kleinman works in a convenience store called Bread & Circus. He stands at the check-out packing groceries into brown paper bags even though there are two Francis Bacons on the walls of his Boston home. There are millions of dollars in his bank account, too, but the retired brewing magnate is an old bugger as well as "a bagger". He has always done what he wanted. "Take the advice of no one" is his arrogant creed. He has survived a one-to-one with a Japanese soldier; he has lost his Italian wife to Alzheimer's disease; he is, in most people's eyes, a man of the world, yet he is about to learn "how ignorant he still was of the human being".

It makes a change for the protagonist of a getting-of-wisdom story to be in his seventies rather than his teens. Ethan Canin does provide glimpses of Augie's childhood in Nazi Germany - cold, factoryowning father; flight to America with his mother - but is on firmer ground in Pittsburgh, Boston and Manhattan. He acknowledges that the world turns in "cycles of devotion, tragedy, idiosyncrasy, and outrage" but the home front interests him more.

Carry Me Across The Water is about the emotional fall-out of family-conflicts rather than the implications of the diaspora. Kleinman crosses the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Caribbean in the course of the novel, yet the journey he makes remains an interior one.

Kleinman is not close to his three children. Harry, the eldest and most like his father, is a viceprovost of Rice University in Texas; Hannah is a schoolteacher in California; and Jimmy is a New York businessman rediscovering his faith. He still has not forgiven his father for throwing him up in the air as a kid. Claudine, from Virginia, converted to Judaism in order to marry Jimmy; they have just had a son called Asher. Claudine is by far the most sympathetic character and she triggers the only moving scene in the entire novel. She comes home unexpectedly to find Augie talking to his dead wife as he changes his grandson's diaper.

Carry Me Across The Water is a well-wrought turn but willed rather than felt. For example, the phrase "the surprising cooperation of physics" on Page 16 - Kleinman has punched his future brother-in-law - is echoed on Page 135 when Kleinman pulls a bow across the resonating strings of a cello: "the co-operation of physics astounded him". Other reviews will use such epithets as "exquisite", "poised" and "beautifully written", and the novel is all of these things, but coming after the superb For Kings and Planets, Canin's last performance, its texture seems disconcertingly thin.

Like the hawkish Kleinman, it inspires respect, not love.