Reading Russell Banks

Russell Banks died slightly more than three weeks ago on 20 January 2023. I have long wanted to read his work, and, this month, I read four of his novels. I can say they are all excellent.

If you are looking for a good place to start with Banks, I would recommend this recent appreciation by Ron Charles in the Washington Post. Charles says this of banks:

Banks, who died on Saturday at the age of 82, was the author of 14 novels, along with several works of nonfiction, books of poetry and collections of short stories. His fiction was relentlessly serious, reflecting the scale and scope of what’s at stake for beings burdened with a conscience. One way or another, that’s the subject of all fiction, but few novelists wrestled so strenuously with the mental anguish of falling short of our ideals. He developed a particular expertise in the way national and personal regrets commingle.

 

I started with Continental Drift, Banks novel published in 1985 about a New Hampshire oil burner repairman, Bob Dubois and his quest to achieve the American dream. As can be expected, Dubois fails to achieve his dream. The first line of the book is

It's December 21, 1979, a Friday, in Catamount, New Hampshire.

 

The second, of four, novels I read by Russell Banks this month was Rule of the Bone, originally published in 1995. One might this novel as a modern day David Copperfield. To quote Charles again,

Throughout America’s renewed mania for book banning, I’ve been disappointed that “Rule of the Bone” hasn’t inspired more prigs to start collecting dry sticks. When it came out in 1995, Russell Banks’s explicit, drug-saturated novel about a troubled 14-year-old boy sparked predictable alarm. But now it doesn’t even make the American Library Association’s list of top 100 most challenged books.

Could “Rule of the Bone” have fallen so far into obscurity that it’s not engaging disaffected teens and shocking a new generation of censorial politicians?

God forbid, because we need Banks’s work now more than ever.

 

The first line of Rule of the Bone is

You'll probably think I'm making a lot of this up just to make me sound better than I really am or smarter or even luckier but I’m not. 

The third Russell Banks novel I read this month, out of four, is The Darling. Goodreads summarizes this novel by saying

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground.

Hannah flees America for West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends of the notorious warlord and ex-president, Charles Taylor. Hannah's encounter with Taylor ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.

The first line of The Darling is 

After many years of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa.

The fourth and final Russell Banks novel I read this month was his last one, The Magic Kingdom.

To quote Ron Charles again, here is something of what this book is about

[Banks'] new novel, “The Magic Kingdom,” returns again to that theme but in an entirely different register. The violent fury of the abolitionists’ principles has been replaced by the quiet intensity of the Shakers’ faith. Both groups looked aghast at a world intolerably corrupted, and both pursued strategies to utterly transform the status quo. But the Shakers, following the inspiration of Mother Ann Lee, withdrew into their egalitarian, celibate communities. And by setting his story among these outwardly peaceful, inwardly passionate believers, Banks has created another fascinating volume in his exploration of the American experience.

“The Magic Kingdom” is framed as a transcript of old reel-to-reel audiotapes discovered by Banks in the moldy basement of a public library in St. Cloud, Fla. The recordings, we’re told, were made in 1971 in the days after Walt Disney opened his gigantic amusement park in Orlando. The voice on the tapes is that of an elderly real estate investor named Harley Mann, who died soon after leaving this confession. Banks, now 82, claims that there are “many unsettling parallels and resemblances between my own story and Harley Mann’s.”

As an old man near the end of his life, Harley relays these details in a slowly gathering cloud of melancholy. Indeed, “The Magic Kingdom” is dramatically backloaded, as though, having committed to a full confession, he remains reluctant to reveal what happened, even more than 60 years later. “Why would I want to revisit a place that I regard as the opening wound in a wounded life?” Harley asks as his tape recorder spins. He spends a long time setting down the social, theological and legal forces that will eventually collide, but that investment — by author and reader — is amply rewarded by this masterfully crafted story.

Our literature is thick with skepticism, condescension and downright derision directed at anyone who takes their faith more seriously than an Instagram poem. But Banks has something more complex in mind than the hypocrisy of a religious leader or the predictable impurities of a pious community. He’s interested in the way grand schemes intended to perfect human nature produce instead a combination of secrecy and shame that can spark wildly unpredictable results.

 

The first line of The Magic Kingdom is

This is Harley Mann talking.

 

To end with a brief conclusion, if you consider yourself a serious reader of American fiction, I highly recommend these four novels.