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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( B ) : Banks, Russell
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The story of a homeless youth living on the edge of society. His life is dramatically changed by an exiled Rastafarian, with whom he undertakes a journey of self-discovery, from the towns and malls of Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica.
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Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules.
Twenty-nine-year-old Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, the adopted only child of a highly regarded New York brain surgeon and his socialite wife. Twice married, Vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. But on the night of July 4, 1936, at her parents' country home in a remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as The Reserve, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa's callow life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, and a mysteriously seductive local artist, Jordan Groves, blithely lands his Waco biplane in the pristine waters of the forbidden Upper Lake. . . .
Jordan's reputation has preceded him; he is internationally known as much for his exploits and conquests as for his paintings themselves, and, here in the midst of the Great Depression, his leftist loyalties seem suspiciously undercut by his wealth and elite clientele. But for all his worldly swagger, Jordan is as staggered by Vanessa's beauty and charm as she is by his defiant independence. He falls easy prey to her electrifying personality, but it is not long before he discovers that the heiress carries a dark, deeply scarring family secret. Emotionally unstable from the start, and further unhinged by her father's unexpected death, Vanessa begins to spin wildly out of control, manipulating and destroying the lives of all who cross her path.
Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondack wilderness to the skies above war-torn Spain and Fascist Germany, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire.
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A powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers, Russell Banks's Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained, and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.
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Get to know the colorful cast of characters at the Granite State Trailerpark, where Flora in number 11 keeps more than a hundred guinea pigs andscreams at people to stay away from her babies, Claudel in number 5 thinks he is lucky until his wife burns down their trailer and runs off with Howie Leeke, and Noni in number 7 has telephone conversations with Jesus and tells the police about them. In this series of related short stories, Russell Banks offers gripping, realistic portrayals of individual Americans and paints a portrait of New England life that is at once dark, witty, and revealing.
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Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom. At the same time that he tells Hamilton Stark's story, he describes the process of writing the novel and the complicated connections between truth and fiction. As Stark slips in and out of focus, maddeningly elusive and fascinatingly complex, this beguiling novel becomes at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.
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In Sucess Stories, an exceptionally varied yet coherent collection, Russell Banks proves himself one of the most astute and forceful writers in America today. Queen for a Day, Success Story, and Adultery trace fortunes of the Painter family in there pursuit of and retreat from the American dream. Banks also explores the ethos of rampant materialism in a group of contemporary moral fables. The Fish is an evocating parable of faith and greed set in a Southeast Asian village, The Gully tells of the profitability of violence and the ironies of upward mobility in a Latin American shantytown, and Chrildren's Story explores the repressed rage that boils beneath the surface of relationships between parents and children and between citizens of the first and third worlds.
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Chapter One This part of my story begins one evening early in January 1976 in Anchovy, Jamaica, a country village clinging to the hills of St. James Parish about twelve miles south and west of Montego Bay. At that time I was residing in Jamaica for a few months, ostensibly for the purpose of investigating the living conditions and habits of the Maroons, a remnant people who were the direct descendants of slaves who had escaped from their Spanish and then British masters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and who afterwards from their inaccessible mountain enclaves had successfully conducted a hundred year guerrilla war against the British. When I was not actively researching the daily lives of these people, I had sufficient leisure and interest to involve myself in the daily lives of the more typical Jamaicans who lived all around me, drinking and smoking ganja with them, playing dominoes, arguing politics, and so on. As a result I formed several close friendships with a number of my neighbors. My closest friendship, however, was with a man named Terron Musgrave who was neither a typical Jamaican nor one of my neighbors. He was a man in his mid-thirties, my own age, and a Maroon, and though during these months he spent fully half his time in Anchovy at my house, he lived in the Maroon village of Nyamkopong, forty miles and three hours' drive away. Terron was a short man, even diminutive, but extremely muscular, and though he gave the impression of having been packed into his body under great pressure and seemed always about to explode into furious, chaotic activity, when he moved he moved slowly and gracefully with thoughtful, deliberate precision. His skin was darkbrown, almost mocha-colored, and his face had been carved by genes and character into the face of a Nigerian king. Because he was a religious man and a member of the Rastafarian sect, he was bearded and wore his hair in long, matted, leonine locks called dreadlocks, and in profile he did indeed resemble a dark male lion, which was as he desired it. Terron's greatest gift, however, his most remarkable beauty, was his voice and the language it carried. He owned a deep, resonating baritone that came directly from his chest, and his exotic blend of Jamaican English, country patois, and Rastafarian neologism, a poem in any man's mouth, in his became a song, a chanting, rolling, mahogany and birdflight song. Against his, my own voice came to sound like the random banging of oilcans, tinny, empty, erratic, and my language as flat and uninteresting as a sheet metal duct. The comparison inevitably silenced me and my silence usually brought Terron "forward," as he would say, "into speech." He told me of his childhood in Port Antonio where the banana boats of United Fruit were loaded, his youth in the ghettos of Kingston where whole large families lived in refrigerator cartons and abandoned Japanese cars, his years in the back streets of Montego Bay where he had hustled as a middleman between the ganja growers in the hills and the dealers in the Bay, and, for the last seven years, his life among his "ascendants," the Maroons of Nyamkopong, where he himself had become a ganja grower. He told me also of his religion and the experience of his conversion, when he had come "to know I," and the marvelous changes it had wrought in his interior and exterior lives, how it had merged them, made them oneholy vessel, like the conversion experience of an early Christian gnostic. His political views, too, he described to me, and they were literally that, views, for he, like all true Rastafarians, was a visionary and believed in prophecy, specifically those of Marcus Garvey and the apocalyptic books of the Christian Bible. We both mistrusted the current Jamaican government, a corrupt, incompetent bunch of ambitious men and women, most of them educated in England, where they had learned to long for the power and wealth of a ruling class and to mouth the socialist rhetoric of the dispossessed masses. But while Terron saw every evidence of their corruption and incompetence as another welcome sign of the fire to come, I saw it merely as another depressing episode in the history of the New World. Evil confirmed and deepened Terron's belief in good; all it did for me was confirm and deepen my pessimism. The differences between us, it seemed to me, were so radical and thoroughgoing, the vocabulary and syntax of our respective lives so incomprehensible to the other, that what ordinarily should have repelled us in actuality attracted us, drew us together, so that we were like a pair of magnets clamped together, opposite pole to opposite pole. A consequence of this, or so I believed, was that neither of us took the other's descriptions of reality as revealing any reality except that of the teller himself. I believed that we looked into each other, but not through each other, to the world beyond. Almost the way lovers do, each man used the other to learn only about himself. We were utterly opaque surfaces, I thought, but as a mirror is opaque. When we sat out on my terrace in the evenings, watchingthe sun fall behind the lush green hills, smoking ganja and talking with one another about our beliefs, I perceived only Terron Musgrave and nothing of the world his beliefs had sprung from. This, I thought, had been a deliberate decision on my part, a decision not to translate his words, not to research him, as it were, but simply to give myself over to the contemplation of his voice and language, his profound sincerity, his genuine great-heartedness and sorrow, and his spiritual optimism. I dealt with him as a phenomenon and not a referent, and thus I learned nothing from him of the Maroons, of Rastafarianism, of Jamaican peasant life, of the intricacies of the ganja trade, or even of the geography of the island, subjects he knew too intimately and unselfconsciously to make known to me without my having first to translate him, without my having to put myself into the role of researcher. Then one night, very late, Terron told me of his knowledge of Errol Flynn.
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Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century.
Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.
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An Omnibus Edition of Three Classic Early Novels from the Critically Acclaimed Author of Cloudsplitter and Affliction
Family Life: Russell Banks's first novel is an adult fairy tale of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom where the myriad dramas of domesticity blend with an outrageous slew of murders, mayhem, coups, debauches, world tours, and love in all guises, transcendent or otherwise.
Hamilton Stark: This tale of a solitary, boorish, misanthropic New Hampshire pipe fitter—the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother—is at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.
The Relation of My Imprisonment: Utilizing a form invented by imprisoned seventeenth-century Puritan divines—an utterly sincere and detailed, if highly artificial, recounting of great suffering—Banks's novel is a remarkably inventive, lovingly good-humored argument, exploration, and map of the caged religious mind.
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In Family Life, Russell Banks's first novel, he transforms the dramas of domesticity into the story of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom. Life inside this kingdom includes the king (dubbed "the Hearty" or "the Bluff"), who squeals angrily as is his wont; the queen, who, while pondering the mirror in her chambers, decides to write a book; three adolescent princes who are, respectively, a superb wrestler, a fanatical sports car driver, and a sullen drunk. Then there are the mysterious Green Man with a thing for princes; the Loon, who lives in a tree house designed by Christopher Wren; and a whole slew of murders, mayhem, coups, debauches, world tours, and love and loss and laughter.
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The Relation of My Imprisonment a work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines. Designed to be exemplary, works of this type were aimed at brethren outside the prison walls and functioned primarily as figurative dramatization of the test of fait all true believers must endure. These "relation," framed by scripture and by a sermon explicating the text, were usually read aloud in weekly or monthly installments during religious services. Utterly sincere and detailed recounting of suffering, they were nonetheless highly artificial. To use the form self-consciously, as Russell Banks has done, is not to parody it so much as to argue good-humoredly with the mind it embodies, to explore and, if possible, to map the limits of that mind, the more intelligently to love it.