Russel Banks' fourteen-year-old Bone is a latter day Holden Caulfield—aware of the phoniness and empty, sordid posturing of adults—and he's also a Huck Finn, lighting out from the strictures of conventional society. Bone tells his story in an unselfconscious manner, a naive narrator telling the ...
It’s not memory you need for telling this story, writes Russel Banks in the italicized introduction with which he begins Continental Drift: With a story like this, you want an accounting to occur, not a recounting, and a presentation, not a representation, which is why it’s told the way it’s told...
This might be a spoilerish review, better read after the book. As we meet Hannah Musgrave, she's an organic farmer in her fifties; a woman haunted by a past that she is finally willing to confront. In a first-person, confessional tone, Musgrave brings the reader along as she returns to Africa; re...
This book is a collection of 13 short stories about the residents of the Granite State trailerpark. The setting is in a small town in New England in 1980's. The trailerpark is home to various eccentric residents whose vastly different lives are told are told in each short story. 11 of these stori...
This story appears to have multiple levels; the author has created a narrator who speaks about events he wasn’t always witness to. The question is whether this particular screen is one that was employed to help the author establish discrepancies and doubt and incertitude or whether it was employe...
A remarkable and remarkably simple piece of literature that spawned a remarkable movie.Russell Banks, Russell Banks, Russell Banks. If I write his name enough it might conjure a complete sentence from my mind, as though his name alone might rub some of his magic off on me and I could explain this...
How this book ranks as a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" is beyond me. At 758 pages, it's about 600 pages too long, making me think Banks must have some sort of auteur cred with his publisher that allows him to demand no editor lay hands on his oeuvre. This is fiction, so I realize i...
I owe Algren a review. He's definitely skilled, and attuned to the bittersweet, to the chasm that occurs between feelings and behavior, especially when it comes to romance or dalliance, and perhaps especially with the down-and-out and poor. The sympathy comes across, but it feels not as if it's...
Russell Banks is turning down the heat. His most recent novels -- released to wide critical and popular acclaim -- were fiery tales of revolution: Cloudsplitter (1998) told the explosive story of abolition terrorist John Brown, and The Darling (2004) raced us through the sprawling horrors of Libe...