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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Russell Banks

by Carl Rollyson

Other literary forms

Russell Banks has published several short-story collections, including Searching for Survivors (1975), The New World (1978), Trailerpark (1981), Success Stories (1986), and The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (2000). His poetry has been collected in Fifteen Poems (1967), 30/6 (1969), Waiting to Freeze (1969), and Snow: Meditations of a Cautious Man in Winter (1974). His account of the American experience—a commentary on the country’s literature, film, politics, and history—appears in Dreaming up America (2008).

Russell Banks.

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(©Miriam Berkley)

Achievements

As several critics have observed, Russell Banks’s novels explore the struggles of New England’s white working class with a sharp eye and unrelenting focus. In part, his achievement derives from his own experience, including the torment of dealing with a broken family and an inchoate rage at a world that boxes in the individual and makes him or her feel alienated from the middle class and the privileged.

Biography

Russell Earl Banks grew up in a working-class family, the oldest of four children. His alcoholic father left the family when Banks was twelve years old. The family then moved from Newton, Massachusetts, to Barnstead, New Hampshire. Angry and directionless, sixteen-year-old Banks stole a car, yet he was a good student and won a full scholarship to attend Colgate University. He soon dropped out, feeling uncomfortable among middle-class students, and went to work as a plumber (his father had been a pipe fitter). The twenty-year-old Banks tried to join Fidel Castro’s army in Cuba. Failing to do so, he married Darlene Bennett in June, 1962, and fathered the first of four daughters. The marriage failed and Banks moved on. He divorced Bennett and married Mary Gunst. This time, his mother-in-law, spotting his talent, supported his education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1967. His second marriage ended in 1977.

Chapel Hill proved a turning point in the novelist’s life. Banks discovered the joys of writing (concentrating mainly on poetry and short fiction) and became engaged with politics. In 1982, he began teaching composition courses; he also married Kathy Walton, an editor. The couple divorced in 1988. He then married Chase Twichell, a poet, in 1989.

Banks’s early novels focus on characters living the kind of hard New England life that Banks himself had experienced. Critics describe his early stories and novels as bleak. His main characters are hard to like and rarely are successful. However, the dark energy of his work has been compared to that of Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville.

Not until Continental Drift, Banks’s fifth novel, did he begin to receive attention as a major writer. This ambitious work features a complex social canvas of characters based on Banks’s New England experience. The novel also has a more accessible style—leaner and stronger—than earlier experimental novels such as Family Life and Trailerpark.

Analysis

Russell Banks’s novels explore how individuals and communities suffer through and attempt to master their own lives. In The Sweet Hereafter, for example, four narrators confront the meaning of a tragic bus accident that took the lives of fourteen children and changed their Adirondack community forever. Banks pursues a similar narrator-main character symbiosis in Affliction, the story of Rolfe Whitehouse’s quest to piece together the events leading up to his brother’s disappearance. The same theme runs through Cloudsplitter, in which John Brown’s son Owen recounts his troubled relationship with his father and the events driving the Brown family toward the fatal raid in 1859 on the Harper’s Ferry armory, which was to be Brown’s crowning blow against slavery. Owen feels compelled to retell and analyze his father’s life.

The hero of Hamilton Stark has been described as a misanthropic pipe fitter, apparently modeled on Banks’s father. The narrator who seeks to understand Stark has been compared to Nick Carraway of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), which is high praise indeed and indicative of Banks’s ability to not only submerse himself in his characters but also provide a perspective on them.

Stories in Banks’s novels are usually filtered through the perspective of a narrator attempting to establish or reconnect with the main characters. Thus, the narrative of a Banks novel is itself an act of reconstruction: Getting the story in the proper order obsesses the narrator, whose own fate depends on understanding the lives of those who have touched him or her.

Continental Drift

This novel focuses on two main characters who leave home to start a new life in Florida. Bob Dubois, thirty years old and living in New Hampshire, and Vanise Dorsinville, a young Haitian mother who emigrates to America, both seek a kind of visionary future that will lift them out of the rut of materialism and the day-to-day routines of their lives. What unites them is Banks’s austere, unsentimental prose.

As the novel’s title suggests, these two lives seem part of a broader movement, the ever-shifting versions of the American Dream to pursue happiness and find a better life. Banks’s ability to imagine these different lives in extraordinary detail and from a panoramic perspective earned the plaudits of critics who suggested the author’s work was now entering the mainstream of American fiction.

Cloudsplitter

In this historical novel, Owen Brown narrates the story of his father’s life and his own ambivalent feelings about the course of events that led to the raid on the government armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. The raid was the doomed culmination of a plan to foment a slave uprising that would (the Browns and their followers hoped) ultimately result in the abolition of slavery. The novel’s structure reflects Banks’s well-established method of making his novels as much about the teller as the tale.

Although Owen was not actually at his father’s side in the raid at Harper’s Ferry, Banks’s decision to use him as the narrator proves ingenious, since Owen is free to describe his father and events from his own unique perspective that cannot be contradicted by the historical record. Owen is writing a memoir to understand his own involvement with his father and with history. He supplies a psychodynamic description of himself and his father that is beyond what is permissible in historical accounts.

At first deeply disturbed by his father’s rigid inflexibility and willingness to shed the slaveholders’ blood, Owen becomes his father’s most faithful disciple, abandoning him only when it becomes clear that the Harper’s Ferry raid cannot succeed. Owen, who is subject to temptations of the flesh and to a conflicted attitude about race, exposes the wide range of emotions that his father abjures in his single-minded plan of attack on slavery. John Brown hardens himself into a symbol, and Owen confesses his failure to do likewise. However, Owen’s very lack of fanaticism—or rather his embrace and then rejection of his father’s extremism—makes Owen’s narrative redolent of the human contradictions and tensions that John Brown steeled himself against.

Cloudsplitter is steeped in the antebellum period, providing vivid scenes not only of John Brown and his cohort but also of Frederick Douglass, who admires Brown yet counsels him that his raid cannot succeed.

The Darling

In The Darling, Dawn Carrington narrates her life story, including her years as a revolutionary in the Weather Underground, as the wife of a Liberian cabinet minister, and as a farmer in upstate New York. Born Hannah Musgrave in a well-to-family (her father is a famous pediatrician reminiscent of Dr. Benjamin Spock), she describes a fierce idealistic streak that is temporarily suspended when she becomes a government official’s wife but is aroused once again when Charles Taylor, her husband’s colleague, launches an uprising against Liberia’s corrupt, dictatorial regime. Unfortunately, Taylor ignites a wave of bestial violence that is even worse than the depredations of his predecessors, and Carrington consequently is forced to reassess the trajectory of her life and how she could have so misjudged events and her own complicity in the horrors of history.

Like many of Banks’s other narrators, Carrington is not very likeable. In fact, she is quite cold and rather inhuman in her overweening concern with saving humanity while contributing to situations that result in the sacrifice and suffering of those close to her. She is a fascinating narrator, though, precisely because she does not pity or excuse her excesses. In retrospect, she recounts the folly and callousness involved in many of her relationships.

The novel takes its place among Banks’s stories exploring migratory characters seeking new visions of themselves through traveling to new lands. A failed revolutionary at home (Carrington was living underground when she escaped with her friend Zack to Liberia), she cannot content herself with the routines of a politician’s life and thus is lured back into the world of revolutionary politics she thought she had abjured. Given her sorry record of radical failure, the term she uses for herself, “the darling,” is ironic.

Critics were impressed with Banks’s ability to write from a woman’s perspective—not only about radical politics but also about Carrington’s experience as a lover and mother (she gives birth to two sons who become victims of the Liberian civil war). Also, Banks describes U.S. involvement in Liberian politics with a sure hand. The scenes of the Liberian civil war are gruesome and stark, giving the novel an austere, documentary feel.

The Reserve

The novel is set in an exclusive community, The Reserve, in the Adirondacks. It is the preserve of old-money investors who have built cottages around two lakes but otherwise have made every effort to ward off the modern world. A strict set of rules governs the way that property can be used, allowing for the persistence of an unspoiled nature. Guides take visitors in and out of The Reserve, but nonlocals must stay at the clubhouse.

It is the 1930’s and Jordan Groves, an artist modeled after Rockwell Kent, famous for his illustrations of William Shakespeare and Moby Dick, finds the finicky exclusivity of The Reserve an affront. He flies into the community to see Dr. Cole, an art collector. Making a dramatic landing on the lake near the doctor’s cottage—which means Jordan has already broken The Reserve’s rules concerning modes of transportation—Jordan becomes entranced with the doctor’s divorced daughter, the beautiful Vanessa, a Fitzgeraldesque character whose emotional instability is reminiscent of the famous Zelda Fitzgerald, about whom her husband wrote in Tender Is the Night (1934).

The daring Vanessa provokes the married Jordan into taking her away in his plane. Rather like Ernest Hemingway’s character Robert Jordan, the hero of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Banks’s Jordan recklessly allows Vanessa to fly the plane, but he returns her to The Reserve, having determined this time not to be unfaithful to his wife, although he finds Vanessa sorely tempting.

Vanessa’s world comes apart when her father dies from a heart attack. Hysterical over fears that her mother will have her committed, she pursues Jordan, who on a visit to Dr. Cole’s cottage becomes implicated in the death of Vanessa’s mother, the result of an unfortunate accident that Vanessa now wants Jordan and her father’s guide, Hubert St. Germain, to cover up.

The plot is further complicated because Hubert has been having an affair with Jordan’s wife, whom Jordan has taken for granted. Shattered by this infidelity, Jordan decides to join his friend John Dos Passos in Spain, where Jordan will fly planes for the Spanish Republic against Francisco Franco’s Fascist rebellion. Inevitably, Jordan’s action calls to mind Hemingway’s Jordan, although Banks’s literary allusion is sardonic. While his Jordan will be hailed as a hero, the novel reveals a rather cold, self-absorbed man who has much in common with Banks’s other major characters, those other darlings who put themselves at the center of history with rather alarming results.

This highly romantic yet unsentimental novel cunningly explores the interactions of egos and events. Once again, Banks probes the psychology of radicalism and finds it wanting. What makes his case against Groves especially compelling is Bank’s deft portrayal of the simple but sound Hubert as well as of the other guides and working people in Depression era America who do not have the luxury of indulging in Groves’s pretensions.

This meticulously researched novel oscillates between starkly different settings—the Adirondacks and Spain—recalling Banks’s similar strategies in Continental Drift and The Darling. In both cases, the characters are strongly defined by their period—their choices the result of a concatenation of events over which they can exert little control. In this respect, Banks’s sensibility seems similar to the determinist ethos of the real John Dos Passos’s great U.S.A. trilogy.

Bibliography

1 

Charles, Katie. “The Best Novels You’ve Never Read.” New York, June 4, 2007. Banks’s novel The Darling is included in this critical analysis of some of the best underrated and unknown novels.

2 

Hutchison, Anthony. “Representative Man: John Brown and the Politics of Redemption in Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter.” Journal of American Studies 41, no. 1 (April, 2007): 67-82. Examines the issue and representation of race in Banks’s novel Cloudsplitter. Hutchison argues that Banks captures the time’s sense of disillusionment among Americans of all races and ethnicities.

3 

Niemi, Robert. Russell Banks. New York: Twayne, 1997. An introductory study, part of the reliable Twayne’s American Authors series. This volume provides critical analyses of Banks’s fiction and a brief biography, chronology, and annotated bibliography.

4 

Trucks, Rob. The Pleasure of Influence: Conversations with American Male Fiction Writers. West Lafayette, Ind.: NotaBell Books, 2002. A collection of comprehensive interviews of American male writers of fiction, including Banks, who discuss their literary influences and their own works.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Rollyson, Carl. "Russell Banks." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_10460141000008.
APA 7th
Rollyson, C. (2010). Russell Banks. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Rollyson, Carl. "Russell Banks." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 19, 2026. online.salempress.com.