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Summary
Summary
Male violence propels this powerful tale as explosive as Deliverance and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by the author of the highly acclaimed novel Continental Drift.
Author Notes
The oldest of four children, Russell Banks spent his childhood and adolescence in New Hampshire and Eastern Massachusetts. His blue-collar, working-class background is strongly reflected in his writing.
The first in his family to attend college, Banks studied at Colgate University and later graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill. While he was establishing himself as a writer, Banks spent time as a plumber, shoe salesman, and a window dresser.
He wrote 21 books of fiction and nonfiction. Banks's titles include Searching for Survivors, Family Life, Hamilton Stark, The New World, The Book of Jamaica, Trailerpark, The Relation of My Imprisonment, Continental Drift, Success Stories, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter and Dreaming Up America. Banks has also written numerous poems, stories, and essays. His last novel was The Magic Kingdom was published in November 2022.
Banks is the recipient of several awards and prizes. Among his accolades are the St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1986, Continental Drift was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Russell Banks died on January 7, 2023, at his home in upstate New York. He was 82.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Divorced, inept, confused and stubborn Wade Whitehouse, harrowed by snow and bone-freezing cold for the several days of the novel's duration, is afflicted with a nostalgic, romantic streak. Wade's dream of marrying Margie, a goodhearted waitress, and making a home for his angry daughter Jill, slowly erodes. PW called this a ``masterful novel.'' (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
That familiar figure from Banks' fiction, the trapped, working-class New England male, is also here, in this novel of a crack-up: a wounded bull, maddened by pain and apparent injustice, makes one last circuit of the arena. The arena is tiny Lawford, New Hampshire, and the bull is Wade Whitehouse, 41-year-old well-driller and town cop (the latter is less than it sounds). The pain began in childhood when Wade and his brothers were abused by their violent, alcoholic father (Pop is a smoking volcano; a fine, unforgettable portrait). Two of the brothers are now dead; the youngest, Rolfe, the narrator, is a teacher in Massachusetts; their parents, still alive, are shunned like the plague. The childhood sweetheart, Lillian, who salved Wade's pain and became his wife, has now divorced him and remarried, living in Concord with their daughter Jill, Wade's treasure; unrealistically, he is planning a custody suit. Because Wade himself will never move, Lawford's opinion is especially important to him: ""he wanted to be a good father, and he wanted everyone to know it."" Yet while wanting the best, Wade invites the worst. The incident that sparks his fury occurs when Evan Twombley, an out-of-state union official deer-hunting with local guide Jack Hewitt, accidentally kills himself. Wade becomes convinced that Hewitt has killed Twombley, as part of a conspiracy masterminded by Wade's boss; this new ""injustice,"" following his loss of Jill, unhinges him. Soon Wade has lost everything: both jobs, the love of Jill and Margie (his part-time lover), even his mother (a victim of hypothermia). Worst of all, reverting to type, he has now struck his darling Jill; so Wade must now kill Pop, and then shoot Jack, before he disappears. . . . . .because enough is enough? But the excessive piling on has already denied us a catharsis, just as the Hewitt/Twombley subplot has been an unconvincing distraction from the novel's real business: the chains of heredity. Still, for all the shaky construction, and straining after significance, there is powerful work here, most memorably in Banks' dark vision of the family as a bed of nails. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Wade Whitehouse is a small-town policeman in his early forties made crazy-desperate by a life of chronic failure and intractably self-destructive behavior. Like his father, he's moody, abusive, and a mean drunk. Wade's got a good heart, and he'd like to change his ways, but his desire to reform is thwarted by his baser male instincts. Things just keep getting worse until he finally can't take it anymore, whereupon he snaps and literally runs amok in a mad and murderous rage of Oedipal annihilation before vanishing, ghostlike, into the snow-covered New Hampshire countryside. Wade's tragic saga is related by his younger brother, Rolfe, a bookish history teacher who suppresses his own self-destructive tendencies by submerging himself in scholarly pursuits. While both Wade and Rolfe are sadly convincing characters--and it rends the heart to follow Wade's doomed struggle against destiny--Banks' novel rests on shaky thematic ground. The author obviously believes that the will to do violence is a primary component of the male ego, as well as a kind of affliction that men carry and spread like a virus. An arguable thesis, to be sure, but you certainly don't have to agree with it to appreciate the consummate artistry of Banks' fiction. --Steve Weingartner
Library Journal Review
``Why Wade and not me?'' wonders Wade's brother Rolfe. Why is Wade ``lonely, poor, depressed, alcoholic and violent''? In an attempt to understand, Rolfe reconstructs the last few weeks of Wade's life in Lawford, New Hampshire--weeks in which Wade buries his mother, loses his job and fiancee, and murders his father. Banks suggests that violence is both cause and effect, that Wade repays the world with the same blows he received as a child. While this is scarcely an original explanation, Banks turns it into vivid and troubling fiction. Like Continental Drift ( LJ 4/15/85), this new novel has its awkward moments, but the prevalence of violence in our culture is more awkward still. For collections of contemporary literature.-- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.