Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Banks, Russell - Penelope Mesic (review date 11 June 1995)

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Penelope Mesic (review date 11 June 1995)

SOURCE: Mesic, Penelope. “Adolescent Adrift: Russell Banks' Remarkable Portrait of a Modern-Day Huck Finn.” Chicago Tribune Books (11 June 1995): section 14, p. 3.

[In the following review, Mesic lauds Banks's vivid and believable characterizations in Rule of the Bone.]

You see the young drifting in shoals through malls, clustering together and then slipping away, hair lank or shaved to nothing or twisted into dreadlocks, tender ears tagged with multiple silver rings as if repeatedly captured and released. Their clothes are ripped and nondescript, protective coloring in a drab and dangerous world. From this inscrutable throng of no-longer-children, not-yet-adults, Russell Banks has chosen a resourceful, undersized, 14-year-old boy to serve as narrator and hero of his latest novel, a brilliantly funny and heartfelt work called Rule of the Bone. Named Chapman, nicknamed “Chappie,”...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Howard Frank Mosher (review date 8 September 1991)
   2. Jeff Danziger (review date 24 September 1991)
   3. Donna Rifkind (review date 17 April 1992)
   4. James Finn Cotter (review date 2 May 1992)
   5. Ross Leckie (essay date summer 1994)
   6. Richard Eder (review date 21 May 1995)
   7. Ann Hulbert (review date 29 May 1995)
   8. Penelope Mesic (review date 11 June 1995)
   9. Phil Baker (review date 30 June 1995)
   10. Brian Morton (review date 7 July 1995)
   11. Ed Peaco (review date fall 1995)
   12. Jerry Herron (essay date fall 1996)
   13. Robert Niemi (essay date 1997)
   14. Henry Mayer (review date 8 March 1998)
   15. Russell Banks and Christine Benvenuto (interview date March-April 1998)
   16. Alfred Kazin (review date 9 April 1998)
   17. Lawrence Hill (review date 13 April 1998)
   18. James M. McPherson (review date May 1998)
   19. Joyce Appleby (review date 22 May 1998)
   20. Russell Banks, Robert Faggen, and Barry Munger (interview date summer 1998)
   21. Millicent Bell (review date fall 1998)
   22. Paul Binding (review date 15 September 2000)
   23. Kathleen Snodgrass (review date spring 2001)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright