and obsessively returning to him.”

Searching for Survivors

Banks’s first collection combines reality and fantasy, with the fourteen stories divided into three general groups: five moral and political parables, a trilogy of stories that feature Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, and six substantially autobiographical tales set in New England. Banks’s experiments with narrative style, structure, and point of view met with mixed response. He was credited for trying but faulted for lacking a unifying thread. Critic Robert Niemi says of the parables that if thetheme is the modern divorce between cognition and feeling [they] stylistically enact that schism with a vengeance almost all [being] solemn in tone, and written in a detached, clinically descriptive style that tends toward the cryptic.

Each story ends on a note of either defeat or disillusionment. Survival is highly unlikely. The American Dream has failed.

The opening tale deals with a man driving along the Henry Hudson Parkway, thinking about his childhood friend’s car, a Hudson, and about the explorer, who was set adrift in 1611 in the waters that eventually bore his name. The narrator imagines going to the shores of Hudson Bay to look for evidence of the explorer’s fate. Therein is an attempt to understand the past. Banks often deals withthe Old World and the early exploration of North America, and he shows the connections between those who set out from their comfortable but unjust homelands to settle the unknown, and modern Americans who have been shunted out of their safe cocoons of fixed values and family security into the relativistic reality of the latter half of the twentieth century.

In a story confirming Thomas Wolfe’s thesis that one “can’t go home again,” a young man returns from adventures with guerrilla leader Che Guevara, only to find his hometown irrevocably changed and himself so different that no one recognizes him. In another story, “With Che at Kitty Hawk,” a newly divorced woman and her two daughters visit the Wright Brothers Memorial. An almost-happy ending has the woman feeling somewhat liberated after being trapped in marriage, but that optimism is fleeting. In yet another, “Blizzard,” Banks shifts the narrator, first having him be omniscient, then having him speak through a man who is losing touch with reality, succumbing to guilt and bleak wintery surroundings.

The New World

Banks’s search for a comfortable voice caused him to continue to experiment with narrative voice, switching from first-to second-person, and sometimes third-, at times unsettling readers and critics who deemed his shifts haphazard rather than intentional. Never fully at ease with an omniscient, all-knowing narrator, yet not wanting his storyteller to be a character, an integral player, and hence subject to the vagaries of plot, Banks tries to approach his writing as the telling of a story to a partner, perhaps in a darkened room while lying comfortably in bed. He wants to share his story, yet not to tell it from a position of privilege. This approach gives the reader the immediacy needed for involvement in the story, but, at the same time, enough detachment on the part of the narrator to trust him.

Banks called his second collection, which was far more positively received,a carefully structured gathering of ten tales that dramatize and explore the process and progress of self-transcendence, tales that embrace the spiritual limits and possibilities of life in the New World.

The collection is divided into two parts: “Renunciation” and “Transformation.” The opening story, “The Custodian,” deals with a forty-three-year-old man whose father’s death finally frees him “to move to a new village to drink and smoke and sing bawdy songs.” As he is now also free to marry, he, “reasoning carefully conclude[s] that he would have good luck in seeking a wife if he started with women who were already married.” Fortuitously, he has many married male friends and thus begins his series of conquests. He proposes to a few likely prospects; they succumb; he changes his mind; they return to their husbands, never to know satisfaction again.

In another story, “The Conversion,” a young boy is wracked by guilt at not being a good person, at engaging in excessive masturbation, always falling short of what he thought he should be. Alvin wants to change. He wants to be good, decent, and chaste. He fails miserably until one day he sees an angel in a parking lot and decides to become a preacher. His conversion, the reader realizes is not so much religious as it is a hope to start anew. His new religious life starts as a dishwasher in a religious camp. Robert Niemi observes that, “much like Banks in his youth, Alvin is torn between the promise of upward mobility and loyalty to his father’s proletarian ethos.” Alvin’s father suspects him of “selling out his working-class identity by associating himself with a bourgeois profession,” reflecting Banks’s own social background in which attempts to move upward were considered a criticism of what was left behind.

Historical figures are featured in some of the stories: Simón Bolívar, Jane Hogarth (wife of the eccentric painter William), Edgar Allan Poe, and others. In the Hogarth tale, “Indisposed,” the wife is sadly used by the husband, who treats her as a sexual convenience and housekeeper. She is overwhelmed by the nothingness of her existence. She is fat and self-loathing until she experiences a sickbed transformation which allows her to move beyond “pitying [her large, slow] body to understanding it.” She is then, according to Niemi, able to “inhabit her body fully and without shame, thus reclaiming herself.” Then, when her husband is caught in the upstairs bed with the young domestic helper, Jane is able to exact swift punishment and completely change the tenor of the home. Niemi observes that Banks’s historyshades into fiction and fiction melds into history. [His] central theme, though, is the enduring human need to reinvent the self in order to escape or transcend the constrictions of one’s actual circumstances. This means creating a “new world” out of the imagination, just as the “discovery” of the Americas opened up vast horizons for a culturally exhausted Old World Europe.

Banks believes that “the dream of a new life, the dream of starting over” is the quintessential American Dream, the ideological keystone of American civilization from its inception to the present day.

Trailerpark

In this collection, perhaps his most structurally satisfying, Russell Banks takes the reader into the very heart of a community of people who, while not having lowered expectations, do have less grandiose or unrealistic ambitions than those in the mainstream. They go through life earning enough to meet basic needs, never going far beyond their environs. Some work full time, some seasonally; some leave for a while and then return. Most seem to find the day-to-day process of getting by nearly enough. Heartaches, anger, depression, and just plain weirdness are often eased with marijuana and alcohol.

This collection’s twelve stories are interrelated because they all deal with the residents of the Granite State Trailerpark in Catamount, New Hampshire. They have little in common other than the circumstances of their housing. They are detached physically as well as emotionally, yet they do form a community with at least some common concerns. One of the residents notes that when you are “a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.” Each story deals with one of the dozen or so denizens, all of whom are “generally alone in the world.”

Trailer #1 is the heartbeat of the park, where French Canadian manager Marcelle Chagnon oversees operations. She lost a child when an unscrupulous doctor found her more interesting than her illness. Bank teller Leon LaRoche lives in #2 next to Bruce Severance, in #3, a college student who is an afficionado of homegrown cannabis. Divorcée Doreen Tiede and her five-year-old daughter are in #4 next to the burned remains of #5, where Ginnie and Claudel Bing lived until Ginnie left the stove burner on. Retired army captain Dewey Knox is in #6; Noni Hubner and her mother Nancy are in #7. Merl Ring, in #8, enjoys self-imposed isolation, eagerly awaiting the blasting winters when he can set up his equipment in the middle of frozen Skitters Lake and spend months of solitary ice fishing. The former resident of #9, Tom Smith, killed himself, and the place remains empty. The only black resident, Carol Constant, sometimes shares #10 with her brother Terry. Number 11 houses Flora Pease and more than 115 guinea pigs, which threaten to overtake the trailer and the whole park. The opening story, “The Guinea Pig Lady,” introduces all the residents as they share their concerns about the situation. Most notable is the trailer and occupant not mentioned at all—#12, probably the narrator’s place. Banks’s park people have offbeat but understandable pathologies. Some are just achingly lonely. Critic Johnathan Yardley credits Banks with drawing together a “small but vibrant cast of characters, a human comedy in microcosm” made up of “utterly unconnected people [who] find themselves drawn together by the accident of living in the same place; the trailer park, grim and dreary as it may be, is a neighborhood.”

Success Stories

This 1986 collection of twelve stories, six autobiographical, six parabolic, has more to do with failed attempts to change the course of lives than it does with acquisition of fame and fortune. The characters in the collection have been called “dreamers, nourished on giddy expectations, but disenfranchised by accidents of class, economy, looks or simple luck.” They think that life holds all sorts of possibilities but learn quickly that fate has not cast a favorable eye on them. Banks sets out to show that success is more elusive for the disenfranchised.

Four stories revolve around Earl Painter, a young child in the story “Queen for a Day,” who writes to the host of the popular television show of the same name numerous times hoping that his mother’s plight will land her a place as a contestant. In subsequent stories, Earl attempts to come to grips with his parents and their lies and imaginings. His search for fulfillment leads him to Florida, where he experiences short-lived success. He toys with the idea of marrying into a new life but instead engages in adultery with a neighbor’s wife, learning from her husband that he is just one of her many dalliances.

These stories are interspersed with ones that are either fabular or close to surreal. Three deal with situations possibly slated to show a similarity between Third World exploitation and an American tendency to disenfranchise the working class. All deal with the terrible consequences of false promises of success.

One story, “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” shows the impermeability of the walls separating the classes. The hero, exceptionally handsome, develops an unlikely relationship with his antithesis, an alarmingly ugly barroom pickup named Sarah. His initial curiosity about lovemaking with someone so badly put together turns into a kind of commitment but not one strong enough to be made public. The contrast in their appearances proves too great for him. He is indeed superficial and acts hatefully. Years later, the truth of his love dawns on him, but Sarah is long gone, and he is left with his shame.

Critic Trish Reeves notes in an interview that “the irony of finally becoming a literary success by writing about the failure of the American Dream was not lost on Banks.” He said:I still view myself in the larger world the way I did when I was an adolescent. [as a member of] a working class family: powerless people who look from below up. I’m unable to escape that—how one views oneself in the larger structure is determined at an extremely early age. The great delusion is that if you only can get success then you will shift your view of yourself you will become a different person. That’s the longing, for success is really not material goods, but in fact to become a whole new person.