[In the following essay, Fonseca offers a mixed review of Success Stories.]

Russell Banks's novel Continental Drift, published in the UK last year (TLS, October 25, 1985), traces the fate of two unsimilar families—one from Haiti and the other from New Hampshire—as they travel to Florida in search of the idea of America. The newcomers' innocent dreams of opportunity inevitably collapse into nightmares of exploitation, humiliation and death. Rude awakenings are also the subject of Success Stories, although, as befits the shorter form, the migrations tend to be closer to home—excursions into family history, journeys of the heart.

Success Stories is not a particularly coherent collection—it has the makings of two books (and one of them is a novel). Half of the dozen stories are connected by way of Banks's fictional alter ego, who recurs as narrator, character, or implied audience. Each story reads like a chapter; we get the same street, the same Studebaker, the same job at the same department store (Maas Bros), and the same girl—Eleanor—reappearing throughout. One is left with the feeling that this contiguity is essential to the success of these stories, which is a way of saying that the novel is a happier form for Banks.

Two stories, framing the others, poignantly describe the same incident—a father's abandoning of his family—first from the viewpoint of the twelve-year-old son, and then, at the end, from the father's viewpoint years later. In the first, Earl—although he fails to get his mother elected to the Queen for a Day television show, which rewards women whose “luck is so bad you feel it's somehow deserved” with living-room suites and washing machines—succeeds. He moves from being a child, “helpless, dependent, pulled this mysterious way or that by the obscure needs and desires of adults”, to becoming the man of the family. It is satisfying to meet Earl again at the end of the book, as a grown man whose success is reaffirmed in his capacity to be kind to his lonely, old, alcoholic father.

The drab, forbidding, arthritic bleakness of New England occasionally retires to tawdrier territories. In Florida, the frustration of those going nowhere fast finds expression in trailers with the wheels removed. In either setting, Banks evokes a picture of shoddy, cruel, intolerant and corrupt America which recalls Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. Banks's stories, like Anderson's, are essentially reformatory—moral fables which question the glorifying of rampant materialism (“The hero without money is just another man”). Banks may have inherited the concerns of Anderson and Lewis, but the mood is modern. His realistic descriptions have the force of “epiphanic moments”—glimpses from which a whole world is known by extension, in the manner of Raymond Carver's slivers of the same sort of life.

The stories in which Banks most dramatically reveals that American opportunity is more like murky opportunism, though, are not set in America, depart from strict realism and suggest other models. Set in South-East Asia, “The Fish” is a parable of faith and greed; and it is food for thought on the world's diminishing natural resources. An enormous, inexplicable fish endures all human ugliness—corrupt officials try to shoot it, bomb it, poison and profit from it, and, when they realize that their livelihood depends on it, they try, too late, to save it. “The Gully” is the story of three unsavoury desperadoes, who, getting hip to the idea that violence can be extremely profitable, set themselves up in business as an unlikely vigilance committee. But even as they rake in the profits, there is a nostalgia for the life that has been lost (in all of Banks's work, upward mobility has less to do with going somewhere than with leaving something—usually something bad, though sometimes something precious—behind). Regret, it seems, is a necessary component of happiness. Both stories recall García Márquez, particularly of the Erendira stories, not just because they are set in a Latin American shanty town, but in the way Banks makes the perverse seem ordinary, and for the cameo appearances of generic local dignitaries, “the prime minister,” “soldiers and politicians” in general.

Banks makes little use of dialogue; rather he expounds the rootlessness and incongruities of his characters in long, expert sentences. At times he pontificates—as when he pauses, turns to us, and explains the function of myths in modern life, and thus the importance of “learning a little more usefully how to listen to the stories of others”—but he usually manages to temper heaviness with hilarity, to celebrate the absurdity of upward mobility. Several stories fail, however, because they are didactic, cute, or self-congratulatory. “Children's Story,” which describes the defencelessness of parents against a conspiracy of tiny terrorists—their monstrous children—is, according to the dust jacket, an allegory of the relationship between citizens of the first and third worlds. If this is Banks's intention, the contrived comment is much less effective than his compassionate treatment of the Haitians in Continental Drift.

In Success Stories Banks fosters the idea that, on the whole, people get what they deserve. “Life was hard and unequally so, but just.” Gone is the determinism of Continental Drift, in which, as the title suggests, currents stronger than men shape their destinies. And Banks is a gnostic; success is about naming the beast. “Character is fate, which suggests that if a man can know and to some degree control his character, he can know and to some extent control his fate.” Life is there to be invented. Among so many puréed accounts of making it in America, these stories are, though less profound than his recent novel, “a dash of mace for the vichyssoise”.