SOURCE: “Apprentice Fiction: Searching for Survivors,” in Russell Banks, Twayne Publishers, 1997, pp. 47–63.

Nobody had enough imagination.

—John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”

With the short stories that eventually comprised his first collection, Searching for Survivors (1975), Banks continued to use his writing to process the traumas of his youth and young manhood.¹ Yet, unlike the poetry, Searching for Survivors goes well beyond the autobiographical impulse. Though Banks does not classify them as such, these 14 stories lend themselves to three general groupings: (1) five moral-political parables; (2) a trilogy of stories that feature the slain Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara as a kind of icon or informing presence; (3) a half dozen quasi-autobiographical tales set in New England. While many of these carefully crafted stories are presented in a relatively straightforward realist style, in more than a few, Banks parodies the illusionist conventions of literary realism. He also conducts the kinds of experiments with narrative style, structure, and point of view that were then all the rage among young writers avid to ally themselves with John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and other practitioners of the metafiction vogue. Moreover, Searching for Survivors manifests an abiding concern with questions of psychological displacement and alienation, or, as reviewer Carll Tucker put it, “the dissociation of the ratiocinative and the feeling self.”²

PARABLES

If Banks's theme is, indeed, the modern divorce between cognition and feeling, his parables stylistically enact that schism with a vengeance. Almost all are solemn in mood, cerebral in tone, and written in a detached, clinically descriptive style that tends toward the cryptic, somewhat in the manner of the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortazar.

“THE INVESTITURE”

Even after repeated, careful readings of “The Investiture,” one is not entirely certain what has happened or to whom. Yet the plot seems simple enough. The charismatic “Sweet Prince” of some unnamed kingdom ventures out among his subjects “alone and unarmed,” only to be run down and killed by a “little Japanese truck.” The incident is narrated by a commoner who describes following the prince, witnessing the accident, and holding the royal body until a Cardinal arrives on the scene, interrogates him, and has the corpse removed to the palace. Then the story takes a surprising turn. The narrator-witness speaks of getting up out of the street and “walk[ing] straight home to the palace” where he “washed, shaved, dressed gorgeously in black and made a sombre, perfunctory appearance at breakfast. No one seemed to suspect a thing” (20). Apparently, then, the narrator was the real prince and the man who was run down was an imposter.

Such a closure raises more questions than it resolves. Why have a double venture out among the people? And who employed him? Scheming ministers or the real prince himself? A hint at an answer is supplied in the narrator's last lines, after the accident victim is honored as the prince and buried:

As for me, I never go outside the outer walls anymore. Once in a lifetime is enough. When you become Leader, you're suddenly the only person left who is still interested in imagining the pain of your own death. For everyone else, it's history.

(20)

Though too ambiguous for its own good, “The Investiture” still manages to problematize political fame and power. Banks suggests that a charismatic head of state is depersonalized by the mystical aura that surrounds him, a paradoxical condition brought into stark relief by his death, especially if that death is sudden and violent. In the public mind the leader qua person doesn't die; a mythic image is shattered. Hence the human tragedy of the man's demise is lost in the larger sociopolitical fallout of his assassination.³

“THE NAP”

“The Nap” is less than a page in length but every bit as cryptic as “The Investiture.” On a lazy Sunday afternoon at home with his wife and kids, an ordinary family man is reading “a recently published novel … about a spy for the CIA, a Jew who, stumbling across an ex-Gestapo officer living incognito in the Bronx, [is] forced to confront his own life as a spy by choosing whether to blow his own cover by turning the ex-Nazi over to the Israelis or to maintain his identity as an American spy and thereby violate his Jewishness” (34). Falling asleep before he finishes his potboiler, Banks's reader expects “to awaken to a difference,” any difference; it's “a private tradition” with him to feel somehow transformed by the fiction he's reading. But this time he perceives no difference. The man's wife “is still the nice, very same wife with the wiry hair,” scolding one of his daughters, a son is still reading the comics, another daughter still visiting a friend, and the family dog is being called outside the house “because [it bears] the smell of a dead skunk.” Bewildered, if not horror-stricken, the man begins “that period of his life when he trusted nothing and no one and greeted sleep with a wariness that bordered on hysteria” (34).

The question here, of course, is why Banks's protagonist is so deeply shaken by a nap that fails to live up to expectations. The spy novel appears to be the culprit, inasmuch as it has a disastrous effect on its reader's psyche—for the paradoxical reason that it has no effect at all. The man drifts into the world of his own unconscious not knowing how the spy will resolve his dilemma, whether patriotism or racial loyalties will win out in the end. Falling asleep trusting that he'll dream up a refreshing solution for a man whose moral, political, and psychological identity is in limbo, Banks's reader awakens to discover that, this time, his imagination has failed him. The chilling truth is that there is no readily apparent answer; conflicting political claims on one's sense of self may all be equally valid or too complex to sort out. At any rate, the inner life matters. Mental and moral health may have little to do with material circumstances, a fact Banks stresses by describing the comfortable ordinariness of the afternoon. Despite the Norman Rockwell milieu, Banks's reader is vexed for reasons as real to him as they are intangible to any casual observer.

“THE NEIGHBOR”

“The Neighbor” involves a different sort of epiphany on the part of the title character. Intent on “living off the land,” a black man “in his fifties,” his white wife, and four teenaged children from previous marriages, move to a farm in an all-white area of the country (55). “Incompetent and, in various ways, a little mad,” the man and his family do not prosper; “the climate prove[s] harsh, the ground stoney and in hills, the neighbors more or less uncooperative—and of course there was that incompetence,” which angers the people around them (56). Indeed, the family's one immediate neighbor, “a dour young man in his late twenties,” is outraged to discover one of their chickens, loose for the 10th time, scratching in his own back yard. He rushes into his house, gets his.45, and fires “eight bullets into the chicken, making a feathered, bloody mess of it” (55).

Some weeks later, the neighbor's tolerance is put to the supreme test. The black man buys Jenny Lind, an 18-year-old mare, so that his wife can drive “her frail-wheeled sulky” the half-mile to the country store, an image of genteel respectability that sends the man's mind “reeling with delight.” But while he and his wife are away from the farm to buy a hitherto elusive used sulky, their four teenagers decide to race “the old horse full-speed along that half-mile route” (56). After a “hundred” passes, a terminally exhausted Jenny Lind drops dead on the front lawn of the neighbor.

Returning home that evening, the black man and his wife spot the dead horse in their headlights, get out of their pick-up, and sit “stroking the mare's forehead” (57). The spectacle of their profound grief moves their otherwise irascible neighbour:

The neighbor was a young man, and while a dead animal was nothing new to him, the sight of a grown man with black skin, weeping, and a white woman sitting next to him, also weeping, both of them slowly stroking the cold nose of a horse ridden to death—that was something he'd never seen before.

(57)

Shaken out of his harsh attitude toward the hapless family, an attitude undoubtedly tinged with racism, the neighbor pats the woman and man on their heads and, “without judging the children,” quietly tells their parents how the animal died. He then offers to help bury the stricken beast. In that moment of pity, the neighbor is able to go beyond his own mental caricature of the black man and white woman as miscegenetic fools. Seeing them in their full, suffering humanity, he becomes human himself. Thus “The Neighbor” suggests that some mishaps are so pathetic, so redolent of human misery, disappointment, and failure that they cancel out petty judgments. In situations of real extremity, social prejudices are apt to melt away, and even the smug are sometimes inclined to act compassionately.

“THE LIE”

Considerably more depressing in its handling of the vagaries of human nature is “The Lie.” Perhaps the best, certainly the most haunting of Banks's Survivors fables, “The Lie” bears an oblique resemblance to Family Life inasmuch as it explores the same intriguing questions that lie at the heart of the novella: how are a man's character and personal ethos transmitted to the next generation and beyond? And, more crucially, how are they transformed and redefined in the process?

“The Lie” begins with an accidental killing. Playing spies on a roof parking lot in Waltham, Massachusetts, circa the mid-fifties, 10-year-old Nicholas LeBrun stabs his playmate, Alfred Coburn, in the heart with a penknife. Horror stricken, LeBrun runs home and tells his father, Robert LeBrun.⁴ He also tells his father that, as he was running away, he glanced back and saw Toni Scott, a known homosexual, walking to his car, coincidentally parked at the scene of the killing. Instantly hatching a lie to cover for his son, Robert LeBrun calls the police and tells them that

his son and another neighborhood kid have just been sexually molested by the neighborhood fag and his son broke away from the guy but the other kid is still with the sonofabitch in his car which is parked in the Transilex parking lot … and he (LeBrun) is leaving right now to kill that filthy sonofabitch with his bare hands so if they want Toni Scott alive they have about three minutes to get to him.

(61)

Despite his protestations of innocence, Toni Scott is arrested, deemed “a scorned and therefore outraged deviate,” convicted of murder, and sentenced to “life plus ninety-nine years” (62).

Although Toni Scott's “absurd fate” points up the extreme social vulnerability of homosexuals in American society, Banks's main concern is to explain why Robert LeBrun chose to lie rather than submit his son to the authorities. The paradoxical answer to that enigma is found in the character of Robert LeBrun's father, Ernest “Red” LeBrun. “A French Protestant and native New Englander,” the late Ernest LeBrun was “thrifty, prudent, implacably stable, high-minded and honorable, incorruptable, intelligent, organized, [and] good-humored” (59). Ironically, these impeccable character traits have a devastating effect on Ernest's son, Robert. By virtue of his ironclad and unselfconscious moral certainty, “Ernest [unwittingly] gave to his young son [Robert] an absolute truth and an absolute falsity and for that reason Robert was forever a child” (64). So when Robert's son, Nicholas, brings news of the killing, Robert “attributes to his son the overwhelming quantity of fear that he knows would have to be his were he ten or nine or eleven years old and faced with something ‘really awful’” (63). Conditioned by his upbringing to feel guiltily inadequate, Robert LeBrun lies “not to save his son but rather to save himself” (64). To round out this complex moral paradox, Robert's neurotic self-absorption has the opposite effect on his son, Nicholas: “Robert to his son gave relative truth and relative falsity and for that reason Nicholas was never a child” (64). Banks's dispassionate narrator concludes that the “question of responsibility then seems not to have been raised in at least three generations” (64).

A finely nuanced and convoluted examination of an extremely subtle ethical question, “The Lie” is apt to leave the casual reader in its wake. Those not given to jesuitical ruminations might be interested to know that this story has biographical underpinnings. Perhaps an amalgam of both grandfathers, Ernest (Red) LeBrun is almost certainly based on Banks's maternal grandfather, Ernest Taylor, a Waltham clockmaker. Described by Banks as “taciturn” and “with a highly developed sense of his own significance” (Banks, 1993, 39), Taylor seems to have had an intimidating effect on Banks's parents not unlike the effect that Ernest LeBrun had on his son, Robert. Accordingly, Nicholas LeBrun can be thought of as a fictional type for Banks himself, who freely admits that he was, emotionally, “never a child,” which would, on one level, make the catastrophe in the Transilex parking lot symbolic of Banks's traumatic childhood. According to Banks, our grandparents “are the people who may have affected us the most, who may be our true psychological, if not strictly genetic, origins” (Banks, 1993, 39).

“THE MASQUERADE”

In marked contrast to the tragic filial determinism of “The Lie” is the gleefully comic tone of “The Masquerade,” an offbeat revision of Hamlet. The story's first-person narrator (the young monarch of some unspecified European kingdom) tells how he and his brother, Paris, outwitted his scheming mother and her co-conspirator, his uncle, the cardinal, for the throne left vacant by his father's death six months earlier. In the first part of the story, the then crown prince informs his mother and the cardinal of his intention to select a date for his coronation. To the prince's surprise, the cardinal receives the news “with a disgust and violence [he] had not thought him capable of” (77). The young man's mother is more crafty; she proposes a grand masquerade as “the occasion to announce the coronation” (77). Still unsuspecting, the crown prince agrees, and “the plans for such a shindig” are put into motion (78).

The prince's suspicions are aroused, however, when his gay brother, “gorgeous” Paris, informs him of an alarming piece of intelligence supplied by Regis, the court sculptor, in a moment of drunken indiscretion. At the masquerade, the queen will be disguised as Paris and the cardinal will be disguised as the crown prince; apparently they plan to steal the throne before the real prince can make his coronation announcement.

Together, the two brothers come up with a plan of their own, which they execute flawlessly the night of the masquerade. Dressed in drag, as “a perfect imitation” of his mother (“sable, ermine, and fox, royal blue velvet with hammered gold trim, white taffeta ruffles and cuffs” etc.), Paris ascends the throne in full view of “the awe-struck multitude” (83). Mistakenly thinking he's been betrayed by the queen “at the last minute,” the cardinal (disguised as Paris, of course) “stumble[s] over his [own] feet” and falls down, “losing all remaining composure and temper simultaneously, stamping his heels against the floor in a tantrum as he lay there” (83). Stricken “with shock and fear,” the cardinal sees no choice but to throw himself at the mercy of the real crown prince, who orders him to change his “costume” and “present himself as quickly as possible in his usual clerical garb” (84). In place of the horrific bloodletting that marks the denouement of Hamlet, Banks supplies a happily farcial ending, with the crown prince triumphantly joining his brother, still in queenly drag, on the dais of the ballroom, as faux mother and son. “With a wave of my hand, I ordered the dancing to begin, and immediately it began” (84).

THE CHE STORIES

Though he had written an ironic elegy for Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Banks seems to have been unable to resolve something inside himself about the fallen guerrilla leader. More than likely, Banks's quixotic and easily frustrated attempt to join Castro's revolution in 1959 came back to haunt him as a painfully absurd confusion of the personal with the political. In the early seventies Banks wrote three stories that invoke the ghost of Che as an ironic counterpoint to his own Walter Mitty-like aspirations as a “revolutionary.” In a larger sense, Che's shadow haunts the depoliticized vacuity of American life, quietly chastizing our obsession with the privatized experience of the self-interested individual.

“WITH CHE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE”

The story's incongruous title is, of course, ironic; Banks's first-person narrator is not, and never has been, with Che in New Hampshire, or anywhere else, for that matter.⁵ Banks's real subject is the complex recollective, imaginative, and cognitive processes by which a writer creates a story loosely based on an experience from his own life. The conceit here is decidedly postmodern: to pretend to let the reader witness the story being dreamed up, in fits and starts, as it is being written.

In keeping with the self-mocking tone of “Homage to Che Guevara,” “With Che in New Hampshire” frustrates its “author” by stubbornly refusing to assume satisfactory form as an authorial wish-fulfillment narrative. In a comically cliché-ridden opening, the narrator fabricates a wildly romantic identity for himself, as a battle-scarred revolutionary traveling the world incognito, one step ahead of the CIA. The story proper begins with the narrator's alter ego returning to his hometown of Crawford, New Hampshire (a mythical version of Banks's Barnstable). That a sleepy community in ultraconservative New Hampshire could have produced a world-class leftist firebrand or that he'd ever return there are underlying absurdities that help to give the tale its parodic thrust.

Almost as soon the author-narrator imagines himself stepping off the bus in Crawford, his romantic imagination begins to run afoul of what he actually remembers about the denizens of his hometown. Picturing some of the town's old-timers observing his arrival from McAllister's Gulf station and general store, the narrator tries to conjure their reactions to his alter ego but cannot quite get it right. At first he has Bob McAllister remark to Doc Cotton that he hopes “the boy's come home for good, 'cause the family'll be needin' him up there.” Doc would supposedly reply: “They sure as hell do, Bob. And by gawd, we need him down here, too” (12). But then the narrator thinks better of such dialogue: “No. Erase that remark. Wipe it out. Doc would never think such a thing, let alone say it, and Bob McAllister hates and distrusts me, I'm sure” (12).

Another try at picturing his protagonist's arrival in Crawford bogs the narrator down in a mire of complicated, interconnected logistical details. How should he arrive? By car or by bus? And what would he have in his duffle bag? Would he have a gun? And if he does have a gun, how would he get into the country? How old is he? What is he wearing? What is his physical condition? Once again, the story founders on such questions because their answers are, to a large extent, arbitrary.

In a last attempt at an arrival scenario, Banks's narrator approaches his subject matter from an entirely different angle. He imagines the man's internal state and finally achieves the creative breakthrough he sought:

I stand next to the idling bus for a few moments, gazing passively at the scene before me, and upon receiving simultaneously the blows of so much that is familiar and so much that has subtly grown strange to me, I become immobilized. Seeing them, I remember things that I didn't know that I had forgotten, and thus I experience everything that comes into my sight as if it were characterized both as brand new, virginally so, and yet also as clearly, reassuringly, familiar.

(15)

When he shifts perspective, it becomes clear to Banks's would-be narrator that the story he is trying to create is not a heroic wish-fulfillment fantasy but rather an oblique attempt to reconstruct a younger version of himself, when he was still a product of his hometown—an imaginative exercise that clarifies his present identity, or at least throws it into stark relief.

“WITH CHE AT KITTY HAWK”⁶

Having just left her husband, Roger, after eight years of marriage, Janet is visiting her parents at the family cottage near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where she vacationed when she was a child. Now 30 years old and the mother of two girls (Laura, aged seven, and Eva, four), Janet had hoped that she could begin her life anew, with a “new man, a new place to live, a new way of life, a profession even” (49). But even after a scant few days, the lonely, fractured reality of her situation generates a feeling of newness that is “a mockery, a sad, lame reaction to the failure of the old” (49). Furthermore, the experience of bringing her children to the haunts of her own youth under such circumstances plunges her into “anger and revulsion for her own life, for the entrapment it offered her” (43). For it occurs to Janet “that she [is] trapping her own children [as well]. The terms of her life had become the terms of their lives now, and thus they too would spend the rest of their lives in relentless, unchanging reaction to patterns she could not stop establishing for them” (49).

Janet's overwhelming sense of her life's suffocating cyclicity is unexpectedly broken when she takes her children to visit the Wright brothers memorial. “[P]eering down at the slope the two bicycle mechanics had used for flying their strange machine,” Janet has an epiphany about the Wright brothers:

Then, as if a wonder were unfolding before her eyes, filling her with awe, she saw a large, clear image of the two men from the midwest, their clumsy wire, wood and cloth aircraft, the sustained passion, the obsession, which was their work, their love for it and for each other … They did not permit themselves (she decided) to live as she had feared she was condemned to live—curled up inside a self that did not really exist, slowly dying inside that shell, no matter how many additional whorls of shell she managed to extrude, each new whorl no more than a dumb reaction to the limits of the previous one, spun by anger or bitterness or despair.

(53)

In a characteristically Banksian ending (though perhaps more pat and preachy than usual), Janet, released from her glum self-absorption, resolves to “go to work, pitching herself into the task of making a machine that could fly, making it out of wires and shreds of cloth and odd remainders of wood and rough pieces of other machinery—the junk of her life so far” (54).

“WITH CHE AT THE PLAZA”

The close companion to “With Che in New Hampshire,” “With Che at the Plaza” once again involves the metafictional conceit of the storyteller transparently creating his narrative as he goes along. In both stories the narrative is self-flattering in the Walter Mitty style, but Banks's coy satirization of his day-dreaming narrator is funnier in this instance because it eschews elaborate, repetitive technical ruminations that make “With Che in New Hampshire” somewhat tedious.

While staying at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, Banks's first-person narrator, “an American businessman,” thinks he recognizes an elegantly dressed Che Guevara having breakfast in the hotel's Green Tulip Room—despite the fact that Che was widely reported to have been killed by counterrevolutionary forces in the mountains of Bolivia five years earlier (68).

His imagination fully engaged, the narrator proceeds to sketch out the details of Che's clandestine life at the hotel. He also posits a friendship between himself and Che that gives the Cuban exile “some pleasure and, indeed, even comfort” (68). Banks's narrator even imagines Che writing a letter to his mother in which he rather rapturously describes his new American friend as “deep, compassionate, with an imaginative relation to men who happen to be radically different from him, whether they be peasants or men like myself” (68).

The narrator's imaginative self-aggrandizement reaches a kind of crescendo when he fantasizes a dream in which he is playing poker with an unlikely assortment of sixties notables—Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Perry Como, and Frank Sinatra—at Sinatra's Palm Beach home (70). Beating his formidable poker companions with four aces, Banks's narrator gets up to depart with his winnings when he is forced to remain seated at gunpoint by Sinatra. Imagining himself “ripping away from the dream” at that point, the narrator then imagines himself being surprised by Che in his room at the Plaza (72). After demanding the man's poker winnings, Che shoots his friend in the chest (72)—an imaginary turn of events that prompts Banks's hero manque to note that, “[T]his Guevara thing was getting out of hand. I was beginning to wish I had never met the man” (73).

A rollicking farce that pretends to no great purport, “With Che at the Plaza” implicitly suggests that the human imagination is a volatile creative force that can never be completely guided or controlled.

STORIES FROM LIFE

“SEARCHING FOR SURVIVORS (I)”

Banks's regional stories combine autobiographical elements with a flare for the vivid evocation of the New England landscape that Banks had already demonstrated in his poetry. Yet the synthesis of these two concerns is never straightforward. “Searching for Survivors (I)” is, for example, a complex hybrid. Part historical parable, part fictionalized autobiography, the story's meandering narrative structure is determined by the mercurial logic of free association.

Banks's first-person narrator begins his tale by identifying with the Arctic explorer Henry Hudson, who was deposed by a mutinous crew on a 1611 voyage and subsequently disappeared. The narrator decides that, if he had been in that actual situation, he “would have stuck with the [the mutineers in the] bigger boat” (1). He nonetheless feels tremendous empathy for the “darkly iron-willed” Hudson (1).

“[R]eminded of Hudson,” the narrator notes that he is “always reminded in turn of other things, mainly automobiles,” particularly the 1949 Hudson Hornet owned by the father of his boyhood friend, Daryl:

The car was deep green … and the restrained stabs of chrome on the grill and bumpers and around the headlights and taillights merely deepened the sense of wellbeing that one took from such huge expanses of color. Shaped more or less like an Indian burial mound … whether stilled or in motion, the vehicle expressed permanence and stability, blocky arrogant pacts with eternity.

(3)

In its absurd but somehow elegant massiveness, the Hudson is more than the embodiment of American technological grandiosity. For Banks's speaker in his youth, the Hudson epitomizes a kind of timeless serenity; more specifically, the “permanence and stability” of his friendship with Daryl.

The illusory nature of that ideal is dramatized in the third phase of the story. Here, the narrator recounts a chance meeting with Daryl when both are about 19 and haven't seen each other in “five or six years at least.” Both men quickly perceive that they stand on opposite sides of the great divide of social class. The narrator is decidedly blue-collar, working as a timekeeper at the Boston naval shipyard.⁷ Daryl, on the other hand, is an apprentice stockbroker “in an expensive-looking charcoal grey, pinstripe suit with a vest and a black wool overcoat with a silver fur collar” (3). During the brief chat that follows, Daryl discloses that his father, loving custodian of the green Hudson, died of a heart attack two years before. After uttering platitudes about getting in touch again, the two rush off “in opposite directions” (4). Struck by the realization that the seemingly endless days of his youth are over, Banks's speaker feels “lonelier” than he'd ever felt before.

In the fourth and final phase of the story, Banks's narrator speaks of buying a Norwegian elkhound puppy whom he has named Hudson Frobisher, “so that I could be sure I was naming him after the explorers of the Arctic seas” (4). Fantasizing about acquiring other elkhounds, putting together a team, and entering the National Sled Dog Championship Races in Laconia, New Hampshire, Banks's speaker imagines that he “would pull off the course after a while” and “light out for the back country” until he reached Hudson Bay. When spring came he would circle “the muddied edge of Hudson Bay on foot, looking at the wet ground for pieces of old iron or charred wood, or maybe a yellowed, half-rotted journal—signs that Hudson had made it to shore” (5). Hence the title of the story and the collection. The figurative “search for survivors” is, at base, a search for enduring continuities between past and present: memories, lessons, articles of faith that can withstand the depredations of time and life's chaos. Such patterns, if they can be discerned, might add up to a stable sense of self.

“THE BLIZZARD”

The sometimes harrowing instability of the self is sharply rendered in “The Blizzard.” Appropriately arranged in nonlinear fashion, “The Blizzard” also alternates between the first and third persons, as Banks's protagonist fades in and out of his own skin. The man sees his derangement as a perennial event, triggered by the onset of winter in New Hampshire: “First, I lose my hold on my sense of self, then of my life as some kind of continuing history. Then of my wife, and finally, of my children … by the time, the first trickles of spring appear, I am like a vaguely discolored fluid floating on the surface of a stagnant sea” (22). Haunted by a generalized “and rather extreme sense of personal guilt,” the man sinks into “silence and detachment,” a mood that drives his long-suffering wife to distraction (26–27). To make matters worse, his wife knows that he's made a pass at her friend, Rose, a woman he's attracted to because of her own tendency toward silence.

Tensions come to a head when the narrator castigates his wife in front of her friends for letting the well-water pump run on. She responds in kind, by telling him to shut his “god-damned mouth.” In a fit of anger the man drives 40 miles to Portsmouth in a ranging snowstorm, intent on spiting his wife by finding a woman to seduce. His plan quickly founders; due to the storm, all the Portsmouth bars are closed. His car buried in rapidly accumulating snow, Banks's protagonist, “hatless and without gloves,” finds himself walking the five miles back to his motel in a blizzard that has virtually obliterated the landscape (33). Both awed and disarmed by the fury of the blowing snow, this wayward, egocentric man begins to come back to himself:

At that time, as he stumbled, walked, and finally jogged happily through the streets of Portsmouth in the middle of a blizzard, I could not believe that I was anyone other than that man with the icicles in his moustache. I was on both side of his eyes, inside and outside as well … It occurred to me the man might die … that he was insane. It occurred to me that he was not insane.

(33)

Winter being the protagonist's bête noire, it is more than a little ironic that a blizzard should succeed in quelling his destructive willfulness. Reduced to his unaccommodated essence by the snows, this troubled man is, at least temporarily, made whole again. He reaches the motel, stays the night, then drives home the next day, not necessarily chastened but certainly in possession of a renewed sense of proportion.

“IMPASSE”

“Impasse” describes the critical moment in another deeply troubled marriage.⁸ Having foolishly married a woman he has never loved, a young Boston bookstore clerk named Ham finds himself in a moral dilemma: “Leaving her now, telling her the truth and walking out, seemed to him as loathsome as its opposite act, marrying her in the first place” (89). Unable “to choose one of two kinds of guilt,” Ham has latched onto a third alternative. He has become deeply infatuated with Rosa, an alluring, mysterious music student he met at a party.

Visiting Rosa at her apartment for the first time, Ham has spent hours telling her “mainly of his [marital] dilemma, little else” (90). Agreeing with him, that he has indeed reached an “impasse,” she disappears into her bedroom for cigarettes. When she reemerges, Ham is faced with a critical decision. Will he try to seduce her or just go home to his wife? Banks offers no real closure, only Ham's prurient wish-fulfillment fantasy. He imagines Rosa seducing him, an act, he hopes, that will produce the “clarity” his life so sorely lacks (91).

“THE DRIVE HOME”

“The Drive Home,” a long, meandering story, features yet another Banks protagonist enduring not-so-quiet desperation. Like Ham and the errant husband in “The Blizzard,” Fletcher Bass is a young man suffocating on the constrictions of his life, “dying”

Of being a father. A husband. A Caucasian. A Ph.D. A twenty-five year old American male. A high school teacher of American history … Of being the husband of a nineteen-year-old blonde from Hartford, Connecticut. Of being the only child of parents dying silently, slowly, in Crawford, New Hampshire. Of being an insomniac who dreams. An adulterer. A wife-beater … A formal man. A cold man. A stingy man. Of being a ridiculous man … full of pity for himself.

(95)

Bass's surfeit of corrosive self-awareness produces recurring nightmares (indeed, the whole story may or may not be a series of dreams within dreams). In one anxiety-ridden dream, he finds himself shooting a “creature” with a high-powered rifle. In another, he kills a young girl who catches him stealing her “Daddy's whiskey” (98). Convinced that he is the moral equivalent of “a murderer and a thief,” Bass is fully cognizant of the danger of obsessing on his pain: “For the truth is that I cannot need to know these kinds of things, if I also need to exist” (95). Predictably, he broods on “these kinds of things” anyway, laying waste to an already fragile ego.

To bolster his self-esteem, Bass cheats on his wife, an act that only engenders more guilt and anxiety—and brings the marriage to an apparently terminal crisis. In the midst of an angry confrontation, Bass's wife, Dagmar, declares the marriage “over” and “dead” and accuses Fletcher of having “killed it.” With their young daughter, Linda, in tow, Dagmar departs for her parents' house in Hartford. Her parting shot is to declare her husband “insane” (101).

Left to his own devices, Bass gets on a bus to seek some solace from his parents in Crawford, New Hampshire, a “drive home” that mirrors his wife's drive home to hers. On the bus, Bass attempts to flirt with a young and attractive but not very bright “Christian lady” named Cynthia. A more likely candidate for Cynthia's attentions is Buzz, a garrulous, “big, blond, crewcut boy of twenty or so,” who wields a guitar and invites everyone to join him at the back of the bus for a “sing-along” (103). In Buzz, Fletcher Bass senses a kindred soul: another preening narcissist, “whose thoughts can drown out the very voices of the others, whose pride is greater than all their vanities and whose guilt is greater than their trivial shames” (105). Deciding that “he is the one to be encountered,” Bass follows Buzz and Cynthia to the rear of the bus and then proceeds to disrupt Buzz's hootenanny by plucking out one of his guitar strings in mid-song. Angry and confused, Buzz tries to ward off Bass, but to no avail. Taunting the younger man with sadistic glee, Bass ends up putting his foot through Buzz's guitar, then orders him off the bus.

On the face of it, Bass's psychic demolition of Buzz is nothing more than a mean-spirited act of displaced aggression, both funny and gruesome. But there's more to it than that; by humiliating Buzz (his mirror image), Bass is able to repudiate a measure of his own narcissism, an emotional catharsis that allows for a significant breakthrough.

Such a breakthrough seems to occur in the final phase of the story. Bass arrives at his parents' home in Crawford, only to discover that they are in the midst of moving and don't even notice his presence. Rushing into the now “cold” and “stripped” house, Bass desperately hopes “To see if anything has been left me. Anything at all!” (110). Until the business with Buzz, Fletcher Bass's every attempt to conquer the demons of self-doubt had only resulted in further regression because he had failed to perceive the real source of his neurosis: an emotionally desolate childhood. At story's end, Bass seems to confront that painful reality. Whether or not the experience will prove illuminating or merely traumatic is left open to conjecture.

“THE DEFENSEMAN”

In a decidedly milder and more nostalgic key is “The Defenseman,” the first-person narrative of a grown man looking back on his childhood initiation into ice skating and hockey. Though he is not sure why he “should happen to seize onto” the remembrance, the narrator suspects that his reverie has its sources in a half dozen ice-skating sessions the previous winter (112–13). When he is skating alone on a small meadow pond in his front yard, the narrator finds that his “physical responses” and “fantasies” of hockey heroics come “straight out of childhood” (113). In Proustian fashion, physically reenacting an activity of one's youth effects “a brief slip backwards into the consciousness of one's ordinarily objectified past” (113). As Banks's narrator later notes, “The conditions surrounding an event, the textures, physically, emotionally, spiritually, these remain uniquely our own; the particulars of an event, what we use to name it for strangers, are no more ours than our dates of birth. Perhaps this is why so much of the act of remembering is an act of the body” (120). Experiencing a renewed connection to his childhood, Banks's narrator also feels reconnected to his father, who patiently and lovingly taught him how to skate.

“SEARCHING FOR SURVIVORS (II)”

Searching for Survivors ends with “Searching for Survivors (II).” The collection's longest (10,000 words), most complex, and poignant story, “Searching” is Banks's fictionalized account of the aftermath of his brother Christopher's death in a train accident in California. A study in the psychology of grief, the story is more fundamentally about the emotional repression—and resulting fragmentation—that plagues the contemporary American family. To evoke the sense that the family is broken up and hopelessly dispersed, Banks segments his narrative into 11 distinct sections or scenes (each transition clearly marked by a line across the page) then rearranges those sections to deliberately violate chronological order.

Hence, “Searching” begins with Reed (Banks) flying home from the West Coast after a futile search for Allen's (Christopher's) body. The next section finds Reed at home in New Hampshire, preparing to visit his father with news about the death and memorial service. Banks then flashes back to California, with Reed at his grieving mother's house after the search. The fourth section reverts to the beginning of the previous summer, with Reed picking up Allen from Boston's South Station for a summer-long visit. Banks jumps ahead to a recounting of the wrenching memorial service for Allen in California, then jumps ahead again to Reed's visit to his father in New Hampshire. The eighth section reverts to Reed's mother's house in California, after the memorial service. The next section flashes back to Reed dropping Allen off at the bus station in New Hampshire for his return trip to California at the end of the previous summer. The ninth section jumps ahead to Reed's leaving his numb father's house after the visit, a scene complemented by the next section, which focuses on Reed's leaving home at the age of 17. The story's final section is set at the site of the train wreck, south of Santa Monica, with Reed and his brother, Gerry (Steve Banks), scouring the wreckage for some sign of Allen's remains. Reed finds nothing except the torn half of a sock that might have been Allen's. As Reed puts it earlier, “My brother wasn't just killed here … He was destroyed. Decimated, and then incinerated. Poof. Gone” (151).

What Banks has very deliberately created is a disjointed series of arrival and departure scenarios. Geographic distance equals emotional distance and vice versa. Split by divorce and divided between the East and the West Coast, Reed's family is unable to sustain viable emotional ties. But it never could, even when its members were in close proximity. Banks attributes the underlying cause of so much distancing to the emotional repression that typifies American life. This, Banks implies, is every bit as tragic as Allen's senseless death. Reflecting on the emotional sclerosis that has crippled his family, Reed thinks that it is

pathetic that we surviving children, we survivors, loved Allen only in secret and never had the pleasure … of uttering it full-faced to him. Pathetic that his death didn't free us to do for each other now what we were unable to do for him then … I can't believe that we have been so incredibly stupid and weak, that we go on doing it!

(140).

This, then, is the final emphasis of Searching for Survivors: a plea for genuineness of feeling and direct expressiveness that is sadly lacking in contemporary American life.

Notes

1. Twelve of the 14 stories that comprise Searching for Survivors were previously published. Only the two title stories (“Searching for Survivors,” I and II) were written specifically for this collection.

2. Carll Tucker, “Failed Utopia,” Village Voice, 30 June 1975, 44.

3. Struck down in his prime, Banks's elegant “Prince” certainly evokes the slain Kennedys. Perhaps another reference is to Gregorios Lambrakis, the Greek pacifist leader whose 1963 assassination by the Greek military was the subject of Costa-Gavras's political thriller, Z (1969). In the film, the Lambrakis figure, played by Yves Montand, is supposedly killed by a small van careening through the streets.

4. The name, Robert LeBrun, is something of a literary in-joke. Robert Lebrun is the name of Edna Pontellier's lover in Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening (1899).

5. Originally published in New American Review, “With Che in New Hampshire” was reprinted in Best American Short Stories of 1971 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971).

6. “With Che at Kitty Hawk” was selected as one of the O. Henry Prize stories for 1974.

7. For a brief period, in the winter of 1962, Banks himself worked as a timekeeper at the Boston naval shipyard.

8. “Impasse” has autobiographical underpinnings. Banks himself was a Boston bookstore clerk in the early sixties. Charleen is loosely based on Banks's first wife, Darlene Bennett, and Rosa is a fictionalized version of Banks's second wife, Mary Gunst, then a music student also living in Boston.