[In the following review, Shorris offers a favorable assessment of The New World.]

Less successful but more adventurous are the stories in the second part of the book. These deal with actual people in imaginary situations: a weary, aging Simon Bolivar contemplating his life and envying a slave in “The Rise of the Middle Class”; Jean Hogarth, wife of the painter, William Hogarth, lying in bed one morning, unable or unwilling to move, surveying her large, healthy body and resenting its misuse by the greedy, unloving Hogarth, in “Indisposed.”

Banks's most ambitious story is “The New World,” which has as its two main characters, Bernardo de Balbuena, Spanish poet and Catholic prelate, and Mosseh Alvares, a Sephardic goldsmith. Balbuena, longing for a post in Spain, Mexico, or even Lima, Peru, is sent instead to serve in Jamaica, in the 17th century a stagnating backwater. Though miserably disappointed, he gallantly writes to his friend, Lope de Vega, that we choose our own destinies. His real hopes are tied up in his epic poem, “El Bernardo,” in which he creates an idealized version of himself.

Alvares is an important member of the Jewish community in Jamaica, but he, too, is an exile. Though he has a successful business and a beloved daughter, he also feels the need to create a fantasy persona, in his case, a patriarch, the hero of a story he tells his daughter one day. Both men, though alienated from their surroundings, are proud of their accomplishments under duress. But they resent that duress. They are angry at not being better situated, so they invent better situations.

Was the New World created to make the old one more endurable, just as people create fantasy lives in order to make their daily existence bearable? It's a bit farfetched, and the audacious Banks doesn't make the connection work completely. Obviously influenced by both Garcia Marquez and Borges, he seems to lack their off-center imaginations and the precision to get the story told before losing the engagement of the reader. But a writer willing to gamble this way deserves unlimited credit at the gaming tables.