The Reserve

Description

Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules. Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondack wilderness to the skies above war-torn Spain and Fascist Germany, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire.

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Customer Reviews

Good story but bad writing
First, I picked this book up from the bargain bin at B&N, looking for summer reading. It was attractive to me since it was staged in the Adirondacks and I like books that describe a nice setting and inspires with me with nature. The writer accomplished that for me, and it's a decent story, but he failed to tie the story together at the end and make his story have a final meaning.

It also annoyed me at one point that he had used so many very fine words, and then used the word "instinctual." That's not a word. More importantly, it also lacked in defining the protagonist. You would presume the protagonist was Jordan Groves, but as the novel came to a close the reader could wonder if the true protagonist was Alicia Groves. The writer defined one, maybe two antagonists, and possbily a third one, but then the second one could also be considered the protagonist (Vanessa Cole).

As far as holding to the template of a well written novel, this one failed miserably. However, I do believe this writer is a good story-teller, and almost above average at characterization, which is the only reason I finished the book. I wanted the story, even though it could have been done a bit better.

The first few paragraphs screamed of a writer that was trying too hard.
At the end, he left us to our own with what happened to the characters, which is good. But he did it so poorly! I don't want to work that hard for a story and I doubt that I'll read another of his books, and "THE RESERVE" was the first.

2010-05-23 (Texas) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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Secrets and lies
(3.5 stars) With THE RESERVE, set in an exclusive private resort in the expansive wilderness park of the Adirondack mountains in north-eastern New York, Russell Banks takes us back to the mid nineteen thirties. While the Great Depression has left its detrimental impact on the impoverished local population, the rich and famous don't have to adjust their lifestyle at all... Within the confines of the resort, Banks explores two distinct social strata by focusing of four central characters who, each in their own way, are attempting to challenge the established class conventions and barriers through their actions.

We are literally flown to the shores of Second Tamarack Lake and into the midst of a July 4th party at one of the luxurious estates. Jordan Groves, artist and "man of action" flies his small pontoon plane, illegally, right into the midst of the upper-crust get together, hosted by well-known brain surgeon Dr. Cole and his pretty, yet subdued wife. Vanessa, their daughter, beautiful and wild, is the personified seductress and it is not difficult to guess who will be the next object if her charm offensive.

Jordan Groves, loosely based on Rockwell Kent, has reached sufficient notoriety, as an artist and writer /illustrator of travel accounts to wild places and also as a ladies man, that he can ignore, usually successfully, the confines of his lower class upbringing. He is also wealthy and has his beautiful, accomplished wife, Alicia, to show for who has the correct credentials. The forth principal protagonist is Hubert St. Germain, the taciturn local park guide, who like other locals is forced, due to the lack of other employment opportunities, to provide varied services to the wealthy resident owners in the Reserve and their illustrious guests.

A tragedy at the Cole estate triggers a series of events that affects all four protagonists in different, yet in each case dramatic, ways. Banks uses the unfolding events to develop psychological portraits of the four individuals and sets them against each other - physically and emotionally. Predictably, there were childhood dramas, unresolved sufferings and more. Deeper questions of "what is truth" stand against "what is betrayal" and "what is love". For Vanessa, for example, "...truth was more a coloration of reality than the organizing principle of its underlying structure... It was something one could assert and a moment later turn around and deny, with no sense of there being a contradiction." Jordan, by contrast has found a definition of "love" for his wife that, at the same time, allows constant sexual conquests without feeling regrets. Alicia is forced to questions more than her marriage and the morality of her own behaviour. Hubert, in the end has to confront the consequences of being truthful to the detriment of his own and other people's happiness.

The build-up towards the culmination of drama seen through the eyes of the four protagonists, given the author ample opportunity to fill in blanks in their respective backgrounds and personal and emotional make-ups. The intimate scenario of the Adirondacks is interrupted by short sections that pulls the reader forward by a year - to 1937 and the Spanish Civil War. These sections, while they give insights into future events that impact the protagonists, they are too short to get a sense of connectedness. Similarly, the sighting by Groves of the German Zeppelin airship, 'Hindenburg' over the mountains feels too deliberate an incident and is not well integrated into the story.

In a lesser wordsmith, this story would have read like a light romantic novel with some disasters thrown in. Banks goes deeper into the underlying issues of the day and the ethical questions emerging from the crises. Unfortunately, the central characters and those surrounding them are, to a certain degree, stereotyped rather than explored in their individuality. The result is a novel not as convincing as one would have liked. [Friederike Knabe]

2010-03-25 (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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More like reserved cheese.
Wow, is this book a poor introduction to Russell Banks. I've never read anything by him before, though I tried in vain several times to borrow Cloudsplitter from my local library (it was always out on loan.) I had heard that Banks was a master novelist, a major literary figure of our time, in the same pantheon as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Well, if Hemingway had written scripts for Ed Wood and Fitzgerald for Carmen Miranda, I could believe that to be so.

This book is so trite, the dialogue so stilted, and the adjectives at once incredibly numerous and entirely predictable, that the result is a feeling not unlike eating three Big Macs. The main characters are cut from stock: a ca-raaaazy socialite whose mama and papa are filthy rich; a predictably handsome, womanizing, left-leaning, "square-handed and broad-shouldered" artist who flies biplanes for fun; and a backwoodsman who's as honest as he is stupid. Oh, and he's handsome, too, and virile as all get out. If this sounds like the makings of a good novel, then push aside the Harlequin Romances and buy this book. If, however, you expect more from a writer with the reputation of Banks, skip this.

2009-11-30 | at78rpm (Saranac Lake, NY USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 2

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A Colossal Flop
I am a huge Russell Banks fan and I am begging you. If you have never read Russell Banks, please, please choose a different book. Try Affliction or The Sweet Hereafter or Continental Drift or Cloudsplitter. This book is an embarrassment. You won't believe any of the pathetically one dimensional characters or the cheesy implausible plot. I suspect Banks is longing for another movie deal because right from the blatantly cinematic first scene, you can tell he's constructing more of a made-for-tv screen play than a serious novel. And the dialogue ... don't get me started. It's like he hired out the dialogue to Jacqueline Suzanne.
But there is potential here. I would love to see him rewrite it as an hilarious satire but alas, satire is not a Banks metier.

2009-11-27 | CherylY (Ashland, Oregon) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Shame on you, Russell Banks!
I have read several of Russell Banks's novels and have always found them to be affecting, involving, and often wrenching (especially Continental Drift and Affliction). The Reserve was a complete disappointment. I can't believe that Banks really wrote this one: It was trite and repetitive, with implausible events, unlikable characters, and laughable dialogue. Two thumbs way down!

2009-10-01 | ns319 (Old Tappan, NJ United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 1

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Sweet Hereafter: A Novel

Product Details

• Inure: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Self-reliance, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and assistance to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• ISBN13: 9780060923242

Description

In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing questions: when the worst thing happens, who do you blame?

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Atom Egoyan's Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter is a good movie, remarkably faithful to the spirit of Russell Banks's novel of the same name, but Banks's book is twice as good. With the cool logic of accreting snowflakes, his prose builds a world--a small U.S. town near Canada--and peoples it with four vivid, sensitive souls linked by a school-bus tragedy: the bus driver; the widowed Vietnam vet who was driving behind the bus, waving at his kids, when it went off the road; the perpetually peeved negligence lawyer who tries to shape the victims' heartaches into a winning case; and the beauty-queen cheerleader crippled by the crash, whose testimony will determine everyone's fate.

We experience the story from inside the heads of the four characters in turn--each knowing things the others don't, each misunderstanding the facts in his or her own way. The method resembles Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Gilbert Sorrentino's stunning Aberration of Starlight, but Banks's achievement is most comparable to John Updike's tales of ordinary small-towners preternaturally gifted with slangy eloquence, psychological insights, and alertness to life's tiniest details.

Egoyan's film is haunting but vague--it leaves viewers in the dark regarding several critical plot points. Banks's book is more haunting still, and precise, making every revelation count, with a finale far superior to that of the film. It's also wittier than the too-sober flick: the lawyer dismisses the dome-dwelling hippie parents of one of the crash victims as being "lost in their Zen Little Indians fantasy," which casts a sharp light on them and him, too. He's lost in his calculations of how each parent will fit into the legal system, and the ways in which he fits into the tragedy are lost on him. If only he and the Vietnam-vet dad could read each other's account of their tense first encounter, both of them might get what the other is missing.

Banks's wit is pitiless--it's painful when we discover that the bus driver, who prides herself on interpreting for her stroke-impaired husband, is translating his wise but garbled observations all wrong. The crash turns out not to be the ultimate tragedy: in the cold northern light of its aftermath, we discover that we're all in this alone.

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Customer Reviews

"There's no such thing as the simple truth."
Four individuals. Delores Driscoll - the school bus driver, Billy Ansel - a widower/father, Nicole Burnell - the perfect schoolgirl, Mitchell Stephens - a slick lawyer. These are the narrators of "The Sweet Hereafter", a story about a tragic school bus accident in a small upstate NY town, where everybody knows everybody. Or do they? That's the question at the heart of this story. Each of these four people have personal truths that are different from the impression they give others. These truths are central to how each interprets the tragedy, and it's aftermath. Without giving anything away, the biggest surprise comes when one narrator reveals a dark secret of private turmoil. I was quite shocked!

My only quibble: I thought the four narrators sounded a bit alike, despite their individual perspectives. All in all, Russell Banks has written a fascinating character profile here, which would make for great discussion. I recommend to book clubs.

Spoiler:

Why was Delores "relieved" when Nicole lied about her causing the bus accident? Was she relieved to be the town's scapegoat, thus creating a way for them to move on from the tragedy? That doesn't ring true to me. What am I missing here? (Guess I could use a book club!)

2010-08-20 (MA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Loved book and movie
I find it amazing that Mr. Banks is able to write so realistically from many different characters' perspectives. Excellent thought-provoking reading.

2010-06-20 | Catglobe (Detroit, MI) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Unique Format Provides Broad Insight into a Tragic Story
One snowy morning a school bus careened off an embankment, killing fourteen children and leaving the small upstate New York town of Sam Dent forever changed. With literary mastery, author Russell Banks answers the implied question, "How does a small community respond when tragedy threatens to destroy its foundation?" This intricate story is unveiled by four narrators: the bus driver, a grief stricken father who witnessed the accident, a negligence attorney who feels a compelling connection to the grieving parent's plight, and a teenage girl who was crippled in the crash and who later became the determinative factor in the future of this small community.

The juxtaposition of the four separate narrators creates what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin describes as polyphonic dialogue. Mr. Banks carefully shapes the consciousness of each narrator in a way that invites the reader to fully comprehend the intricate discourse of the people of Sam Dent. After reading one narrator's accounting of an event, the reader may be left with myriad of questions which will often come to light by deductively paying attention to each subsequent narrator. Mr. Banks does not lace the narrations with common underlying themes, but rather highlights the individual differences of each character, thereby allowing the reader to discover the connections and make key realizations as each narration builds upon the last. This creative interplay of multiple voices produces an intriguing, suspenseful, and honest story, leaving the sensitive reader no choice but to consider the totality of the circumstances before passing judgment.

The tale begins with the voice of the school bus driver Dolores Driscoll who appears to be thinking out loud while trying to make sense of a traumatic event. Mr. Banks paints Dolores as an honest, caring, and selfless woman, who is saddled with the guilt of being the person responsible for the death of fourteen children, whom she cared for as if they were her own. A brief factual description of this horrendous event would leave most people blaming Dolores, but Mr. Banks humanizes her, thus leaving the reader sympathetic to the poor woman's plight. Putting Dolores first in the order of narrations softens the reader's judgment of her and effectively facilitates an impartial review of the remaining narrations.

Billy Ansel, the ex-football hero, Vietnam veteran, cancer-widower, and father of two of the victims was the only witness to the bus crash, as he was following behind the bus while waving to his joy-filled children. His narration, like Dolores's, reads more like a journal than a story. The intimate details of his struggle with losing his wife are heart wrenching and his subsequent motivation to be a positive role-model for his children by remaining strong is admirable. The loss he suffers after the crash evokes nothing but empathy in the reader and Billy's downward spiral becomes not only understandable but seemingly unavoidable. Regardless of his despair, Billy has a strong resolve to move on with his life. When he hears about the attorneys who "swam north like sharks from Albany and New York City," Billy becomes enraged. Unlike most people in the town, he did not wish to blame anyone, although Banks seems to hint that Billy's detachment and self-destructive behavior were due in a large part to self-blame.

When Mitchell Stephens, Esquire reads about the Sam Dent tragedy in a New York newspaper he immediately makes the long drive upstate. If this story were told in any other way than first person, feeling empathy for the lawyer would be near impossible. However, Mr. Banks masterfully guides the reader through the mind of Mitchell Stephens. Stephens is a father of a drug-addicted daughter and this causes him to feel a connection to people who have suffered terrible loss. Stephens' motto is "There is no such thing as an accident," and he asserts that some company must have cut a corner somewhere, which ultimately led to unnecessary death. Mitchell Stephens is angry or more aptly "permanently pissed off" and it is his mission to "ensure moral responsibility in this society." Stephens' conviction convinced at least three families to share in his anger and he formed a class action suit against the school board and the state of New York. His strongest witness was the crippled teenager who survived the accident, but little did he know that she would also prove to be his worthiest adversary.

Nichole Burnell was the town princess, beautiful, talented, and intelligent. To the onlooker, she appeared to have a blessed life. Nichole begins her narration with the moment she wakes up in the hospital, and then she leads the reader through the ordeal of learning how to live with a permanently crippling condition. Although her body is damaged, Nichole's mind is sharp and she unhesitatingly discloses her innermost fears and feelings. Nichole's trials and tribulations are further personalized with her revelation of a deep secret, which manifests through passive-aggressiveness. Her tenacity and determination to obtain personal vindication drives her to make decisions that shape how this small-town community will survive the sweet hereafter.

Russell Banks skillfully guides his reader through the shattered lives of the people of Sam Dent. Reading this book is like putting together a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle which upon completion brings tremendous satisfaction. It takes amazing literary aptitude to bridge four separate voices through polyphonic dialogue, but Mr. Banks believably attains this feat in a manner that makes this book a classic must-read for all literary enthusiasts.

2010-05-12 (University Place, WA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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The Sweet Hereafter
The storyline of The Sweet Hereafter is: There is a school bus accident in a small town in upper New York state. Most of the town's children on the bus are killed. The book relates the events leading up to the accident and what follows after the accident from the perspective of four characters: the bus driver, a father who witnessed the accident and whose children died in the accident, a lawyer who comes to town to try to start a class action lawsuit and a student who has survived the accident.

As the story unfolds we discover that there are many, many secrets in this small town. Some relatively minor, some very disturbing. Lives are uncovered and changed. Friendships are affected. Divisions in the town occur. And a question is persistent throughout the book: When the worst thing you can imagine happens, whom do you blame?

Turns out that this book was based on a real incident that occurred in Alton, Texas, in 1989. There was also a movie made based on the book, which I took out from our local library. I thought it followed the book for the most part but was not a fan of it.

All in all, I thought this was a good book, a good discussion and I'm glad I had the chance to read it.

2010-03-13 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Not a book to read twice
I would not prefer to read this book a second time since it was a deeply sad story of what occurs inside and was not the kind of story I'd normally read but was required for a class. There were as others say multiple narrators of the story but that added to difficulty since they seemingly went back and forth in time to fill in the details to make the story touch you the way it did me. Of course for an English class this is helpful with all the meanings and the thoughts make meaning of details.

The above is why I gave it a 3 and If I had to read again I'd probably give it less.

2010-01-25 | coolbiker (Ny USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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The Darling: A Novel

Description

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground.

Hannah flees America for West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends of the notorious warlord and ex-president, Charles Taylor. Hannah's encounter with Taylor ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.

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Russell Banks brings to life in The Darling another political-historical narrative of great scope and range. As in Continental Drift and Rule of the Bone, racial issues are explored; as in Cloudsplitter, idealism runs off the rails. Banks always makes it work because he keeps it real.

The "darling" of the story is Dawn Carrington, neé Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground forced to flee America to avoid arrest. At the time of the novel, she is 59, living on her working farm in upstate New York with four younger women, recalling her life in Liberia and her recent return to that country to look for her sons. "Mainly, we return to a place in order to learn why we left," she says. For Hannah, the decision was harrowing. She abandoned her sons during a bloody civil war, after the death of her husband, Woodrow Sundiata, a black African Cabinet Minister in President Samuel Doe's government, who is beheaded in front of her and her three boys. Banks explores mercilessly the corruption, greed, sloth, cynicism, and violence running through the Liberian leaders from Tolbert to Doe to Charles Taylor, weaving the real story of the horrors of West Africa with the fictional narrative of Hannah and Woodrow. He can take history off the page, bringing to life the times, people and events he recounts.

Hannah was born a child of privilege and chafed against it from her youth: "...it was an old impulse ... this desire to separate myself in the dance of life from the people who had brought me and become one instead with the people excluded from the dance..." Her father is a famous pediatrician, her mother a shadow figure maintaining a predictably correct suburban household. Both parents are liberal, but Hannah outstrips their political stance early on. They are estranged for many years because of her flight, but the separation is really much deeper than distance or politics.

She becomes a wife and mother, and is bored and unfulfilled by the role. She turns to creating a sanctuary for chimpanzees and finds her real purpose. "An old pattern. It's how since childhood I have made my daily life worth living, by turning tedium and despair into a cause." She names each chimp, calls them her "dreamers," and cares for them while others care for her children. Self-knowledge is not high on a list of her personal attributes. Although she characterizes herself as "a darling," there is little evidence to support her claim: distant father, cold mother, controlling husband. She finally sees herself in a true light: "Here it all was again: the names and dates, the tired facts of my biography up to then, the description of my few skills and talents. It was the CV of a small-time, would-be domestic terrorist. Sad. Pathetic." Hannah Musgrave is a visitor in her own life, never really connecting with anyone; more a dreamer than a darling.

Russell Banks has, once again in The Darling, shown himself to be one of the finest novelists writing today. He has written very convincingly, in a woman's voice, a story of youthful idealism destroyed by the real world, of a woman who connected more completely with chimps than with humans, and who says, "once it was clear to me that I would have to abandon my husband and children and return alone to the United States, once I saw that I would be alone, safe from prosecution--I realized, gradually at first and then in a rush, that it was exactly what I had wanted all along… I was once again seizing an opportunity to abandon one life for another." Another reinvention for Hannah. --Valerie Ryan

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Customer Reviews

"Liberia is a permanently haunted land filled with vengeful ghosts."
Recreating the events which led to the catastrophic battles for power which engulfed Liberia from 1980 - 1996, author Russell Banks shows how four different home-grown armies, each with their own goals, aggressively engaged in atrocities to ensure victory for their own side. Employing child soldiers, and killing and maiming anyone who stood in their way, including women and tiny children who simply had the misfortune to belong to the wrong rural tribe, these armies massacred a quarter of a million people and displaced a million others.

Forcing the American reader to pay more attention to the full scale of these horrors, Banks describes this turmoil through the eyes of a radical American anti-war activist, Hannah Musgrove who arrives in Liberia in 1976 on a passport which identifies her as Dawn Carrington. Musgrove is on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List for her activities as a member of the Weather Underground. The "darling" daughter of a well-known pediatrician with ultra-liberal politics, Hannah had a privileged childhood and attended elite private schools and colleges, including almost two years of study at Harvard Medical School. For reasons that are never quite clear, she has rejected everything her parents believe in, engaging in crimes resulting in deaths, and going into hiding to avoid facing the consequences.

Egocentric and arrogant, Hannah believes so totally in her own definition of what is right that she is almost inhuman, unable to relate to other people, unable to understand or accept any compromise or middle ground on any issue, and unable to work on an equal partnership with anyone else. Once in Liberia, she meets and marries a government minister in the cabinet of President Samuel Tolbert and has three sons, but she remains both a detached observer of what is happening in Liberia and a detached participant in the lives of her Liberian family. Only the chimpanzees for whom she has set up a sanctuary gain her full attention.

Banks cleverly compresses time and provides "breathing space" from the violence by shifting back and forth in both location and time. The novel opens in the twenty-first century on a farm in upstate New York, now owned by Hannah, age fifty-eight. Through flashbacks, Banks shows Hannah's early life with her husband in Liberia, the violent transition from the corrupt government of William Tolbert to that of Samuel Doe in 1980, her expulsion from Liberia, her meeting in the US with Charles Taylor, a friend of her husband, and her eventual return to Liberia and her family, just as a horrific, four-pronged war breaks out. The forces of Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, Prince Johnson, and ECOMOG, a multilateral army consisting of troops from other West African countries engage in horrific violence as they compete for power in Liberia. The novel vividly depicts Liberia's brutal history, and no one who reads this will fail to understand the scope of crimes for which the International Court of Justice in The Hague has put former President Charles Taylor on trial, nor will they be able to ignore the horrors also committed by an opponent, Prince Johnson (and recorded on video), who is currently serving as a duly elected senator in Liberia. Mary Whipple

Cloudsplitter: A Novel
Continental Drift (P.S.)
The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks

2010-08-25 (New England) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 4

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Some good, some bad
Some interesting historical content about Liberia, otherwise I probably would not have forced myself to read the entire book.

2010-06-28 (Carterville, Illinois) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Do better research next time
Well written and engaging most of the time. I, however, was distracted because of the many errors. At one point, if one had gone south as the direction to a location indicated, the person would have ended up in the Atlantic Ocean. When writing "historical fiction" that is of a current situation it is important to get the facts straight and often these were not. I was living in Liberia when much of this story occurred and know some could not have been true. Since most of the Liberia story was in the last twenty years readers may feel they understand, but just because it is published does not mean it is true. Actually, when I completed reading the book, and I read it all to see what truth I could find, I dumped it in a garbage can. What a waste of good talent - misleading people about events in a country they may never see! Reader beware.

2009-07-19 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Best book I've read since Cloudsplitter
Banks is an absolutely fantastic writer that is able to transport the reader with very extreme believability into the most foreign locales and most bizarre, alien cultures with finesse, perfect language and strong, gripping story telling. The Darling should be required reading for anyone interested in Africa, the US role in Africa, the delicacies of modern race relations etc...

2009-01-04 (New England) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Slow Start, good middle, decent ending
This is my first Banks novel.
I almost gave up on this book in the first hundred pages, it's slow, plodding and not very interesting. Then I got into it and liked the ambience of 20th century west africa (if you are not interested in africa, skip). The ending was a little iffy - I was left wondering why the main character didn't end up more assaulted/dead after everything else that happens at the end. And the end hits fast and hard, a little too fast. It's decent.

2008-10-27 (Seattle, WA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Continental Drift (P.S.)

Description

A powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers, Russell Banks's Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained, and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.

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Customer Reviews

Fantastic Start, Tragic Finish
This novel is a great American novel on the scale of Grapes of Wrath--with the same kind of flaws. It has an extraordinary start--the chapter on the migrations of peoples is a tour-de-force. The interwoven stories of Haitian refuges and American economic refugees of their own making carry resonance of the first order today, as many reviewers have noted. I felt that, like so many of Banks' novels, particularly Rule of the Bone, the narrative sometimes gets overwhelmed by his passion for the Caribbean cultures. Also, the story of the Haitians gets, in the end, subsumed under the tragedy of the American white guy. . .but his story resolves in the classic way and is, in the end, a completed journey with the kind of inevitability of self-determined fate and justice that all tragedy has. I wish I could give it a 4 1/2 or even 4 3/4 stars. Excellent book, worth the read.

2010-08-10 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Book review
Interesting book and could have been written yesterday. The same issues that faced families in the 80's still persist.

2010-04-08 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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America's Modern Steinbeck
This book was introduced to me by my eldest son who is a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Apparently, it was on a reading list for an English class in which he was enrolled. It came with his strong recommendation. I can only concur with his judgement.

"Continental Drift" is a modern American gem. It covers two ultimately intersecting lives. In the first place, Bob Dubois is a working class oil burner repair man from snowy New Hampshire. He is hard working but clearly going no where. He has a dead end job and can only see ahead of him a hard life of toil and just making do. The novel's other key character is Vanise Dorsinville, a young Haitian woman trying desperately to avoid the abject poverty of Haiti and start a new life in America. At first glance, there lives have nothing in common. However, such is the tide of events that their lives do, indeed, cross. The circumstances are not joyful.

Russell Banks has crafted a work where continental drift has a much wider meaning than that implied by geology. Here we see the drift not as land masses but as individuals with events bring them closer together. The term might also be seen as applying to marriage. Bob Dubois has a family but, again, events conspire against it. Forces are at work that are tearing at its very fabric. Again, the outcome is not propitious.

I can highly recommend this book to all readers. It presents an image of America's underbelly not widely seen. Banks is a modern master. In many respects, he reminds me of a John Steinbeck. Such praise is not hyperbole; rather, it is warranted.

2009-08-27 (Neutral Bay, NSW Australia) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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The Loa Narrator
In reading Continental Drift, a tragedy in every sense, I was struck by how usual the novel was in its structure and its distinct narrator. Banks employs a Haitian loa (a spirit of the dead) to tell us the story of Bob Dubois, a frustrated, blue-collar resident of New Hampshire, and Vanise Dorsonville, a Haitian immigrant, and young mother, looking to escape to America for a significantly better life. The traditional use of the narrator as an all-knowing persona, as Russell Banks explains is "a convention that went out the window in the twentieth century." While there has been a series of literary movements concerned with varying degrees of realism and a reduction in the psychic distance between readers and characters, Banks, in telling the story of disparate characters a world apart said, "I want to feel I have my arm around a shoulder of the reader and I'm explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to the person I've stopped, like the wedding guest in Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner...And I want to have that sense of intimacy, a face-to-face, arm around the shoulder contact." The use of the "omniscient" (psychically and physically detached narrator), in Banks's novel, creates an unusual richness in detail, characterization, and commentary that would be more difficult to achieve using third person limited point of view. And the loa, because he appeared to have no vested interest in manipulating the details of the story, seemed to be a more "reliable," believable, and interesting narrator of events than a story told from first person point of view. In a way, what Banks has done has fed the loas with his work, and tried to change how we see those we often look down upon. And, in truth, this is all an author can ask: to try to change the world through stories, through imaginary lives, and through the power of the written word.

2008-03-06 (Crested Butte, CO) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A depressing tale about a group of losers with no redeeming value
Russell Banks is the master of the depressing story about losers. There is not a single character in this book worth knowing about. There is not a single event worth hearing about. And the writing is terrible -- pretentious, "full of sound and fury and signifying nothing".

A book to be avoided at all costs, unless one is in misery or despair and looking for company.

2008-02-12 | Barry Preston (Providence, RI) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 1

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Dreaming Up America

Description

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Customer Reviews

There is way too much....
opinion being stated as fact for my taste. Leaps of faith, along with cause and effect problems abound. If this book was being presented as an essay I could handle it, I guess. I don't disagree with the author on many of his statements but he is all over the place often swinging wildly. The format he chose to present this little gem was a mistake IMHO. A spoken narrative for a documentary is a spoken narrative for a documentary. If you are going to write a book, write a book!

2008-12-10 (Dover, NH United States) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 2

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Holy smokes! Highly useful "braiding," as Banks calls it
To add to review #1 (which is nicely complete), what I found useful was Banks' characterization of three "strands" in American psycho-history:

1) Escape from religious persecution, found a "new Jerusalem on a hill" (North-east);

2) "Mere" capitalism, exploitation, commerce (Mid-Atlantic, Caribbean. Spanish, mostly

3) Start from scratch, build a new life, find the fountain of youth. (many Europeans, including Ponce deLeon, of course, rummaging around in Florida.

Banks calls these, in another articulation, the three Cs--Christianity, Capitalism and Civilization.

Our big problem? The wee, itty-bitty delta between what we say and what we do. I've added the paragraphs to this one-paragraph excerpt, from pp 96, 97:

Russell Banks-Dreaming Up America. 2008

p. 96 THE PERIOD we're going through right now in the US, in terms of Iraq and the Middle East particularly, in many ways isn't an aberrant period at all. It's typical of America's view of our proper relationship with the rest of the world. Not even the intensity of our involvement is aberrant. Look at Panama, at Vietnam, at Korea, Or, in the earlier nineteenth century, at the Philippines, at cuba. We are and historically have been very involved in other parts of the world, exploiting people and lands as much as any other colonial power, in Asian, African and South American countries.

But in the American imagination, we're only doing that to avoid leaving them to their own terrible troubles. So there's a conflict between the reality of the nineteenth century -- between the nature of our involvement with Mexico, the Caribbean, Liberia, West Africa, and later our involvement in the Philippines and in Asia in the earlier twentieth century , and the rhetoric and imagery we use to describe that involvement. So much of American violence arises because of the conflict between the reality of our lives and the perception of our lives, the way we imagine ourselves.

This goes back to the early colonists in New England and Virginia and the Carolinas, who were basically committing a kind of genocide against the native people, but claimed they were saving them for Civilization, Christianity, and Capitalism. In fact they were killing them and stealing their land, but they never looked at it that way. So there was a huge conflict between what they said they were doing and what they were actually doing.

And that kind of conflict in any human being, in any people, makes for a predictable explosive violence. D.H. Lawrence said, "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." He was pointing at the consequences of the American split between perception of self and reality. The killer is someone who would rather take a life than have to resolve that conflict between self-perception and reality.

2008-12-06 | Stills99 (Boston, MA USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Dreaming Up America
This is a carefully constructed critique of American culture from the time of Columbus until the present. What we do today and how we think is driven by our background. We are a new country compared to much of the world. The factors that brought our forefathers to the Americas and the ease with which the European invasion expanded across the continent are major factors in who we are today.

This book is drawn from interviews conducted in preparation for a documentary produced in France. In part, the intent was to correct images of America that non-Americans draw from popular movies. Banks has edited that material after the documentary has been translated into several languages. The maturity of the ideas in the book shows the refinement of this period of reflection. However, it still comes across at times that Banks is talking to a different audience than his countrymen. Many readers will consider that an enhancement since we too seldom try to look at ourselves as others see us.

Early in the book, Banks introduces three factors (he calls them dreams) that he believes have strongly influenced us since colonial times, and are still a strong part of our national motivation. He terms those factors The City of Gold, The City on the Hill, and The Fountain of Youth. I urge readers to keep those factors in mind as they read and reread "Dreaming Up America." Other factors are important as well. Banks considers the Constitution and Declaration of Independence to be inspired documents whose full power hasn't yet been realized in American culture. Banks joins others in seeing racial influences at the root of every aspect of American society. Consider European treatment of the indigenous American people, slavery, and how our view of other people is influenced by whether they look like us or are different. Banks calls America "a country that was invented out of many parts" and thus we think and act differently than more homogeneous populations with longer histories.

These various factors are often in opposition to one another. Thus our society is often under tension. At times this is positive; it motivates us to move ahead. Far too often it leads to violence, both within ourselves and our actions toward others.

Not every reader will appreciate Banks' perspective. It would be unfortunate if that kept them from closely examining the points that he makes. Most Americans would benefit from reading this book twice through. It doesn't take long to read but the thought and discussions that it fosters endure much longer.

2008-11-09 (Missoula, Montana USA) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 4

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Probably should stick to fiction
Mr. Banks makes some valid observations IMO, but also wildly misses the mark on others. His insistence that events need to be seen through cinema eyeglasses places his observations in doubt. Certainly the education of the young by TV distorts ones concept of reality, so too by films. Perhaps the value in this book is an insight into the thoughts of too many fellow Americans. It is said that people get the government they deserve.

2008-09-14 (Seattle, WA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Cloudsplitter: A Novel

Description

A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, brilliantlyplotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart.But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.

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The cover of Russell Banks's mountain-sized novel Cloudsplitter features an actual photo of Owen Brown, the son of John Brown--the hero of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" whose terrorist band murdered proponents of slavery in Kansas and attacked Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 on what he considered direct orders from God, helping spark the Civil War.

A deeply researched but fictionalized Owen narrates this remarkably realistic and ambitious novel by the already distinguished author of The Sweet Hereafter. Owen is an atheist, but he is as haunted and dominated by his father, John Brown, as John was haunted by an angry God who demanded human sacrifice to stop the abomination of slavery. Cloudsplitter takes you along on John Brown's journey--as period-perfect as that of the Civil War deserter in Cold Mountain--from Brown's cabin facing the great Adirondack mountain (called "the Cloudsplitter" by the Indians) amid an abolitionist settlement the blacks there call "Timbuctoo," to the various perilous stops of the Underground Railroad spiriting slaves out of the South, and finally to the killings in Bloody Kansas and the Harpers Ferry revolt. We meet some great names--Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and a (fictional) lover of Nathaniel Hawthorne--but the vast book keeps a tight focus on the aged Owen's obsessive recollections of his pa's crusade and the emotional shackles John clamped on his own family.

Banks, a white author, has tackled the topic of race as impressively as Toni Morrison in novels such as Continental Drift. What makes Cloudsplitter a departure for him is its style and scope. He is noted as an exceptionally thorough chronicler of America today in rigorously detailed realist fiction (he championed Snow Falling on Cedars). Banks spent half a decade researching Cloudsplitter, and he renounces the conventional magic of his poetical prose style for a voice steeped in the King James Bible and the stately cadences of 19th-century political rhetoric. The tone is closer to Ken Burns's tragic, elegiac The Civil War than to the recent crazy-quilt modernist novel about John Brown, Raising Holy Hell.

A fan of Banks's more cut-to-the-chase, Hollywood-hot modern style may get impatient, but such readers can turn to, say, Gore Vidal's recently reissued Lincoln, which peeks into the Great Emancipator's head with a modern's cynical wit. Banks's narrator is poetical and witty at times--Owen notes, "The outrage felt by whites [over slavery] was mostly spent on stoking their own righteousness and warming themselves before its fire." Yet in the main, Banks writes in the "elaborately plainspoken" manner of the Browns, restricting himself to a sober style dictated by the historical subject.

Besides, John Brown's head resembles the stone tablets of Moses. You do not penetrate him, and you can't declare him mad or sane, good or evil. You read, struggling to locate the words emanating from some strange place between history, heaven, and hell.

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Customer Reviews

Excellent work of historical fiction
It's been a few months now since I read Cloudsplitter. There are a few simple criteria I use to judge the quality of a novel. One of them is how often you find yourself thinking about it after some time has passed. Some novels seem quite good while you are reading them, but a year later you see them on your bookshelf and can barely recall their content. Cloudsplitter is not one of those novels. It evokes an era in the history of American politics and moral and intellectual life that is absolutely alien to modern sensibilities. The ascetic life led by the main characters - a life tied to the land, the rigid adherence to moral principles come what may, the lost character of American liberty, the violence and chaos of that period of American history are all evoked with great skill by Mr. Banks. There is a great deal that can be said in praise of this novel, but the most succint thing I can say is that I would put it on the same pedastal with For Whom the Bell Tolls as an example of high quality historical fiction.

2010-05-23 | Reformed English Major (San Francisco, CA United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Audio Edition - Heart Pounding Read
This review refers to "Cloudsplitter" by Russell Banks - audio cassette edition read by George DelHoyo....

If you are looking for a fabulous Historical novel for a great read on a long trip, this audio edition will keep you enthralled for the entire 6 hours.

John Brown who's fierce and violent attempts to free all the slaves is the focus of this story set on the eve of the Civil War. His life and the building of his utter contempt for slave owners and catchers is told through the eyes and participation in events by his son Owen. From the early beginnings of the "Underground Railroad" system,Banks builds on the tense situations, to murderous raids on those who opposed Brown to the heart pounding climax of the raid at Harper's Ferry. He also delves deep into the psyche of Owen Brown and his battle of conscience.Descriptions of the old South, the countrysides, the secret moving of Slaves and subsequent events,puts the reader right into the story. My Walkman was practically attached to me, I couldn't find a place I wanted to pause it.

The reading by George DelHoyo is magnificent as he finds all the emotional turmoil of Owen, the wrath of the controversial John Brown, the wisdom of Frederick Douglas and the horrors surrounding the events. I have never heard a reading by him before,but will be looking for more.I likened his voice to Nick Nolte's. Raspy and masculine.

There are 4 tapes for a total of 6 hours with quality sound. My only reason for 4 stars(instead of 5) is that this tape is an abridgement.It is recorded by Audio Literature.

An enthralling historical fiction read for audio book fans
enjoy the read....Laurie

2009-10-11 | Laurie's Boomer Views (fountain valley, ca United States) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Cloudsplitter
My problem is that I was charged for the used book but NEVER RECEIVED IT. And I have sent emails to Amazon and Papa Leone but have not been able to talk with a person or get a personal email conversation going about never getting the book!

2009-03-02 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Not fooled for a minute
I had high hopes for this book, but I was quickly disappointed. Reading it is something like seeing Jack Nicholson playing Mark Twain in a one-man show: never at any time do you believe that the man onstage is anyone other than Jack Nicholson. Likewise, as I read, I saw only Banks at work, never Owen Brown. Banks has taken an interesting premise and used it as a pretext for his own literary pretensions. When I was younger, I would have eaten this novel up, but today I have very little tolerance for novelists who have nothing better to write about than the color of the leaves and every nuance of their feelings--especially when presenting them as the reminiscences of a genuinely interesting historical character.

2008-08-02 (San Diego) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 2

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a case of writerly vanity
It must take a great degree of writerly vanity and unself-conscious ego to produce a monologue of more than 700 pages. No, the monologist is not (perhaps at moments it is) the author himself. Nonetheless, the self-conscious literary babble attributed to Owen Brown, escaped from his father John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, requires a tolerance and patience greater than any I possess. Why do I tell this story, to whom do I tell this story, what parts of this story can you trust, blah, blah, blah, and so on and so forth, page after page after page. A good editor-- I suspect it would take courage as well as competence,here--could and should have cut this blather by a third.

Nor is the prose anything to write home about. It's workmanlike--as, I suppose, it must be because Owen Brown is not a particularly literary guy. But that's a problem for Banks to solve: if you can't write fancy and lyric because that's not consistent with the character, how do you keep the reader's interest? This is a wonderful text out of which to make a 90 minute movie.

2008-03-21 (hastings, new york) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 2

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