Far From Brooklyn

Russell Banks is brutal. There is a brutality to his writing, a pitilessness to his characterizations.

He’s always willing “to go there,” if that’s where the story leads, and generally, in his work, it does:

• The pathetic protagonist of “Continental Drift,” the novel that made his name back in the mid 1980s, is a furnace repairman in New Hampshire who strikes out for Florida, where, of course, there is very little need for furnace repair.
• In “Sarah Cole,” a man beds a woman out of curiosity, simply because she is exceptionally ugly.
• “Rule of the Bone,” Banks’ version of a coming-of-age novel is a pitiless representation of people shut out from society, their options and futures capped at the outset.

So when I read a dyspeptic review of his new book, “Foregone,” I wasn’t surprised that the reviewer might recoil from Banks’ imagined characters. It had the sound of a book of the 1970s, the tale of a willful artist and the women (and others) he misused on his way “up.” Since I came of age reading some of those (possibly/definitely) misogynistic, patrio-centric novels of the 1970s, I thought, “I might like that!”

But no. The willful artist in question, Leonard Fife, is on his literal deathbed, his urine trickling through a catheter into a collection bag tended to by his Haitian nurse, his massive drug regimen causing him to suffer sudden sweats, bursts of nausea, and bouts of confusion. Nevertheless, he has the (not credible) wherewithal to narrate his life story to a gathering of filmmakers, including a protege or two, and the story, at least the first third or so, is relentlessly mean-spirited. I just didn’t feel like going on–I’d heard enough about catheters and abandoned wives, and Fife was just not intrinsically interesting enough to me to wade along for the length of the book.

This was definitely a case where an author was willing to look unblinkingly at something but (this) reader was not.

Incidentally, a quick glance at Banks’ bio on wikipedia makes evident that “Foregone” closely mirrors his own life – wives and children abandoned in his wake, etc. That makes some sense – it might explain why this book feels so undigested.

I still think Banks is a brilliant and somewhat underappreciated novelist, though.

[Postscript: RIP Russell Banks, March 28, 1940 – January 8, 2023]

Photo credit: Podzo de Borgo, Wikimedia Commons