IT IS 1936, AND WE ARE AT A PARTY at a luxurious camp on a vast private reserve in the Adirondacks. As the sun begins to dip behind the mountain range that dominates the horizon, a beautiful young woman detaches herself from her elders and wal
ks barefoot to the shore of the lake.
Suddenly a seaplane appears in the air and all look on, stunned, as it lands on the surface of the water. Such a thing has never occurred before, and furthermore is taboo under the largely unspoken laws of the reserve. A dashing aviator – we will discover he is a famous artist, a radical, a free spirit – steps out of the plane and locks eyes with the glamorous yet troubled young woman. You can picture this on the movie screen: all golden light, exquisite set design and dazzling wardrobe, starring perhaps Keira Knightley.
Russell Banks's new novel begins this way, and the scene exemplifies both its strengths and its weaknesses – it is not necessarily evident which is which. Banks has written a novel in which almost all the constituent aspects are larger than life. The major parts are all star turns, the setting is outrageously dramatic, the time frame is heavy with portent and the story is seemingly all climax.
Banks has lived for years in the Adirondacks and has severely mixed feelings about its private reserves, which protect nature but subordinate the land and its people to the pleasures of the rich; and he is fascinated by the artist Rockwell Kent (1882-1971). Kent was complex and, indeed, rather dashing – among other things he wrote and illustrated books about his sometimes hazardous travels to far-flung and daunting places (Alaska, Greenland, Tierra del Fuego), and his increasingly radical views both got him into trouble during the McCarthy years and garnered him the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967.
Banks uses elements of Kent's life and personality, but makes his character, Jordan Groves, even more of a Hemingway hero – an impetuous womaniser drawn to contradictions: luxury and social justice, bright lights and wilderness.
His heroine, Vanessa Cole, the adopted daughter of a wealthy physician, has a history of scandalous liaisons and erratic behaviour. As any reader of pulps could guess, she and Groves are immediately and fatally attracted to each other. The night of their meeting, he takes her up in his plane to watch the Independence Day fireworks and dares her to fly it herself.
In the careless way Hemingway heroes have of demonstrating affection, however, he abandons her in the woods to walk home by herself in the dark. While that is going on, her father suffers a fatal heart attack back at the camp. The event, when she learns of it, dislodges most of the pins holding together her remaining tissue of emotional stability. And then we're off to the races. Huge, operatic scenes unfurl, involving sex, death, money and art; earth, water, fire and air.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss the book's plot past the halfway point without engaging in spoilers. Suffice it to say that the scenes are as outsize as the characters, as cinematic as the establishing set piece and as plausible as a 1936 screen adaptation of Euripides' Electra, starring Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart.
While the reader might not anticipate all the twists of the plot before they occur, the most outrageous possibility to dance speculatively in his mind at any given point in the story is likely to find fulfilment before long.
Meanwhile, interspersed between the chapters are two or three-page narrative fragments, set in italics, which eventually reveal themselves to be flash-forwards to Jordan's and Vanessa's future lives, amid the global turmoil of the late 1930s. They do not assist in toning down the melodrama.
One of the main problems is the way in which Hemingway's influence dulls description to the level of a mail order catalogue: "The pilot was a large man, in his early 40s, tall and broad, with big, square hands, and moved with the grace of a man who liked the feel and appearance of his own body, although he did not seem to be vain."
All of this is surprising coming from Banks, author of Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, a writer whose work tends to be unsparing and even harsh in its lyrical honesty. In The Reserve he has penned a ripping yarn, which seems equally suited to Hollywood, the book clubs and the talk shows. It is hard to begrudge him a bountiful payday.
The full article contains 771 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
