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The Darling by Russell Banks HarperCollins, 2004 392 pp., $25.95 |
Over the past four decades, Russell Banks has crafted a formidable body of work. His novels are regularly nominated for major prizes, and his 1998 magnum opus, Cloudsplitter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the State Author of New York from 2004 to 2006.
And yet, Banks hasn't achieved celebrity commensurate with his gifts. He taught creative writing at Princeton for many years but doesn't share the instant recognition enjoyed by his colleagues there, Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates. Indeed, he may be best known for the critically acclaimed films based on his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction.
Given the profound moral depths of his fiction, Banks deserves a wider audience. He is an unapologetic realist who has movingly portrayed the failures of modern American life: addiction, abuse, infidelity, racism, and economic hardship, as well as the violence such failures often provoke. His work has focused predominantly on the working poor of New England, among whom he grew up and about whom he insists on being neither sentimental nor sensational. He doesn't shy from abstract questions of right and wrong, but he addresses them with a subtle hand, avoiding the temptation to grow strident or pedantic.
Key to this presentation is his ability to elicit from readers an emotional investment in the lives of people who are not terribly sympathetic. In Affliction, for example, the protagonist is a man few of us would want to spend time with in the real world. Hot-tempered, impulsive, driven by a sense of being wronged by his father, his ex-wife, his community, Wade Whitehouse blindly attempts to set things right by force. Wade is at once frightening and comprehensible, a dangerous stranger and an all-too-familiar figure, as close as the mirror on the wall. We cry out in disappointment as his poor decisions mount and spin out of control. Banks does not recount his story with indifference or voyeuristic satisfaction. Rather, he leaves his readers with a clear sense of tragedy, set against an implied backdrop of profound moral depth.
In Cloudsplitter, Banks tells the story of the radical abolitionist John Brown from the perspective of Brown's son, Owen. Though a historical novel, Cloudsplitter is driven by the same sort of conflicts that drive Banks' stories of contemporary life—here, above all, the difficult relation between abusive fathers and their sons, as well as racial injustice and the use of violence to correct it. Through the eyes of Owen Brown, we are brought close to his father, a man who zealously embraced his divine calling to liberate slaves and expected his family unquestioningly to do the same. In the end, this zeal led the Browns to take up arms and brutally slay those who supported slavery. One of the central triumphs of this novel is that Banks retains John Brown's mystical fanaticism while making us as eager as Owen to understand him.
Banks' latest novel, The Darling, takes us to Liberia, a republic that originated through the efforts of the American Colonization Society, which began to settle freed American slaves there in 1822. Since then the United States has helped the country battle its fiscal and political troubles with varying degrees of business investment, financial aid, and clandestine interference.
The descendants of the original freedmen, called Americo-Liberians, maintained political dominance over native Africans from the late 19th century until 1980, when the country experienced its first military coup, at the hands of Samuel Doe. The next, led by Charles Taylor in 1989, plunged Liberia into years of inter-tribal conflict marked by increasingly horrific violence and intimidation. Boys were recruited into competing armies, and whole villages of women and children were systematically raped, tortured, and mutilated. The fighting continued until August of 2003, when Taylor was forced into exile; he has since been indicted for war crimes associated with rebels he aided in neighboring Sierra Leone.
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