512
PARTISAN
I~£VIEW
often the same character, a man about forty, depressed, emotionally
disabled, gazing back with fatal clarity at the early twists and turns which
made his life whatever it became: a father's sudden act of violence, a
mother's abandonment of the family, a husband's chronic infidelity, a
teenage boy's numb acquiescence to disaster.
One story, "Great Falls," begins: "This is not a happy story. I warn
you." But as the suffocating details pile up grimly, Ford is preparing us
for a bold rhetorical leap. His stories often end in large unanswerable
questions that point to some hollowness, some huge inevitability that
underlies human relationships, "some coldness in us all, some helplessness
that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain." These
rhetorical gestures are just what any sensible editor would urge the writer
to eliminate, but their effect can be exhilarating, heartbreaking. They
echo with a bottomless sadness, yet give a larger, almost cosmic dignity
to the disappointments of routinely stunted, marginal lives.
Russell Banks's novels, with their melodramatic intensity and strong
narrative drive, show nothing of Carver's tight-lipped, slangy style. But
Carver's example may have liberated Banks to deal directly with his own
\
blue-collar background. Banks began as a metafictional writer who
published his first stories with the experimental Fiction Collective. But in
recent large books like
Continental Drift
(1985) and
A.f!7.iction
(1989), he
shifts to a powerful realism that centers, as Carver's work does, on the
self-destructiveness of the blue-collar male - "lonely, poor, depressed, al–
coholic and violent" - the dreamy man-child who never thinks things
through, the perfect loser with a genius for the wrong choice, who's
sure that "you can't escape certain awful things in life," whose every at–
tempt to escape is bound to make things worse - to leave his children
scarred, his wife bitter, and his own life in shambles. These are people
"whose lives ... were ordinary and, despite the ordinariness, gave them
constant trouble."
Yet Banks is also a writer in reaction against the kind of narrow–
gauge minimalism that Carver's style unwittingly encouraged but scarcely
exemplified. Like the wide-ranging Robert Stone and Don DeLillo
(whose fix on the violent blue-collar male is part of his portrait of Lee
Harvey Oswald in
Libra)
Banks is willing to harness his acute perceptions
about people to a thriller plot, with clements of murder, suicide, and
suspense.
In
doing so he gives his fatal vision a headlong momentum and
connects individual lives to a larger social world, especially in
COlltil1ental
Drift.
(This book, with its large metaphorical title and topical Haitian
counterplot, reminds us not of the minimalist side of Hemingway but of
the Caribbean adventurers of
To Have and Have Not.)
In
the end Banks, like the Hemingway of the 1930s, risks sentimen–
talizing his loser into the "common man," a figure of some special de-
