Banks gives cheese when we've come to expect meat - Russell Banks book review

THE RESERVE

Russell Banks

Bloomsbury, £14

RUSSELL Banks' new novel bears less resemblance to his gritty, visionary epics, such as the 1985 masterpiece, Continental Drift, than to a melodramatic 1940s B movie. Its two main characters are a wealthy socialite and a famous artist, who take their privileges for granted and lead profligate, self-dramatising lives.

The plot, which takes place in the Adirondacks in the summer of 1936, moves not with the swift, sharklike momentum of his best fiction, but in a hokey, herky-jerky fashion that never lets the reader forget that Banks is pulling the characters' strings.

How did things go so wrong? Perhaps part of the problem stems from the patched-together genesis of this novel. Banks writes that the book's hero, Jordan Groves, was "based loosely" on "the flamboyant leftist artist, Rockwell Kent", and that his heroine, the dangerously troubled Vanessa Cole, evolved from his interest in Hemingway's affair with a socially prominent and emotionally unstable woman who became "the model for the darkly vengeful wife" in The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber.

Cole is a parody of the crazy femme fatale, a woman so beautiful, Banks would have us believe, that men are willing to overlook her obvious mental illness. More mad than madcap, she is prone to "dangerous, erratic behaviour and wild exaggerations and outright lies", and was once arrested with a gun, apparently stalking one of her ex-husbands.

Jordan is an equally silly and stereotyped character: a dashing womaniser who also happens to be a famous artist and a wartime pilot. He's a left-wing man of the people who hangs out with the rich and famous; an adventurer who always returns from his wanderings to obscure corners of the globe.

The only character who actually comes across as a plausible human being is Hubert St Germain, a local Adirondack guide who works as a caretaker at Vanessa's family's house, and who has been having an affair with Jordan's disaffected wife, Alicia.

Like many of Banks' most memorable characters, Hubert is a man who has been down on his luck and making do for many years. Whatever sympathy the reader might feel for him – the honourable, working-class rube, corrupted by two upper-class narcissists – isn't enough to redeem this cheesy, histrionic novel, unworthy of a writer with as many gifts as Russell Banks.