“I think writing saved my life. I was so self-destructive, so angry and turbulent, that I don’t think I could have become a useful citizen in any other way.”
But it was not until the publication of his eighth book, Continental Drift, in 1985, that Banks first achieved critical success. The novel is the story of Bob Dubois, a burned-out oil-burner repairman from New Hampshire struggling to escape mediocrity, and Vanise Dorsinville, a refugee struggling to escape Haiti for the promised land of America, and the tragedy that ensues when they become involved in each other’s destiny. The novel’s title refers to the theory that the earth’s continents were once a united land mass that broke up and continues to drift slowly apart. Banks, however, is referring to demographic, not geologic, drifting, as people all over the world flee their homes in search of new lives. He is also describing the drift that occurs between human hearts, leaving an unbridgeable gap between husbands and wives, families and friends.
“I want to feel I have my arm around a shoulder of this reader and I’m explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to this person that I’ve stopped, like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ ”
In order to capture a narrative voice capable of encompassing the disparate worlds of blue-collar New England and Caribbean voodoo, Banks invokes the Haitian loa, or mouth-man, the spirit of the dead that speaks through the mouth of the living, to help tell the story. “I’m really interested in reinventing the narrator. It’s a convention that went out the window in the twentieth century. I want to feel I have my arm around a shoulder of this reader and I’m explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to this person that I’ve stopped, like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ I’m like the ancient mariner stopping the wedding guest in his rush to tell this wonder to him. And I want to have that sense of intimacy, a face-to-face, arm-around-the-shoulder contact.” Continental Drift, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the John Dos Passos Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. James Atlas, writing in Atlantic Monthly, hailed the book as “a great American novel … a lesson in history… It is the most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America.”
Writing also helped Banks come to terms with his past. Though he made peace with his father before the older man’s death in 1979, the theme of troubled father-son relationships continues to play a large role in Banks’s novels. In Affliction, he explores the terrible legacy that an alcoholic and abusive father, Wade Whitehouse, has upon his son. “Writing Affliction, and dealing with Wade Whitehouse, gave me a kind of mercy and certainly forgiveness and understanding of my father that if I had just turned my back on him and walked away and acted bruised and hurt the rest of my life, I never would have obtained.”
In The Sweet Hereafter, Banks again explores the world of troubled blue-collar families. The novel takes as its central event the fatal crash of a school bus and the devastating effect it has on a small town’s emotional life. Banks was initially inspired by a newspaper clipping of a similar crash, as well as the tragic early death of his younger brother. The freight train his seventeen-year-old brother hopped onto was caught in a mudslide in Santa Barbara. “It was an inexplicable event. It was a mystery, finally.” The novel wrestles with issues of blame and causation in cases of accidents.
Rule of the Bone returns to the author’s twin obsession with Jamaica and dysfunctional American families. The novel tells the story of a teenage misfit’s flight from an unhappy home in an upstate New York trailer park and the series of adventures he embarks upon until his final redemption in Jamaica. Banks borrows from Huckleberry Finn in order to create a contemporary American odyssey of race relations and alienation of youth.
“[In Rule of the Bone], Banks borrows from Huckleberry Finn in order to create a contemporary American odyssey of race relations and alienation of youth.”
Buoyed by the success of these novels, as well as the film adaptations of The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, Banks retired from teaching and gave up his professorship at Princeton. “A funny thing happened when I quit Princeton,” he recalled in The Irish Times. “My attention shifted. I immediately forgot opinions I had on things like deconstruction. And I started noticing things like: ‘Why is the television set on in my neighbor’s house at five in the morning? Is that woman really unhappy? Or has the old man got drunk again and passed out?’ I sat in on a murder trial in the next town. I read the local paper instead of the TLS.”
Banks and his fourth wife, poet Chase Twichell, bought a second home in Keene, New York, not far from the abolitionist John Brown’s old farm. The move inspired his thirteenth novel, Cloudsplitter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Seven years in the making, Cloudsplitter is the story of the firebrand John Brown and the events leading to his disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry, as told through the eyes of his son, Owen. Banks began thinking about his legendary neighbor and realized John Brown’s story has all the themes “I’ve been concerned with, some would say obsessed with, for twenty years — the relationships between parents and children, particularly fathers and sons, and the interconnections between politics and religion and race.”
The Darling (selected by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2004), is set in late twentieth-century Liberia. The work spans topics of civil and political upheaval, and strained loyalties to country and family.
His latest novel, The Reserve, is a national bestseller. Set in the rugged beauty of the Adirondacks, The Reserve explores the intersections of class, politics, art, love, and madness that occur when two powerful personalities come together on the eve of the Second World War.
The father of four daughters, Banks continues to write in a converted sugar shack just down the road from John Brown’s grave.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
NOTES
* These comprise the sequences and subjects of the first seven chapters of The Plumber’s Apprentice, the novel from which “Return and Depart” is drawn. It also marks one of the few places in the book where the narrator self-conciously becomes “the author.”
* The Latin version of Tobit adds that Tobias and Sarah defeated the demon by successfully remaining chaste for the first three nights of their marriage, which was the beggining of the later custom “Tobias’s Nights.” In fact, right down to the nineteenth century in parts of France, Germany, and the Balkans, it was customary to follow the example of Tobias and Sarah, and in medieval France, husbands were often permitted to pay a fee to the Church for a license to disregard the rule.
* Oddly, when asked which of his many construction jobs had given him the most personal satisfaction, Hamilton replied, “The Temple of Jerusalem,” which remark, at the time, was interpreted by the interrogator as meaning that none of his many jobs had given him personal satisfaction.