Customer Reviews

The Life I Lead

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Was it Flannery O'Conner who said "nothing human is alien to me?" In seeking to demystify (yet not forgive) pedophilia, Banner beautifully fulfills this most challenging of the fiction writer's credo. It took no small about of courage to write this novel. I applaud the writer and the publisher and find myself perhaps a bit sadder but also richer for having read Keith Banner's dramatic exploration.

Unlike most other novels about down-n-out types, Keith Banner's The Life I Lead does not rely on gritty, hard-edged prose to brag about its working class depictions. The prose is simple, with an everyday modesty, and yet the cumulative effect is a stunning poetry. I'm already reading this book a second time to try to figure out how Banner creates such sympathetic characters with such few words, and without pulling any punches about their weaknesses. The reader aches in sympathy for the pedophilic main character. It's easy to create reader outrage (A.M. Homes, B.E. Ellis, for example). Trying NOT to shock or outrage might be this novel's biggest accomplisment. In some ways, in its unwavering insight but lack of mockery, the novel reminds me of Robert Duvall's similar accomplishment in The Apostle.

Switching back and forth between 1998 and 1972, and between multiple points of view, Keith Banner constructs a quest for salvation through love that is utterly original. The plot twists, flashbacks, and variations on the themes of love, memory, guilt, and redemption are tours de force. But the characters are what burrow into your brain--Indiana trailer trash who are fully human, and whose perversions induce sympathy, not revulsion. Who'd a thunk this could be done to such a tee, especially with langauge that is unassuming but poetic at the same time? Bravo, Banner!

I do not know if Mr Banner's novel will eventually emerge as one of the finest works of fiction in the late 20th century. But it should. Its delights are in its details: no writer I know wields such an incredibly perceptive eye over American culture; Mr Banner shows an extraordinary, almost scary knowledge of all the wonderful and sad little things that make up the average American's everyday life. The Life I Lead is a great painting that's never been painted; a perfect film that's never been shot; a poem not yet set down. It captures so much that has yet to be properly articulated in American art, I can only hope that it someday receives the recognition it deserves.

Uncompromising, powerful, humane. (And surprisingly funny too!

Keith Banner has done an enviable job with his debut novel. Written in staccato thoughts of Dave Brewer, one experiences this man's own undoing. If you are looking for an unusual and thoroughly engaging read, The Life I Lead is a godsend. After reading this novel, it was easy to understand why the Kenyon Review chose Banner as one of the nation's emerging new writers.

Anyone looking for a sicko novel about a pervert should look elsewhere. Keith Banner has written a deeply perceptive novel that explores the baffling question of why a seemingly good man can be a pedophile. His characters are so vivid I found myself forgetting they didn't exist beyond the page. But the best reason for reading this book might be Banner's writing. The man can tell a tale, and he does it with a bone-edged poetry that at times had me catching my breath.

Most painfully exquisite writing since Graham Swift's WATERLAND

This is a wonderful book. It deals with a subject that in less intelligent and thoughtful hands might have become prurient or even pornographic, opening up the mind and heart of a deeply-conflicted man to the reader. If one of the jobs of fiction is to help us understand the other as individual and equal, and surely it is, then this novel does a fantastic job. It's moving, tender, disturbing and surprisingly comic, and almost as good as Banner's exemplary collection of stories, The Smallest People Alive.

Banner is a tough case because he's such a good writer in so many ways and yet entering the closed world of his writing can be depressing and claustrophobic. He is brilliant at distributing class markers so that you might swear you have been living among these Indiana losers for generations--ever page, nearly every paragraph has one or two scintillating details.` In a shed, eating ice cream with a cute young boy, David Brewer says, "We ate the ice cream first, as soon as I unlocked the plywood door, and inside it stank of the deodorizer put into the gas to make sure if there's leaks you can smell it 'cause natural gas alone doesn't have a scent." His syntax alone can make you queasy, but when he gets to the drawnout narration of how deep a hole Brewer is going to dig himself into with his boy obsession, it's hard to take, but just try to look away from the tragedy on the horizon, that will be your big challenge.

As others have noted, the narrators all sound pretty much alike, as though Anderson (Indiana) were occupied solely by a slow-moving tribe of damaged and therefore dangerous troglodytes. I'm not sure whether a certain amount of variety would have been better for the book, but obviously Keith Banner is a man with a vision and in such cases it's wiser to keep out of the way and just duck when such a writer is at the controls. But Troy (who as a teen molested little David when the latter was a boy, and who is now looking after David's abusive dad in a nursing home for some reason) writes so much like David that eventually one comes to feel that just as there's a cycle of abuse, there's a cycle of bad naturalism that comes when one has been abused as a boy by a trusted older relative or babysitter.