25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Art Imitates Art?, February 26, 2008
This review is from: The Reserve (Hardcover)
I've never read Russell Banks before, so I wasn't sure what to expect of THE RESERVE. The dust jacket copy and cover art reeled me in, so I bought it. This is apparently his homage to the American literary giants of yesteryear, notably Hemingway and Fitzgerald, with a distinctly modern point of view. It is certainly well-written, and the soapy plot is lively, and the contrast between the very rich and the working class at the height of the Depression is well-drawn. The two principal male characters are another study in contrasts, and they're interesting men. But the woman at the center of the story, the fabulously beautiful Vanessa Cole...well, much of your enjoyment of THE RESERVE will depend on your tolerance for her, and she is truly irritating, a charmless variation on any number of Hemingway and Fitzgerald characters. Still, the evocation of time and place is vivid, and there's a swoony romanticism to it all that's fun to read. Now I think I'll try some of his other, less derivative works.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I do not believe.............., August 23, 2008
This review is from: The Reserve (Hardcover)
..........that the man who wrote Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, and Continental Drift also wrote The Reserve. Into the second chapter, I had to double check that there weren't two authors named Russell Banks. The story is just plain odd - the characters have no depth, no nuance and their actions ring false (an understatement.) I was reminded of Fountainhead (I noticed another reviewer mention Ayn Rand, so I am not necessarily losing my mind)only without the philosophical underpinnings. Any.
I, too, skimmed, which I only do when the author has totally failed to engage me, but I want to give some benefit of the doubt without a huge time investment. By the end, I suspected I'd lost absolutely nothing. There is no THERE there.
I have been a Banks fan for twenty years and all I can say is, I am baffled.
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32 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Russell Banks' Gift Outright, February 19, 2008
This review is from: The Reserve (Hardcover)
Russell Banks' latest novel THE RESERVE, set in the Adirondacks in the second half of the 1930's, opens with a beautiful description of a beautiful woman, Vanessa Cole, the twenty-nine-year-old adopted daughter of a rich New York brain surgeon, Dr. Carter Cole, who is credited with the invention of the lobotomy, and his socialite wife Evelyn. Several times married, a participant in many affairs-- she is rumored to have slept with Ernest Hemingway-- impulsive, selfish, Vanessa seems on the surface to be a spoiled rich girl as her life intertwines with three other central characters. Jordan Groves is a handsome man's man, an artist-- whom I believe Mr. Banks said he may have modeled in part after Rockwell Kent-- also a pilot, with leftist political leanings and a womanizer and adulterer although he only sleeps with women one time and lets them seduce him; hence, he has no guilt. Jordan is married to Alicia, his long-suffering and pretty wife and the mother of his two sons, whom he has insisted on naming after animals he likes, Bear and Wolf. Finally, Hubert St. Germain is a competent, muscular guide for the rich summer vacationers, in his 30's, one of the locals-- he voted for Herbert Hoover-- who lives alone in a cabin, having lost his wife in an accident. These four characters find themselves in a quagmire that they have gotten themselves into by their own actions.
In prose as transparent as the Adirondack lake Jordan Groves sets his biplane down in, Mr. Russell creates a story in the noir tradition that in the hands of a lesser skilled writer would have been a potboiler. The plot has some unexpected twists and turns although some of the things that happen to these characters ultimately are unavoidable. Like other Banks characters, as the author himself has described, as the plot progresses, there are fewer and fewer things possible for them and they cannot survive. Even though these four individuals commit bad acts, they in the end are not villains but rather engaging sympathetic characters-- in a word, all too human.
The novel has an authentic feel to it and is full of details from the 1930's: Lucky Strike cigarettes, GONE WITH THE WIND, the dirigible, Packards. There are references to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the singer Jimmy Rogers, and John Dos Passos who once at a party allegedly made a drunken pass at Alicia.
THE RESERVE is about class: the lives of the idle rich are contrasted with the locals, the victims of the Great Depression, who are little more than servants of the vacationers who employ them. Jordan Groves is in many ways caught between classes. He moves in the circles of the Coles but is more comfortable drinking beer with the local workers. Hubert, however, is the most admirable character in the novel. He values honesty and understands the value of decent work. It is no coincidence that Mr. Banks ends this novel with the thoughts of Hubert. This bleak novel is also about the loneliness that each individual feels, that can be filled, if only briefly, by giving love to someone else-- and finally about duty. Alicia knows what she will do with the rest of her days. "She will raise her sons, and when they become men she wil cling to them and want to ask constantly of them if they love her, but she will hold her tongue. Instead, over and over she will ask herself, and now and again will dare to ask her sons, if she did badly by them, and they will sigh and reassure her one more time that she did not do badly by them and they are grateful."
Ideas like these so well-written are why we read fiction. Russell Banks is one of our best writers.
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