Customer Reviews

The Reserve

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

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.

..........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.

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.

I've read everything by this prolific and profound master of written language and I have difficulty understanding how or why he wrote this book. Neither the characters or the plot is compelling- I found myself skimming the book towards the end. I just hope that you try any one of Russell Banks other books. They are ALL better than this one.

I am a huge Russell Banks fan and I am begging you. If you have never read Russell Banks, please, please choose a different book. Try Affliction or The Sweet Hereafter or Continental Drift or Cloudsplitter. This book is an embarrassment. You won't believe any of the pathetically one dimensional characters or the cheesy implausible plot. I suspect Banks is longing for another movie deal because right from the blatantly cinematic first scene, you can tell he's constructing more of a made-for-tv screen play than a serious novel. And the dialogue ... don't get me started. It's like he hired out the dialogue to Jacqueline Suzanne.
But there is potential here. I would love to see him rewrite it as an hilarious satire but alas, satire is not a Banks metier.

Banks' novel The Reserve is set in the Adirondacks of the 1930s. Much is accurate description of the area and its people, especially the interactions between the wealthy summer people, their servants and guides, and the bohemians who also sometimes live in these northern woods. In many ways, the Adirondacks have not changed since the 1930s. The Adirondack Park of New York State is a mix of private and public land, and is larger than the state of Massachusetts. Vast stretches of the park are still wilderness or reverting to wilderness after years of half-hearted logging and mining. There are still vast estates with "camps," actually rustic mansions, where upper-class families from New York City and Boston spend the month of August. The Reserve, in the novel called the Tamarack Club, is actually the Ausable Club in Saint Huberts near Lake Placid, Upper and Lower Tamarack Lakes are Upper and Lower Ausable Lakes, the Tamarack River of the novel is the Ausable River, Goliath Mountain is Giant Mountain, and so on. Some features, such as the Great Range, are given their true names. The Ausable Club is in the heart of the High Peaks of the Adirondacks and is certainly one of the finest pieces of private property in the eastern U.S. The Ausable Club kindly allows non-member hikers to walk along its paths to access some of the High Peaks, so I am familiar with it. By the way, the cover picture is not of the Ausable Lakes. This looks to be some more dramatic lake in the Rockies.

As an addition to the body of Adirondack literature, which includes for example Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Banks' novel is a failure. The plot is mostly incoherent and to the extent that it is coherent it is implausible in the extreme. It is a mix of crimes and misdemeanors including adultery, kidnapping, maybe murder, insanity, and aiding and abetting all of the above. I did not get a full sense of the beauty and mystery of the Adirondack High Peak region. The characters, one main one Jordan Groves is based very loosely on Rockwell Kent, are weird, deeply troubled, unhappy, and vaguely criminal in a disorganized sort of way. These are not the sort of people I would enjoy spending time with or that I even found to be very interesting. Banks does manage to tell a story that interweaves the lives of the wealthy club members, the Adirondack guides, and the bohemians, but this is not enough to save this novel. If you are looking for something to read try Rockwell Kent's N by E. It is a wonderful book, but not about the Adirondacks.

Wow, is this book a poor introduction to Russell Banks. I've never read anything by him before, though I tried in vain several times to borrow Cloudsplitter from my local library (it was always out on loan.) I had heard that Banks was a master novelist, a major literary figure of our time, in the same pantheon as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Well, if Hemingway had written scripts for Ed Wood and Fitzgerald for Carmen Miranda, I could believe that to be so.

This book is so trite, the dialogue so stilted, and the adjectives at once incredibly numerous and entirely predictable, that the result is a feeling not unlike eating three Big Macs. The main characters are cut from stock: a ca-raaaazy socialite whose mama and papa are filthy rich; a predictably handsome, womanizing, left-leaning, "square-handed and broad-shouldered" artist who flies biplanes for fun; and a backwoodsman who's as honest as he is stupid. Oh, and he's handsome, too, and virile as all get out. If this sounds like the makings of a good novel, then push aside the Harlequin Romances and buy this book. If, however, you expect more from a writer with the reputation of Banks, skip this.

Russell Banks can be a terrific writer but this his latest novel is a disappointment. The setting and period details never seem to bring the story to life, the characters are one dimensional, and the plot is just silly and not particularly engrossing. A very minor effort in comparison to previous titles like Continental Drift or Affliction. My only question upon finishing it was why Banks' publisher or agent didn't encourage him to write this under a pseudonym.

I admire Russell Banks as an author. Been a fan since Searching for Survivors when Banks was a member of the now forgotten Fiction Collective, a "new writing" group in the late 70s.

While his craft has deepened over the years, this book is a poor reflection of it.

We end up caring little for Jordan, Vanessa, Hubert or Alicia. And the plot is just too unbelievable in the end.

I expected more and received less, far less, then I deserved as a reader. Skip this one.It disappoints.

Call it a misfire. It is a low point in the career of a fine writer.

Russell Banks is an important American novelist. He's written a great novel, Affliction, and Cloudsplitter is close to it. Others, such as Continental Drift and The Sweet Hereafter, are definitely worthy of respect. When he's good, which he often is, Banks has a Dreiser-like ability make you care deeply for people in the grip of social forces beyond their control. Many of Banks' stories explore what happens to characters trapped in a difficult situation not of their making. They have to figure out the right thing to do, and then figure out if they're willing to do it.

The Reserve takes place during the summer of 1936 in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. The locals have lost the farms and forestry jobs that allowed them to subsist on the edge of this pristine wilderness. Now they're servants to the summer people, who come up to the Reserve, their own private wilderness, and commune with nature from the porches of their luxury cabins. This turn of events is personified by Hubert St. Germain, a proud wilderness guide who's devolved into a hired hand for the Coles, a wealthy family in the Reserve. Dr. Cole is a psychiatrist who may have had a hand in perfecting the frontal lobotomy. His wife exists in a misty world of alcohol and depression. Their adopted daughter Vanessa, bored, troubled, promiscuous, is looking for anything or anyone that can take her on a quick trip out of herself.

Vanessa's longings are answered when the painter Jordan Groves swoops down in his seaplane onto the private lake by the Coles' cabin. Jordan is artist as swashbuckler. Although he's wealthy and successful, Jordan's a dedicated Communist who owns his own plane and leaves beautiful women churning in his backwash. He studied art under Robert Henri, a leader of the school that stripped sentimentality out of American painting. He knows Hemingway and Dos Passos, and has adventured to the world's remote places and returned to write books about it.

The plot pushes forward at a breathless pace. We understand right away that Jordan and Vanessa are fated for each other, and that their affair will leave gashes and bruises. Hubert St. Germain gets involved with Jordan's wife, Alicia. Vanessa, who may or may not be certifiable, most certainly leaves a swath of destruction wherever she goes. Her anger may be attributable to something her father did to her as a child - or she may have made the whole thing up.

This story takes place at a complex cultural moment. Many once durable constructs are breaking down, such as the code of the rugged individual, the idea of style as a carapace over character, exemplified by Bogart and Hemingway, the notion of character as fixed and immutable. As belief in individual efficacy erodes under the twin pressures of worldwide economic depression and the rise of fascism, people are groping for new ways to define themselves. Jordan's friends are urging him to come to Spain to fight the fascists. Hubert feels hollow because he's gone from living off the land to schlepping groceries into rich people's cottages. Vanessa's many love affairs are desperate attempts to plug into something bigger and more permanent than her small self - not unlike the people in crowds roaring adoration for Hitler and Mussolini. Jordan's wife Alicia realizes that her affair with Hubert has destroyed the illusions that made her marriage to Jordan possible without replacing them with anything tenable she can grab on to. This sense of being unable to get back to what you had, of being forced to find a new way forward, pervades the historical moment and the lives of the main characters.

Banks is ultimately exploring the wilderness of modern consciousness. He's at the headwaters, the moment in our history when we turned toward collectivism, existentialism, moral relativism. His characters are all struggling to figure out who they really are. They wonder if who they are can ever be expressed to somebody else. If it can, how in the world do we express it? It's the sensitive probing of these questions, more than the lurid particulars of lust among the tamaracks, that give The Reserve its intellectual and moral heft, and make it a worthy addition to the Banks canon.