Russell Banks - Outer Banks

That’s not all he is, however, and we are grateful for that. For these are not merely apprentice works. In a carefully roundabout way, Banks is edging up on the themes that will probably preoccupy him as a writer of fiction for the rest of his life. Family Life is aptly titled. Perhaps the only way he could contend with and come to an understanding of the pain and confusion of his childhood was by forcing its materials through the grid of fable. Later, having reconciled with his parents, he’ll no longer need that grid and will write Rule of the Bone , also about family life, but told from the point of view of the abandoned child. Hamilton Stark , for all its formal elaborations, is an exploration of the mysterious charisma that surrounds domestic violence and the godlike power held by fathers over their children. We will see Banks explore these themes further in the late 1980s in his novels Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter . And The Relation of My Imprisonment , ostensibly a parody of the allegorical accounts of spiritual testing written by John Bunyan and seventeenth-century New England puritan divines for the voyeuristic delectation of their religious brethren, is as much about the theme of redemption through suffering as novels Banks will write in his late-middle age, Cloudsplitter and The Darling .

It’s interesting, as well as anxiety-producing, that with each novel or collection of short stories that he publishes, the young Russell Banks comes ever more closely to resemble me. It has become increasingly difficult for me to stay ahead of him. It’s hard to find a genre or narrative mode that he hasn’t already turned to, to come up with a theme or conflict or character that he hasn’t found first, or to generate a plot that he hasn’t thought of yet. I don’t know what he’ll write next, but it scares me to think that I may end up chasing him , and he may end up writing an introduction to my early novels. Or worse, to my late novels.

1.

To go back to the beginning would be fruitless, timewasting, pretentious. It’s much more productive, faster and more sincere to commence in medias res with the king squealing angrily, the princes, all three of them, lolling through their extended adolescences, the queen quietly comforting herself in her chambers, and the several secondary characters gathered together in small groups scattered variously about the palace — the Green Man (so-called), the Loon, the Twit, Genghis, etc., etc.

This, then, is not unlike the opening scene of a favorite opera, The Trojans, by Hector Berlioz (after The Aeneid, by Virgil), part 1, “The Sacking of Troy.” That is, one thinks of that narrator, and of Cassandra, Coroebus, Andromache, Astyanax, Aeneas, Priam, Hecuba, Panthus, Helenus, Ascanius, Polyxena, Hector’s Ghost, and others (in order of appearance), and one thinks of Troy or Carthage or of a castle-like citadel inside a ravaged city, of city walls and a vast plain beyond, and one recalls that particular narrative line and obtains thereby a pretty fair idea of how it all begins.

2.

This is intended, actually, to be a family story, after the Greeks. But after Thomas Wolfe, too. And Gertrude Stein. Certain late nineteenth-century Russian novelists. William Faulkner. Marcel Proust. Thomas Hardy. Henry James. D. H. Lawrence. New England poets of the mid-twentieth century. André Gide. The Scandinavian playwrights. Truman Capote. Wright Morris. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Vladimir Nabokov. John Milton. Philip Roth. George Bernard Shaw. Washington Irving. James Agee and Walker Evans. Charles Dickens. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sigmund Freud. Eudora Welty. William Burroughs, Jr. Laurence Sterne. Thorstein Veblen. William Carlos Williams. Edna Ferber. The Grimm Brothers. William Saroyan. Anton Chekhov. William of Occam. James Branch Cabell. John Steinbeck. Ellen Glasgow. Sarah Orne Jewett. Frank Norris. Katherine Anne Porter. J. D. Salinger. Franz Kafka. Anne Frank. Sinclair Lewis. Bede. Erskine Caldwell. Charles Addams. Tennessee Williams. James T. Farrell. Rollo May. Giovanni Boccaccio. Theodore Dreiser. Elia Kazan. Sherwood Anderson. Henry Fielding. Louisa May Alcott. Zelda Fitzgerald. Oscar Handlin. Thornton Wilder. Flannery O’Connor. The King James Version of the Old Testament. William Makepeace Thackeray. Ed Sanders. Jane Austen. Ignazio Silone. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Ernest Jones. And Ford Madox Ford. — After these, too.

After them in time, of course, if not in manner. Yet also, and perhaps more important than either time or manner, after them in a subtler way, and suggesting through that a previously unrecognized, yet ancient tradition, the nature of which should be apparent as soon as one has considered which authors, insofar as their names are absent above, cannot be said to participate in that tradition: The Tradition of the Bloody Orange.

3.

THE TRADITION OF THE BLOODY ORANGE — A PARADIGM

Someone appears on the horizon as a black speck, a fly stuck against the lavender sky. He draws closer and closer, at first slowly and then more rapidly, until he has drawn face-to-face with the viewer, whereat he is repelled. He tries not to reveal the depth and extent of his revulsion, nausea, disgust, boredom, by describing himself, his family, his friends and lovers, and the enemies of all. At last, unable to conceal his true feelings any longer, he draws from the leather pouch at his waist a large Florida orange (of the hybrid type, called “navel”). He brings the perfect sphere slowly up to his mouth, which is ample, and chomps suddenly into it, splattering billows of blood over his face, hands, green lamé shirt and tan suede boots. Then, continuing to eat at the orange, he turns and withdraws quickly to the horizon again, where he remains, a speck of changing color from black to red to orange and sometimes (to the naked eye) appearing cadmium yellow or even, as he should, green. From such a distance, he is quite beautiful to observe, changing color like that, especially against the lavender sky!

4.

This is the start of the action. A handsome youth who wore slick green suits and strangely decorated hats went to the king with three sons and expressed in public a passionate desire to have one of the sons for his lover.

— I don’t care which one, he cried. — Any of them will satisfy me. I have this thing about princes, he said.

5.

For two days and nights, the king ambled down the many-tapestried corridors of the palace, laughing and murmuring to himself. — A thing about princes, indeed. That’s rich!

6.

It was a late, amber-colored afternoon. In the gymnasium the three princes practiced the sports. Naked and oiled, they ran and kicked and threw. Soft light from the windows above drifted down and shimmered over their sleek bodies.

One of the ballboys attending them, a cripple desperately seeking favor and possible advancement, told them about the young man in the slick green suit and his strange request. The way the ballboy told it, the man’s request was actually a demand, ominously put.

— He gave your father, His Royal Highness the King, just three days to decide which one it would be, the ballboy told the athletes.

They laughed and called the ballboy a twit. — Far out, twit! they teased.