Russell Banks: Continental Drift

“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.”

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.

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 . 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.”

His latest novel, 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.

The father of four daughters, Banks continues to write in a converted sugar shack just down the road from John Brown’s grave.

Excerpts from Russell Banks’s Diary

“I need to talk and drink with these guys, and the immigration guys, need to know the names of things.”

10/21/81

HOW ABSURD IS IT for me all at once to be thinking about a novel about refugees? Set in Haiti and southern Florida all about boats and the sea and human suffering and greed (what I’m really interested in is the couriers, the vultures who perform the necessary task of transporting the refugees — out of Haiti, Cuba, [illegible], Mexico).

Main character is American man in 40’s, a survivor on the edges of the respectable world who traffics in illegal aliens. Runs a charter boat out of Islamorada, lives in a trailer, is married, has two kids, has a drinking problem, has trouble dealing with sex, race violence. Yet knows what he is doing, has the large picture, which is what makes his trade legitimate. He’s an enzyme that connects two worlds, the Sunbelt USA and a backward Caribbean despotism — he lies between the fat Americans and the starving Haitians. His role is historical, he knows it, and it conflicts with his personal world when he faces being caught and has to destroy his human cargo to save himself.

I need a story here, a line along which my hero can change from a man unconscious of his tragic position to one conscious of it even though trapped by it. I need minor characters, I need the Haitian who corresponds to him, the guy in trade from the other side. I need to talk and drink with these guys, and the immigration guys, need to know the names of things.

These guys are like maggots or vultures — they turn one thing into another.

Locations — Miami & vicinity; Haiti; at sea.

Opens with the killing of the refugees off coast of Florida (off Palm Beach?). Then how my man got to this point, and what happens to him now. The main question, of course, is what happens to him, inside him, now? To answer that we have to know how he got here, his choices, if any. To destroy him is to destroy his historical usefulness, but to save him is to justify what? Murder?

Possible to write the scenes set at sea without traveling to Florida or Haiti. Research.

Through clippings and maps. Talk to a few people who know .

10/22/81

TRADER WOULD HAVE A HELPER, Haitian, who organized the group of refugees. At time of discovery at sea, the Haitian (a woman?) gets thrown off the boat with the others. Coast Guard picks her up with other survivors, she ends up in detention centers, etc. — so we get to see how refugees are treated — and trader tries to pursue her without exposing himself to danger. Why would he be so attached to her, except through guilt? Girlfriend, somehow?

10/23/81

GOOD TALK with C. last night re. The Trade (as I’ve come to think of its title) — very encouraging to me. As Bob Shure told me, Hawthorne and Pierce will wait, they’re already dead.

Thoughts of intercutting 20–30 page descriptions of the trade in Pakistan, SE Asia, central Europe, Africa, as the tale moves along. Same tone but more formalistic in approach.

Could I write 100 pages this winter — while doing a few stories, while researching the rest of the book, while relocating to NYC, while adjusting to new domestic circumstances, while attending to my kids …? Not to mention — while teaching at Columbia and Princeton. Seems impossible, but it will be, unless I make it a goal.

“Could I write 100 pages this winter — while doing a few stories, while researching the rest of the book, while relocating to NYC, while adjusting to new domestic circumstances, while attending to my kids …?”

Well — to Amherst, and K. Thank heaven we can see each other even this infrequently. I love loving her.

Reprinted by permission of Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin