Volume 36, Number 19 · December 7, 1989
You Can Go Home Again
By Robert Towers
Affliction
by Russell Banks
Harper and Row, 355 pp., $18.95
Mile Zero
by Thomas Sanchez
Knopf, 349 pp., $19.95
Russell Banks is one of a group of American realists concerned with the latter-day condition of some 'non-ethnic' Americans of very old stock, whose ancestors (some of them) settled in North America as long ago as the seventeenth century. But far from living in Federal houses or belonging to suburban country clubs, these particular 'old' Americans are the ones who have stayed behind in decaying villages or hardscrabble farms, or else have drifted to the Sunbelt or the West, where they are likely to live rootlessly in trailers or 'ranchettes,' hang out at bars, and work at odd jobs. Whether they have stayed put or moved on, they have, many of them, embraced, or inherited, failure, and they tend to ease their disappointment with hard drinking and activities that go with it, particularly deer hunting and beating up their wives and children. Banks's turf, so to speak, is small-town New Hampshire, where he set the stories of Trailerpark, and from which Bob Dubois, the main character of the much celebrated Continental Drift, escaped to a life of increasing desperation and criminality in Florida.
Review, 2885 words
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