White Male Writer

Tuesday, Feb 12th: The last time I saw Russell Banks was 13 years ago. After the publication of his novel Rule of the Bone, I interviewed him for the University of Toronto newspaper, The Varsity. At that time, he was congenial and gracious, answering all of my inane questions about his groundbreaking story focused on homeless teenagers that had somehow fallen through the cracks of society. He is now older, with less hair, and more of it is gray, but he still looked great and is a prolific novelist at the top of his game. The Village Voice has referred to him as “the most important living white male American on the official literary map”. His major works include: Trailerpark, Continental Drift, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, Rule of the Bone, and his magnum opus on John Brown, Cloudsplitter. Both Affliction (starring Nick Nolte and James Coburn) and The Sweet Hereafter (directed by Canadian Atom Egoyan) were made into films. His 2004 novel, “The Darling” is going to be made into a Martin Scorsese film while he has written a screen adaptation of Kerouac’s On the Road for Francis Ford Coppola. He was in Denver recently to talk about his new offering, The Reserve, a tale of the class divided world of Depression-era America.

In His Own Words:

“That quote from the Village Voice has followed me around for awhile and it makes me feel like a shelf in a bookstore “White Male Authors” [laughter]. But I’m not complaining about it.”

“The question of ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ applies to this book in some ways because I don’t get my ideas from my usual sources. It’s not quite ‘Where the hell do you get your ideas?’. But there is a little of that. The main thing is that the question makes me slightly uncomfortable because I don’t really know the answer but yet I feel compelled to try to answer it… There are inevitably and inescapably many, many different origins for a novel and anyone who writes one knows that. And it’s very hard to identify one or two or even three out of it. It takes time, usually a very long time to separate them out and name them. With this book “The Reserve” I’ve just begun the process.”

“But even so, a few months ago, my editor Daniel Halperin at Harper Collins asked me to write a few pages of notes about the origins of “The Reserve” that Harper Collins wanted to tip into the back of the bound galleys that they send out to booksellers and reviewers. And I know that it was coercive, they were trying to control and navigate—manipulate I should say, the reviewers—more than the booksellers—into writing reviews of a certain type.”

“But to begin with the personal. Because there is a personal source for the novel. In recent years, I’ve gradually come to realize that the spending habits and restrictions and the associated fears and anxieties that had been forced upon my parents in the 1930’s by the Great Depression—because they were working people in a small town in New England—were actually mine as well in the 21st century despite the huge differences in our respective economic conditions. But they had been passed down to me from my parents’ youth like their DNA. I’m speaking about small things which were observed and ridiculed by my children like shutting off the lights every time I left a room, turning the thermostat always down, making sure that all the doors are closed and preserving the small bit of oil in the furnace, walking long distances to drop a letter in the mailbox instead of driving there. My kids made fun of me for it, but I knew that it came from the 1930’s somehow, it came from my parents’ life long before I was born. So I thought that I might somehow get to the ground of my own economic fears and anxieties if I imaginatively explored theirs… But once I started researching and writing about my parents’ world, I realized that I was equally fascinated by the world of those Americans whose lives weren’t especially threatened by the Great Depression: the old patrician, New England, Manhattan families who lived off inherited fortunes amassed decades earlier by their parents and grandparents in the so-called Gilded Age. These were the children and grandchildren of the Robber Barons and industrialists who cordoned off vast tracts of the Adirondack wilderness for their game camps and private reserves. All through the Depression, and even into today, these two classes lived side by side in an intricately interdependent relationship in which one group, the local struggling poor—my parents’ group—was a serving class and the other—the summer resident grandee—was a ruling class.”

“My wife’s family happens to descend from the latter group: the ruling class. Over the years, almost against my will, and in defiance of my left-leaning politics and my working class background and sympathies, I had learned slowly, gradually, with great resistance, that her fore bearers deserved my sympathetic understanding as much as the impoverished local people they had hired as guides and housekeepers and cooks and caretakers. I had learned that the rich were people too. It was hard but I learned it. [laughter] They are perhaps not quite the same as you and I. For reasons that you may recall Hemingway famously explained to Fitzgerald. You know that story where Fitzgerald says to Hemingway, ‘The rich are different from us’. And Hemingway says, ‘Yeah, they have more money’. What you can also say, is they are human beings too. That is the side of the account that is never really pointed to. And that was what Hemingway got and Fitzgerald didn’t get. But despite the fact that they have more money and power than the rest, they still—as Hemingway knew—have hearts that swell and break over love and loss, and minds that collapse with grief, and dreams of a better world for all, and guilt and bitter disappointment at not being able to establish that world.”

“The ideas that mattered to me most–and I hope to the reader—came out of the process of writing itself. This is true also for the plot, and for the themes, and for the images, and for much of the locale and for the characters themselves. One thing suggested another and then another and then another and I merely tried to keep up all the way to the end.”