the american writer Russell Banksone of the great masters of American letters, author of excellent novels such as ‘Affliction’ or ‘Sweet Hereafter,’ which the filmmakers Paul Schrader and Atom Egoyam they took to the movies respectively, passed away last Saturday at his residence in upstate New York. The author, who was Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, has died at the age of 82, a cancer victim. The news was confirmed this Sunday by her editor, Dan Halpern, of the Associated Press and picked up on Twitter by her good friend Joyce Carol Oates, who referred to the novelist as a great writer “very loved by all”. Oates was a classmate of Banks at university and she remembered how in their adjoining offices they both shared the difficulties of writing ‘Cloudcracker’, in the case of Banks, and ‘Blonde’, with respect to the author.
Although he lived part of the year in Florida and had a house in Jamaica, Banks’ literature will be remembered for the icy, winter landscapes of his native Massachusetts or upstate New York, where he also lived, and which are the setting for good part of his novels. Son of a modest family in which his father worked as a plumber, the great theme of the author, who has always recognized his debt to humanist teachers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne or Walt Whitman, has been that of the hardships of the working class that he portrayed with enormous empathy and comprehension. Most of its protagonists are characters tortured by adverse circumstances or by their own demons, such is the case of the desperate and paranoid policeman who stars in ‘Affliction’ or the protagonist of ‘Continental Drift’an average American looking to get rich until he realizes the emptiness of his life.
Controversial John Brown
Banks’ most ambitious, extensive and recognized novel, the aforementioned ‘Cloudcracker’, follows the life of the legendary and highly debatable anti-abolitionist hero John Brown, related with its lights and shadows by his son and that in no way detracts from the works of William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy. Thanks to this novel, the author was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, 13 years after being nominated for that award for ‘Continental Drift’. ‘Affliction’, the basis of the Schrader film, starring Nick Nolte, earned James Coburn an Oscar for best supporting actor, in the role of the protagonist’s father.
Banks’ most recent book, the novel ‘The Dropouts’, published last year by Sexto Piso, is the story of an American filmmaker who fled to Canada in his youth to escape the Vietnam War. In that confessional story beat an intimate and testamentary farewell from the author to his readers.