A leading novelist, the American writer, who died on January 7 at the age of 82, will have traced a singular path and marked his time.
Par Florence Colombani
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« QWhat type of book do you avoid? asked the New York Times to Russell Banks in 2014, when his collection of short stories A permanent member of the family. And the author replies: “Those that the author or publisher presents as fantasywhich for me is a way of saying: don’t worry, reader, Death will remain absent. Like Thomas Pynchon, I believe that serious literature is one in which Death is present”. Russell Banks – who has just died of cancer at the age of 82 – always gave pride of place to death in his novels as in his short stories. And wrote this “serious literature” which, by giving life to striking characters, offers a true vision of America and the world.
Recognized during his lifetime as a great American novelist – without ever reaching the status of his almost contemporaries Philip Roth and Cormac McCarthy -, Russell Banks left a substantial body of work (about twenty novels and collections of short stories), haunted by the flaws of the American dream. . Son of an alcoholic plumber whose blows left traces (a motionless left eye), he is the very type of “class defector”: married at 18 and father at 19, he too was a plumber before entering university – a first in his family – thanks to the help of the family of his second wife. He will become a professor of literature at Princeton and will be twice a finalist for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.
READ ALSORussell Banks: “Trump is not a clown, just a Berlusconi” Initially paralyzed by the guilt of having left his native environment, Banks takes some time to anchor his stories in these industrial lands of New England where jobs are gradually deserted and where one lives in mobile homes. -homes lined up as far as the eye can see. His short story collections Trailerpark (1996) et The Angel on the Roof (2001), ses romans Under the reign of Bone (1996) et Affliction (2000) are the headlines of this vein of his work, whose heroes are people who – he explained to the Guardian in 2000 – “usually arouse contempt or mockery”, “people for whom you would not feel affection if you met them in the street. Me, I love them in an almost simple way ». The figure of the father – “the center of my imaginary life” – haunts these texts which tell of the hold, the trauma but also the “electric” seduction of violence.
READ ALSORussell Banks: “Those who inspired my characters, I met them, listened to them”
Always moving
From this very harsh social and affective reality is born an irresistible impulse towards elsewhere. The one that Russell Banks experiences in his personal life, leading him from Jamaica to the Himalayas, and which is the subject of the collection of stories Voyager (2017). And the one that his characters feel, always in motion. In his first international success, Drifting Continents (1985), Banks recounts the parallel destinies of Bob Dubois, a New Hampshire boiler repairman, and Vanise Dorsinville, a Haitian immigrant, both convinced that Florida has a better future in store for them. This great novel of the disillusionment of the American dream finds a striking echo in American Darling (2007), the story of an American bourgeois who builds a new life in Liberia, soon overtaken by the chaos of great History.
Audacious, jack-of-all-trades, Russell Banks dares the great historical epics (Cloud Slayerin 1998, on the abolitionist John Brown) as the nightmarish evocation of a sexuality devoured by pornography (Distant memory of the skin2012).
His strongest text remains undoubtedly one of the most famous, Beautiful tomorrows (1997), which explores the perspectives of four characters affected by the fatal school bus crash. By its multiplicity, its ambition, its powerful work affirms, again and again, an absolute belief in the power of fiction. What to ensure our deep gratitude.
The entire work of Russell Banks, translated from (American) English by Christine Le Bœuf and Pierre Furlan, is available from Actes Sud.