Foregone Books

 I did a video about the Russell Banks novels I have read.

He died on Jan 7, 2023

The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks

 The new Russell Banks novel is an epic history of our times. Our times move fast. So an epic novel need not cover a multi-generational timeline of slow change. 

In The Magic Kingdom the sweeping change of times and physical landscape is shown in the environment of a single lifetime of one man.   

The character and first person narrator of the story is Harley Mann, an 82 years old resident of St. Cloud Florida. He was born in 1890. 
The set up of the novel is that in 1972 he recorded, on reel to reel tapes, the story of the first 20 or so years of his life. It is a very unusual story and life. 

He is the child of a family who lived in the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee and later in Waycross Georgia. These were designed to be utopian examples of how we could live in a more cooperative socialist structure.    
After the death of his father, child Harley moves with his mother, his twin brother, his other set of twin brothers, and baby sister to a dismal sort of plantation that is more or less a prison including overseers with bullwhips. 
It’s the system of indentured slavery where one can never work off the debt owed to the master of the place, a strange little rich man who lives in a mansion on the grounds. 

This family is rescued by a man who is the head of a Shaker community in the Florida Everglades. Elder John buys off the family debt and takes them to the New Bethany colony when Harley is around 11 and the story moves on from there. 

Early on in the novel Banks shows us a part of the history of the USA which is little known and actually not the kind of thing that our mainstream goes out of it way to show us, being more inclined to celebrate capitalism over socialist cooperative systems as if capitalism and the business community is really the only American Way.  The bulk of the story takes place in New Betheny and the nearby city of St Cloud. Although a mere 110 or so years ago the area was almost pioneer territory for these white oddball utopian Christian characters, the seminole people having been killed off or otherwise removed not that long before.    

Harley and family, coming from the Ruskin experience, are secular whereas the Shakers are very religious, although both the secular and neo-Christians want to live in a cooperative economic system. This is another instructive aspect of this fine novel. The reader gets a certain amount of information about what the Shakers were all about. We learn that the Shakers believed in Christ but also a woman who was an 18th Century founder of the sect and brought them from England to New York State. She established the Shaker celibacy. Though long dead she, Mother Ann Lee, is worshiped along with Christ. In The Magic Kingdom the Shakers colony can only survive via recruitment, being unable to reproduce new Shakers via bringing their own children into the religion. Although not clearly stated, that is the reason that Elder John rescued Harley and family from the plantation. These five children learn to become Shakers. They are free to accept the doctrine when they come of age, confess to the elder or woman elder. and then be Shakers and continue the colony. Or go elsewhere, live in The World.   

The Shakers reject profit from usury. But people are surrounded by economic challenges which can make their Biblical moral foundations sometimes on ground with sinkholes.    

The emotional heart of the story is an odd love that Harley finds and comes to cherish. The Magic Kingdom is a love story. A story of what humans will do for love, be it something justifiable or not, as a young man follows his heart.   

The core of the novel is this love and shame in a restrictive community. It is not at all a didactic slog about religious and cooperative communities.
It’s an involving page turner, a gripping story of a young man’s love.

All in the land of the corporate Magic Kingdom of Disney World only a few decades later.

Russell Banks remains one of our greatest novelist.

Foregone by Russell Banks

 This is a new novel by an elderly writer who knows he is coming to the end of a successful career.

  It’s about a successful left-wing Canadian documentary filmmaker in his late 70s dying, and quite soon, of cancer. But Leo Fife is now involved with one last project. Other documentarians are filming him for one last interview. They are former students of his. They want to talk about his career and the details of production of certain of his films, but he has another plan, a sort of confession that he wants his wife to hear.
 
We are told throughout that Leo is on heavy medication for his cancer. Also that he was somewhat of a heavy drinker. Both of these things make his testimony unreliable. His wife insists that some of the stories he is coming up with are actually her story.
We have no real reason to believe that any of this is “true”. Yet the novel has an authentic feeling of a human life as it flashes by, from and returning to oblivion. 

He doesn't want to talk about his filmmaking or his Candian life at all, just events from his earliest years. In this USA youth of his he dwells on stories of how he abandoned people in the past. Clearly he is feeling guilt and shame for this and wants to set the record straight so that Emma, his wife will know who he truly is rather than who he has become as the successful American draft resister who fled to Canada to start a new life.

His story is totally different from that. It is an episodic tale of at least two different life and family trajectories he was on and how he abandoned those lives and people almost on a wim.

The novel has a unique style. There is a lot of supposed dialogue, but no quotation marks are used. Where other writers may have done this, or tried it, Banks makes it all perfectly clear, with no question of, ”Wait! Who is talking here?” It’s really well crafted. The heart of it is easy to access because the mechanics do not call attention to themselves. Stylistically it is a very smooth presentation that goes down easily.

The reader is presented with a certain amount of life and death contemplation. These things concern what is likely to happen next, after death. Leo, the character, is of a secular orientation, so he is facing the nothingness next, or the everythingness. It is all viewed as a sort of return to the sourse without memory of this existence.