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.