Continental Drift (59 page)
“Banks has skillfully used his repertoire of contemporary techniques to write a novel that is classically American—a dark, but sometimes funny, romance with echoes of Poe and Melville.”
—
Washington Post
SUCCESS STORIES: STORIES
In
Success Stories
, an exceptionally varied yet coherent collection, Russell Banks proves himself one of the most astute and forceful writers in America today. “Queen for a Day,” “Success Story,” and “Adultery” trace the fortunes of the Painter family in their pursuit of and retreat from the American dream. Banks also explores the ethos of rampant materialism in a group of contemporary moral fables. “The Fish” is an evocative parable of faith and greed set in a Southeast Asian village, “The Gully” tells of the profitability of violence and the ironies of upward mobility in a Latin American shantytown, and “Children’s Story” explores the repressed rage that boils beneath the surface of relationships between parents and children and between citizens of the first and third worlds.
“Each story is uncommonly good … surprising, lively writing and believably human characters …. Banks has a terrific eye, mordant yet affectionate, for the bric-a-brac and the pathos of the American dream.”
—
Washington Post Book World
THE BOOK OF JAMAICA
In
The Book of Jamaica,
Russell Banks explores the complexities of political life in the Caribbean and its ever-present racial conflicts. His narrator, a thirty-five-year-old college professor from New Hampshire, goes to Jamaica to write a novel and soon becomes embroiled in the struggles between whites and blacks. He is especially interested in an ancient tribe called the Maroons, descendants of the Ashanti, who had been enslaved by the Spanish and then fought the British in a hundred-year war. Despite this history of oppression, the Maroons have managed to maintain a relatively autonomous existence in Jamaica. Partly out of guilt and an intellectual sense of social responsibility, Banks’s narrator gets involved in reuniting two clans who have been feuding for generations. Unfortunately, his attempt ends in disaster, and the narrator must deal with his feelings of alienation, isolation, and failure.
“A compelling novel…. Banks achieves effects at once beautiful and brutal. A virtuoso performance.”
—
Publishers Weekly
TRAILERPARK
In
Trailerpark,
Russell Banks introduces a colorful cast of characters at the Granite State Trailerpark, where Flora, in number 11, keeps more than a hundred guinea pigs and screams at people to stay away from her babies; Claudel, in number 5, thinks he is lucky until his wife burns down their trailer and runs off with Howie Leeke; and Noni, in number 7, has telephone conversations with Jesus and tells the police about them. In this series of related short stories, Russell Banks offers gripping, realistic portrayals of individual Americans and paints a portrait of New England life that is at once dark, witty, and revealing.
“Mesmerizing…. There are times when Banks’s prose fairly dazzles”
—
Publishers Weekly
THE RELATION OF MY IMPRISONMENT
The Relation of My Imprisonment
is a work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines. Designed to be exemplary, works of this type were aimed at brethren outside the prison walls and functioned primarily as figurative dramatizations of the tests of faith all true believers must endure. These “relations,” framed by scripture and by a sermon explicating the text, were usually read aloud in weekly or monthly installments during religious services. Utterly sincere and detailed accounts of suffering, they were nonetheless highly artificial. To use the form self-consciously, as Russell Banks has done, is not to parody it so much as to argue good-humoredly with the mind it embodies, to explore and, if possible, to map the limits of that mind, the more intelligently to love it.
“This is a marvelously written little book, fascinatingly intricate, yet deceptively simple. Well worth reading more than once.”
—New York Times Book Review
FAMILY LIFE
Family Life,
Russell Banks’s first novel, transforms the dramas of domesticity into the story of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom. Life inside this kingdom includes the king (dubbed “the Hearty” or “the Bluff”), who squeals angrily as is his wont; the queen, who, while pondering the mirror in her chambers, decides to write a book; three adolescent princes who are, respectively, a superb wrestler, a fanatical sports car driver, and a sullen drunk. Then there are the mysterious Green Man with a thing for princes; the Loon, who lives in a tree house designed by Christopher Wren; and a whole slew of murders, mayhem, coups, debauches, world tours, and love and loss and laughter.
“Banks writes with trembling knowledge, conviction, and authenticity”
—Chicago Tribune
The Darling
The Angel on the Roof
Cloudsplitter
Rule of the Bone
The Sweet Hereafter
Affliction
Success Stories
Continental Drift
The Relation of My Imprisonment
Trailerpark
The Book of Jamaica
The New World
Hamilton Stark
Family Life
Searching for Survivors
“Russell Banks, the author of several well-received novels and short story collections, explores the themes of good and evil, fate and freedom, success and failure, love and sex, and racism and poverty through alternating chapters focusing on dual protagonists: Bob Dubois, 30, who forsakes his dead-end job as an oil burner repairman in New Hampshire to begin a new life in Florida, and Vanise Dorsinville, a young, illiterate Haitian mother who seeks refuge from poverty by fleeing to America…. Original in conception, gripping in execution.”
—
Newsday
“Grandeur…. Tremendously ambitious…. A powerful, disturbing study in moral ‘drift,’ confusion, and uncertainty.”
—
San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
“Unrelenting…. This is literature in the realistic tradition at its best.”
—
Boston Globe
“Exhilarating…. A vigorous and original novel.”
—
The New York Review of Books
“An excellent novel…. An important novel because of the precise manner in which it reflects the spiritual yearning and materialistic frenzy of our contemporary life. It is also an extremely skillful book, both in its writing, which is impeccable, and in the way it unfolds…. Always, Banks writes with tremendous knowledge, conviction, and authenticity.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“What gives this novel its force is Banks’ ability to make you feel the colossal waste of these obscure lives. He makes you grieve for Bob Dubois and the Dorsinvilles. They are tragic figures whose only critical mistake is that they wanted, and sought, something better…. Banks has created something more than a world of his own; he has evoked all the hope and misery of the real world.”
—
USA Today
“Remarkable … a visionary epic about innocence and evil and a shattering dissection of contemporary American life … it lingers in our mind long after we finish the novel.”
—
New York Times
“Excellent…. Powerful…. Always compulsively readable…. Takes on, in miniature, the entire condition of the world in our time.”
—
The New Republic
“Moral, huge in its ambition and utterly human—the most powerful American book—and book of America—I have read in years.”
—
Miami Herald
“A fully absorbing novel, intelligent, immensely informed, realistic and visionary at once.”
—Joyce Carol Oates
“Suspenseful and moving … covers the issues of race and dreams and love and sex and power and fantasy in America.”
—
Boston Globe
The author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1985 by Harper & Row, Publishers.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
. Copyright © 1985 by Russell Banks.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-12316-9
HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
First Harper Perennial edition published 1994.
First Perennial Classics edition published 2000.
First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2007.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Banks, Russell.
Continental drift.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-015383-0
I. Title. PS3552.A49T65 1985
813’.54 84-48137
ISBN: 978-0-06-085494-2 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 0-06-085494-4 (pbk.)
11 RRD 10 9 8 7
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