New York, Jan. 9 (U.S.): Russell Banks, an award-winning fiction writer who anchored novels like “Affliction” and “The Sweet Hereafter” in the wintry rural communities of his hometown in the Northeast, imagining the dreams and obstacles everyone has died of as collar workers. Modern blues refer to the radical abolitionist in “Cloudsplitter”. He was 82 years old.
Banks, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, died Saturday in upstate New York, his editor, Dan Halpern, told the Associated Press. Banks was being treated for cancer, Halpern said.
Joyce Carol Oates, a former Princeton classmate who referred to Banks on Twitter as a great American writer and “a beloved friend to many,” said he died peacefully at his home.
“I loved Russell and his immense talent and compassionate heart,” Oates wrote. “Cloudsplitter” (was) his masterpiece, but all of his work is exceptional. “
Born in Newton, Massachusetts, and raised in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Banks was an heiress modeled after 19th-century writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, aspiring to fine art and a deep understanding of the country spirit.
He was the son of a plumber who wrote a lot about working-class families whether those who died trying to escape, or fell into “a kind of madness” the past could be erased, or those like him who escaped and survived and asked “Why? Me, Lord?”
Banks lived part of the year in Florida, and for a while he had a home in Jamaica, but he was basically a guy from the North with an old-fashioned Puritan sense of consequences. Snow falls a lot in his narrative, from an upstate New York community riven by a bus crash in “The Sweet Hereafter” to a despondent, divorced New Hampshire policeman decimated by his paranoid fantasies in “The Calamity.”
In the bank’s critical achievement Continental Drift, published in 1985, oil stove repairman Bob Dubois flees his native New Hampshire and goes into business with his wealthy brother in Florida, only to discover that his brother’s life was as hollow as his.
“His brother’s strutting and boasting were empty from the start, and in a visceral, barely conscious way, Bob knew that all along and forgave his strutting and boasting simply because he knew they were empty. But he never thought it would come to this, with nothing,” Banks wrote.
His most ambitious novel was Cloudsplitter, a 750-page story about John Brown and his unlikely quest to rid the country of slavery. The story long predates Banks’ life, but the inspiration was close to home. Banks lived near Brown’s cemetery in North Elba, New York, and he passed by often enough that Brown “became a kind of ghostly presence,” the author told the Associated Press in 1998.
“Cloudsplitter” reads like an introduction to Banks’ contemporary work, Hawthorne Calling and other early influences. As son Owen Brown recalls, John Brown was a haunted man of the Old World, whose determination to free slaves and punish the enslaved made his face burn like a revived preacher.
“As a boy, I was afraid of my father’s face,” Banks’ narrator explains. “I remember my father looking straight into our eyes, burning us with his gaze, as he told us to hear him now.
He decided that from now on he would put his sins of pride and vanity behind him. And he was coming out of here and waging war on slavery. The time has come, and he declares that he wishes to join him in a perfect cry.”
Banks was a Pulitzer finalist for “Cloudsplitter” in 1999 and had been awarded the title for “Continental Drift” 13 years earlier. His other awards include the Anisfeld-Book Award for “Cloudsplitter” and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Two of his books were adapted into popular film releases in the late 1990s: “The Sweet Hereafter,” directed by Atom Egoyan and starring Ian Holm, and Paul Schrader’s “Affliction,” which earned James Coburn an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Banks’ recent work includes the short story collection “A Permanent Member of the Family” and the 2021 novel “Foregone,” in which an American filmmaker who moved to Canada during the Vietnam War looks back on his impulsive youth, a background Banks understood from within.
His books are often told of absent and failed fathers. Banks’ father, Earl Banks, was an alcoholic who the author says beat him as a child and left his left eye permanently damaged. Destined for other worlds, Russell was smart enough to earn the title of “teacher” in high school and become the first member of his family to attend college, earning a full scholarship from Colgate University.
He was an idealist in search of ideals, among the countless young men of the 1960s who adopted Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” as a kind of bible. He left Colgate and traveled South with dreams of joining Fidel Castro’s Revolutionary Army in Cuba, a mission that ended in St. Petersburg, Florida.
He married twice in his early twenties (and eventually had four children), endured more than a few tavern brawls, wrote poetry so bad he later wished he had burned it, and worked for a time for his father as a plumber in New Jersey. Hampshire resumed his education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He was in his mid-30s, nearing the end of his second marriage, when he published his first collection of short stories, Searching for Survivors, and his first novel, Family Life. By the beginning of the 1990s, when he turned 50, he was an established author and settled into a permanent marriage with his fourth wife, poet Chase Twichel.
“Over the years, I think I’ve managed to keep my anger in line with myself, and that’s allowed me to become more meaningful as a human being, as a writer, as — I hope — as a husband, father, and friend,” he told Plowshares in an interview that appeared in the magazine’s winter 1993-1994 issue. It’s very hard to be a decent human being if you’re being controlled by anger you can’t understand. When you begin to gain this understanding, you begin to become useful to others.”