The Reserve
By Russell Banks
HarperCollins
This is Russell Banks’ Depression novel. That’s Depression, as in FDR and the New Deal, as opposed to depressing, which “The Reserve” also is, although not any more so than many of Banks’ earlier works.
Banks’ later books seem written less to be read for pleasure than to be taught, for credit. And what is stressed in those creative-writing courses is literary technique, rather than the story-telling that characterized earlier Banks’ books, among them the memorable collection of inter-connected short stories, “Trailerpark.”
“The Reserve” opens in 1936 with a chapter that moves almost as slowly as the glaciers that carved out the Adirondack lake where much of the book’s action, or lack thereof, take place.
Vanessa Cole is a traditional slutty rich bitch and Jordan Groves, who is a local artist/celebrity, was a pilot with Eddie Rickenbacker in World War I. Now he’s a lefty dilettante, a Beautiful Person before there were Beautiful People.
Jordan is a “devout atheist” who is reading “the new Steinbeck, ‘In Dubious Battle.'” In his spare time he organizes futile strikes and for his home insists on “the strict use of local materials,” says Banks. So even in 1936, he thinks local. Jordan has a great affinity for the Soviet Union, where he is lionized because of having painted various murals there of the struggle of the lumpen proletariat.
Jordan and Vanessa listen to black jazz, they roll their own smokes and you just know she’ll be the Bohemian version of a grande dame in 30 years.
We meet these two narcissists when Jordan flies into “the Reserve,” a huge tract of wilderness owned for generations by Depression-proof old-money families like Vanessa’s. He arrives for a cocktail party on July 4, which naturally he doesn’t celebrate although he wouldn’t mind doing so if only he “could forget his politics for once.”
Jordan drifts away from the party and falls hard for Vanessa. Banks notes her “slender, pale, uplifted throat,” her “tall slender figure,” and her “broad shoulders for a slender woman.”
Eventually the author reins in the torrent of adjectives and lit-quarterly mannerisms and starts writing. The traditional Banks working-class hero, an Adirondack guide named Hubert St. Germain, appears to seduce Jordan’s Viennese wife, Alicia, who is of course extremely beautiful. Angst and adultery abound.
Banks’ undiminished gift for dialogue is on display, especially after Vanessa’s mother is semi-inadvertently killed. This is Banks at his best. But a few mordant quips on the subject of corpse-disposal aren’t enough to save this slight book.