The Great-ish American Novel

The Darling, Russell Banks. Remember Fametracker? Remember the Fame Audit? The idea was that the Fametracker correspondents would analyze a celebrity to determine whether he or she was famous enough, too famous or just right. Reading Russell Banks generally makes me think of that: is Russell Banks the greatest living American novelist? And if so, have enough people heard of him? Too many? The right number of people? I can think of at least two of his novels (Continental Drift and The Sweet Hereafter) that made me think, "This is it. This is exactly the book" about something and one (Rule of the Bone) that just seemed impossibly clever. But I don't see people reading his books on the subway, I never read them as an undergraduate English major, and except for the brief spate of film adaptations about 10 years ago, I don't hear anyone talking about him.

The Darling is not my favorite of Banks's novels. It's not bad, it doesn't cause me to question the hyperbolic statements of the paragraph above. If anything, the faint disappointment I felt while reading it reinforced my appreciation for Banks's other books. Furthermore, while trying to determine what exactly I found disappointing about the book, I came across all sorts of things Banks does surprisingly well. For instance, he pulls off the trick of narrating in the voice of a person of the opposite sex, something many novelists really can't do. There's just something a little bit off in how the story is doled out -- it feels stingy, somehow -- he teases out the outline of the plot in the first 20 pages, then spends something like 400 more building up to a climactic few pages. It may have been a mistake to have read this book immediately after What Is the What: that book covered almost the same ground as The Darling (same continent, different country, different region, similar ideology), but in a much more immediate, personal way. Usually, Banks is an author who can marry ethical and political concerns with real narrative urgency, and in this book -- and really, maybe just in comparison to What Is the What -- he feels a little removed.