Lauren Baratz-Logsted is here again, with a review of The Darling by Russell Banks. I remember having a book signed by Russell Banks in Atlanta perhaps a decade ago, back when that great bookstore housed in a used car dealership still existed. I was 23 years old, and it was the first book I ever had signed by a writer I didn’t personally know. Here’s what Lauren has to say.
Times are indeed getting lean around here as of the 13 books I’ve read since Sam Pickering’s Let it Ride, there’s only one worth mentioning, but that one is a doozy.
The Darling, by Russell Banks. I’ve been a fan of Mr. Banks ever since 1989 when, as an independent bookseller, I sold the hell out of his excellent novel Affliction, a book I liked to describe as a story about a man with a toothache who lets the toothache go too far. My admiration only grew with The Sweet Hereafter, a daring book about the aftermath of a horrific school bus crash, and Rule of the Bone, about a 14-year-old misfit who moves into an abandoned bus with a Jamaican mystic.
The Darling continues Mr. Banks’s string of brave and inventive novels, the story centering this time on a woman: Hannah Musgrove, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground (think 60s and 70s groups) who, fleeing the FBI, winds up in Liberia. There, she marries a black minister in the corrupt regime, bears three sons, assumes a job with chimps and, ultimately, becomes instrumental in the stateside prison breakout of the man who will later overthrow the Liberian government. Hannah’s story, told in first person, moves forward and back, like a great tide, and the reader knows from the beginning that Hannah will at one point have to leave her children behind in Liberia, the question becoming: When she returns years later to search for them, what will she find?
The authentic narrative voice, the depth of historical and political detail, the evocation of place and time, and the creation of a complex heroine who is not always likable, but who grabs the reader by the wrist with a steely grip compelling the reader to hear every one of her words, all add up to a superlatively satisfying read.
The prime reason for setting out on my insane journey to read 365 books in a single year was to help define myself as a writer. A natural mimic –“ I attribute learning Hebrew at a young age to this–“ I can ape nearly anything if the mood takes me, which is why I write in different genres, time periods, voices, because it stretches me and keeps me fresh. But every now and then I come across something that makes me realize, no matter what my inclinations, I know that if I live another hundred years more than the actuarial tables tell me I’m likely to, I could never achieve what Mr. Banks has achieved here, I could never write a novel as accomplished as this.