Continental Drift (P.S.) by Russell
Banks
A Novel Of Great Passion!
A powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fictions most
acclaimed and important writers, Russell Bankss Continental Drift is a
masterful novel of hope lost and gained, and a gripping, indelible story of
fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and
the seductions and realities of the American dream.
In reading Continental Drift, a tragedy in every sense, I was struck by how
usual the novel was in its structure and its distinct narrator. Banks
employs a Haitian loa (a spirit of the dead) to tell us the story of Bob
Dubois, a frustrated, blue-collar resident of New Hampshire, and Vanise
Dorsonville, a Haitian immigrant, and young mother, looking to escape to
America for a significantly better life. The traditional use of the narrator as
an all-knowing persona, as Russell Banks explains is "a convention that
went out the window in the twentieth century." While there has been a
series of literary movements concerned with varying degrees of realism
and a reduction in the psychic distance between readers and characters,
Banks, in telling the story of disparate characters a world apart said, "I
want to feel I have my arm around a shoulder of the reader and I'm
explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to the perso n I've stopped,
like the wedding guest in Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner...And I want to
have that sense of intimacy, a face-to-face, arm around the shoulder
contact." The use of the "omniscient" (psychically and physically detached
narrator), in Banks's novel, creates an unusual richness in detail,
characterization, and commentary that would be more difficult to achieve
using third person limited point of view. And the loa, because he appeared
to have no vested interest in manipulating the details of th e story, seemed
to be a more "reliable," believable, and interesting narrator of events than a
story told from first person point of view. In a way, what Banks has done
has fed the loas with his work, and tried to change how we see those we
often look down upon. And, in truth, this is all an author can ask: to try to
change the world through stories, through imaginary lives, and through the
power of the written word.
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