Helpful Score: 1
Gripping story of small-town policeman in gloomy New Hampshire town succumbing to his demons.
Helpful Score: 1
Amazon.com
If Russell Banks hadn't become a writer, he thinks he would have wound up stabbed to death in a barroom brawl. He is the son of a two-fisted, drunken New England plumber, and the grief of fatherly combat resonates through his work like the background radiation of the big bang. Banks became a violently drinking plumber himself--and then a Pulitzer Prize-nominated Princeton literary giant and one of the luckiest Oscar-buzzed writers in Hollywood history.
........Affliction transmutes Banks's painful past into fiction. His divorced protagonist, Wade Whitehouse, 41, is imprisoned by fate in Lawford, New Hampshire, a hell frozen over. He digs wells for chump change, lives in a trailer, drinks, and alienates his daughter by dragging her to a miserable Halloween costume party. In two weeks' time, Wade demolishes his pitiable hopes of family happiness, drawn into a rigorously plausible series of disastrous deaths. In flashbacks to his Dad-abused youth, we see how Wade wound up such a Dostoyevskian clown.
Banks has a mind of winter: when Wade sees his dead parent, the scene unfolds with the cold logic of ice-crystal formation. The story is narrated by Wade's kid brother, the family's sole escapee to college, in a cool, distanced way. Both brothers contain aspects of Banks, but each breaks free of autobiography. This is one haunting novel. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/2742722807/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
If Russell Banks hadn't become a writer, he thinks he would have wound up stabbed to death in a barroom brawl. He is the son of a two-fisted, drunken New England plumber, and the grief of fatherly combat resonates through his work like the background radiation of the big bang. Banks became a violently drinking plumber himself--and then a Pulitzer Prize-nominated Princeton literary giant and one of the luckiest Oscar-buzzed writers in Hollywood history.
........Affliction transmutes Banks's painful past into fiction. His divorced protagonist, Wade Whitehouse, 41, is imprisoned by fate in Lawford, New Hampshire, a hell frozen over. He digs wells for chump change, lives in a trailer, drinks, and alienates his daughter by dragging her to a miserable Halloween costume party. In two weeks' time, Wade demolishes his pitiable hopes of family happiness, drawn into a rigorously plausible series of disastrous deaths. In flashbacks to his Dad-abused youth, we see how Wade wound up such a Dostoyevskian clown.
Banks has a mind of winter: when Wade sees his dead parent, the scene unfolds with the cold logic of ice-crystal formation. The story is narrated by Wade's kid brother, the family's sole escapee to college, in a cool, distanced way. Both brothers contain aspects of Banks, but each breaks free of autobiography. This is one haunting novel. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/2742722807/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
A VERY BLUE COLLAR STORY .
Banks did a tremendous job of showing Wade Whitehouse's slow mental erosion. Initially I found him unsympathetic and somewhat of a sad sack, but by the end I understood. A person can take only so much. I found a lot of myself in him - feeling that justifying fairness and righting wrongs was more important than humanity. And again, I saw myself in him when he got ideas in his head that weren't there. Neuroticism. Painful.
Well-written prose and a great atmospheric detail of late Autumn in New Hampshire make this book worth the read. But be prepared that it's as bleak as the landscape and there is very little redeeming in it that will boost your faith in humanity.
Well-written prose and a great atmospheric detail of late Autumn in New Hampshire make this book worth the read. But be prepared that it's as bleak as the landscape and there is very little redeeming in it that will boost your faith in humanity.
