There are 31 stories in this book. The first three are ordinary enough, considering they were written by Russell Banks, one of America's finest, if least sung, writers. Author of nine novels, including the ambitious saga Cloudsplitter (1998) which tells the complex story of John Brown on the stage of 19thcentury rural America, Banks possesses a dark, urgent vision and a genius for creating battle-scarred characters so real they emerge from the pages and stand beside you. None of them think life is fair, because it's not. Yet Banks is a realist, not a prophet of doom; he has watched and listened.
It shows. Landscape and weather are strong, as they are in many Northern US writers, but characterisation and dialogue are stronger still. The best of these stories are as good as his best novels; Affliction (1989), The Sweet Hereafter (1991) and Rule of the Bone (1995). In each of these novels, among the most powerful American novels yet written, Banks demonstrates a genius for creating a voice in which every word rings true. But should you presume that his territory is blue-collar hell in northern New Hampshire and Vermont, Banks is versatile. He can shift location and tone to explore the world of the betrayed wife of the painter William Hogarth. Elsewhere he enters the mind of Edgar Allen Poe, poised to recite "The Raven" to a Virginia audience. One of the most unusual stories unfolds through a narrative divided between the first and third persons as a handsome man confesses the rise and fall of his love for an ugly, trusting, older woman he had to destroy before he could understand the depth of his feelings for her.
Banks is as unpredictable as he is careful. These stories will take you by surprise because for all their bluntness, there is no brashness. He is a subtle writer. "Stacy didn't mean to tell Noonan that when she was seventeen she was struck by lightning. She rarely told anyone." is the opening sentence of "Lobster Night". In the next paragraph, some extra information is added; it was also the night "she shot and killed him".
Interestingly the stories are arranged randomly, not chronologically; the dates of publication are given in a final footnote. This proves fascinating not only as regards Banks's career, but in the context of a number of narratives all set in a trailer park with a small community of angry losers and crazy dreamers. The trailer stories are not presented as a group, but rather as instalments. We happen upon them. Chance references are made to characters who reappear in subsequent stories and a passing remark becomes a life history. By the end of the book, the trailer stories leave one with the feeling of having read a self-contained novel.
In "The Fisherman" the first of these visits to Granite State Trailer Park, the focus is on Merle Ring, an elderly ice fisherman. Each winter he comes into his own. "When ground froze, his walk took on a springing, almost sprightly look, as if he were happy to find the earth rock-hard, impenetrable, and utterly unyielding." Old Merle waits until the ice is thick enough to bear the weight of his bob-house, a small hut set on the ice. Inside it he cuts through the ice in preparation for putting his lines through. Merle is tidy, organised, distant. "It didn't matter whom he was talking to, Merle's observations and opinions left you feeling puzzled, a little hurt and irritated."
All of a sudden old Merle, a man of habit who has always bought his monthly ticket, wins the state lottery. Now an object of interest in the trailer park, Merle is visited by most of his neighbours, each with perfectly good reasons for why he should give them a loan. As indifferent to money as he is to most other things, Merle pays up. When he later wins the Grand Lottery, his neighbours are outraged that such a person should now be in the possession of so much cash. It is left to Marcelle Chagnon, the middle-aged woman who runs the trailer park to ask herself, "Am I crazy, or is everybody trying to figure out how to get Merle's money for themselves? It's his money, and I don't care what in hell he does with it." Out of a cast of remarkable, if odd, characters, she presents the voice of reason, bewildered but reasonable.
In another story, "The Child Screams and Looks Back at You", Marcelle's history is traced back beyond the trailer park, to the time she was a brutalised young wife. Having escaped her husband to raise her boys on her own, Marcelle has survived, but watched one of them die at the age of 12 from meningitis. The doctor, who was propositioning her at the time, had decided it was a bad 'flu. Now she runs the trailer park. That's the way it is for the people in these stories. One former resident of the trailer park is Tom Smith. Now he is just a sad memory, a suicide whose trailer is difficult to rent.
But in "The Burden" he comes into focus. Abandoned by his wife he looks after their son, who grows up unnaturally handsome and unnaturally wayward. Eventually wearied by the boy's thieving, Tom sends him away. The father is described as having "studied the boy's face carefully, as if seeing something there he had never seen before. When you love someone for years, you lose sight of how that person looks to the rest of the world. Then one day, even though it's painful, you push that person away, and suddenly you can see him the way a stranger sees him . . . Tom stopped looking at his son and instead looked at the ground."
The best story in a book of riches is "The Guinea Pig Lady", which proves as tragically offbeat as it is hilarious through the skilful interplay of the characters. Flora Pease, ex-US Airforce, is an unlikely addition to the trailer park - or anywhere else for that matter. Given to singing songs from the Broadway musicals at the top of her voice, she also looks odd; "her body was a little strange, however, and people remarked on that. It was blocky and square-shaped, not exactly feminine and not exactly masculine, so that while she could almost pass for either man or woman, she was generally regarded as neither . . . what didn't make sense was how someone who seemed slightly cracked, as Flora came quickly to seem, could have stayed in the military long enough to end up collecting a pension for it."
Flora buys a couple of guinea pigs and soon has close on 100 of them, with numbers rising. Her neighbours are interested, particularly the college boy who also enjoys smoking dope with her. Marcelle is called in to deal with the guinea pig family. Her policy on life is one of live and let live. Then Flora becomes ill. It is the longest story; its threads and those of the other trailer park stories are intermingled. Yet these narratives also stand on their own. Spanning some 30 years, they reveal as much about the US and the post-war American short story, as they do about the bluntly subtle art of Russell Banks. Certainly one of the books of the year, it is also a collection to stand alongside those of John Cheever and William Maxwell, Ford and Updike.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
