Two more by Russell Banks

Russell Banks is an author that should not be missed. In 2008 he published the nonfiction book Dreaming Up America and the novel The Reserve. Like much of Banks' work, these two stories both take place in the Adirondacks, where the novelist lives with poet Chase Twitchell.

Rule of the Bone (1995)

Chappie, the fourteen year old narrator, lives in a trailer park in Plattsburgh with his mother and an abusive, alcoholic stepfather. A small-time drug dealer and full time truant, we meet Chappee as he becomes a modern-day Huckleberry Finn, on the road looking for his next puff of grass. Through the course of the book, he saves one child, is reborn after a fire nearly kills him, and meets Iman, a Rastafarian who gives him a taste of self and humanity.

 

Chappie’s transformations give this novel its structure and moral latitude. Banks tells that he wrote Rule of the Bone while living in Jamaica and watching his Caucasian daughters transform as they played with Jamaican children. It is a book about class, race, how we can transcend race, and how we are bound by it. These are the issues he will also grapple with in his magnum opus, Cloudsplitter.

Cloudsplitter (1998)

Banks said it took seven years to write this novel about the infamous antihero, John Brown, the Adirondacks-based abolitionist and one of America's first homegrown terrorists. This past January marked the 150th year anniversary of Brown’s hanging.

The author chooses Owen, Brown's crippled third son, to be the narrator for Cloudsplitter. He was looking for a narrator who loved Brown, but was also afraid and bullied by him. Banks’ challenge was to represent Brown, a working class farmer with a large family and a radical moral compass, as a whole man for the reader.

This Pulitzer Prize finalist takes place in and around North Elba, a free Negro community in the Adirondacks in the years leading up to the Civil War. Similar to Rule of the Bone , the novel explores the mixing of races and draws on characters who strive to transcend race and make meaningful connections. John Brown might have been the best example of a man shaped by history, who turns around and tries to right a wrong he can not live with, slavery, by any means necessary.