The Reserve

This is a wonderful book with a GREAT story. Banks continues to surprise me with his great writing. Buy this if you love Russell Banks.

I've never read Russell Banks before, so I wasn't sure what to expect of THE RESERVE. The dust jacket copy and cover art reeled me in, so I bought it. This is apparently his homage to the American literary giants of yesteryear, notably Hemingway and Fitzgerald, with a distinctly modern point of view. It is certainly well-written, and the soapy plot is lively, and the contrast between the very rich and the working class at the height of the Depression is well-drawn. The two principal male characters are another study in contrasts, and they're interesting men. But the woman at the center of the story, the fabulously beautiful Vanessa Cole...well, much of your enjoyment of THE RESERVE will depend on your tolerance for her, and she is truly irritating, a charmless variation on any number of Hemingway and Fitzgerald characters. Still, the evocation of time and place is vivid, and there's a swoony romanticism to it all that's fun to read. Now I think I'll try some of his other, less derivative works.

This is a book about bad choices made by less than perfect people. In other words, about your life and mine. The basic difference is that almost all of these people are rich, but trust me, their wealth does not improve their decision-making prowess. Wild, beautiful, and possibly deranged heiress Vanessa Cole is like the sun at the center of the story. She's also possibly the only one who really knows what's what, although it's tough to detect the truth among her many delusions. Wealthy artist Jordan Groves resembles Icarus, flying his Waco biplane closer and closer to Vanessa until he, like everyone who touches her, crashes in flames. It's a strained metaphor, maybe, but one highly applicable. It all takes place during the Great Depression at a remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as the Reserve, where Vanessa's family partakes of the great outdoors as only the very rich can do. She's the adopted (or is she?) daughter of a brain surgeon father who conveniently drops dead of a heart attack in the first chapter and a drunken socialite mother who spends a great deal of the book trying to have her daughter committed to an asylum. The loving family's secrets could fill a vault---which they do, in fact. Jordan's exploits provide great counterpoint to Vanessa's, both physically and mentally. Jordan straddles the divide between the poor artist he used to be and the wealthy, successful one he's become. He detests the very rich and all their trappings, but loves their money and attention. A subplot with Jordan's wife, Alicia, and local Adirondack guide Hubert St. Germain, who also works for Vanessa's family, rounds out the plot nicely. A passage near the end captures the essence of the story for me: "Hubert looked down at his hands, one holding his old fedora by the brim, the other upturned in his lap, as if waiting for a coin from a passerby. What he was doing now did not feel any longer like the right thing. But it was too late to stop it, too late to go back to what he had been doing before. That had felt wrong, too. In little more than twenty-four hours---starting at the moment Vanessa Cole showed up at his cabin door---he had arrived at a place in his life where he could no longer choose between right and wrong." Banks does a fine job of stepping into his character's minds and telling the story from viewpoints that shift from paragraph to paragraph---no mean feat, but one he accomplishes quite handily. He also maintains a remarkable amount of suspense for a murder tale where you know exactly who killed whom at the time it happens.

I just read Michiko Kakutani's (New York Times) over-the-top venomous review of this book. I don't know either Mr. Banks or Ms. Kakutani, but her review was so insanely nasty, I'm purchasing a copy of this book right now, just to see what set her to muttering in a corner. I've really loved Banks' work in the past, so I'm giving this an advanced, five, life-time-achievement stars.