American Spirits - Russell Banks

 

The literary world suffered a great loss when author Russell Banks died of cancer in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two. Twice a Pulitzer Prize for fiction finalist, Banks came to be known as a novelist and short story writer whose work usually focused on the daily struggles and stresses of ordinary working people, those forever fated to remain on the outside looking in at others whose lives they perceive to be so much easier than their own. 

Banks's first novel, Family Life, was published in 1975 along with Searching for Survivors, his first short story collection. The Magic Kingdom, the last novel to be published during the author's lifetime, came along in 2022, some forty-seven years after Family Life. But as it turns out, there's going to be at least one more Russell Banks book for readers to enjoy because American Spirits, a collection of three loosely connected stories, will be published in just a few days (March 5, 2024). 

The three stories in American Spirits, each about eighty pages in length, or set in and around the fictional community of Sam Dent, New York. The little town is named after an early settler to the area who donated the land for the townsite on the strict condition that it be called "Sam Dent," and nothing else - certainly not some corruption of his surname such as Denton or Dentville. Unfortunately for Mr. Dent, the future would not treat his descendants kindly, and it has been all downhill for the Dents since Sam's passing. 

In "Nowhere Man," a struggling family man and his siblings decide to sell off much of the remaining family land they still hold only to have the purchaser open a private gun range and training facility for right wing militia members on the property they sell him. After the seller dares complain about the resulting noise and the now-broken promises made to him prior to the sale, his life becomes pure hell.

"Homeschooling" is set in one of Sam Dent's finer neighborhoods where two very different families struggle to figure out just what to make of each other. In one family, a woman and her wife who have adopted four black siblings live in total isolation in the large home in which they homeschool the children. In the other, a young couple naively in love with the whole idea of life in "the country" moves in next door along with their own two children. Things begin to get strange almost as soon as the two families first set eyes on each other.

The third story in American Spirits, "Kidnapped," is about an elderly couple kidnapped and held for ransom by two Canadian criminals who have come south to collect the money that the elderly couple's grandson owes the men. The utter ineptness of this pair makes them more dangerous than anyone can imagine. 

Russell Banks is not one to have ever pulled punches in his fiction, and the realistically presented stories in this collection are a vivid reminder of how quickly things can go from bad to worse in the crazy world we live in today. American Spirits is pure Russell Banks, another reminder of just how badly Banks is going to be missed.

Russell Banks in 2011 (Wikipedia Photo)