The New World: Tales by Russell Banks

by Russell Banks

The New World is, in the words of its author, "a carefully structured gathering of ten tales that dramatize and explore the process and progress of self-transcendence, tales that describe and embrace the spiritual limits and possibilities of life in the New World." Both religious and funny, the stories mark a giant step forward in Banks's rapid development into one of the nation's most exciting young writers.

Genres: Fiction

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Russell Banks was a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He has written fiction, and more recently, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl]

The story I found most affecting in this 1978 collection was "The Conversion." It's the longest story, and one of the more conventional narratives. Sixteen-year-old Alvin Stock lives in New Hampshire with his working class parents in the 1950s. He does well in school, is athletic and good-looking, popular with both boys and girls, but loathes himself because of his constant horniness and chronic masturbation. When he drinks with his friends, he loses control and does things he regrets later, like breaking into the vacation cabin of an acquaintance's parents and taking a shit in their bathtub. His angry plumber father gives him mundane jobs which he fails at - counting and sorting thousands of cast iron, copper, and brass fittings - because he is interrupted by daydreams. He vows to reform, deciding to take a job at a Christian summer camp, and tells everyone he wants to become a minister. Is it true? Is he capable of reform? It's unclear. After all, he's only 16. But anytime a writer can get me interested in the life of a teenager, it's an accomplishment.

Most of the stories are quite short; a few are in the second person, a few in present tense. The narrator of "The Caul" is Edgar Allan Poe, and the narrator of the feminist revenge tale "Indisposed" is the 18th-century painter William Hogarth's long-suffering wife Jane. (I notice that Hogarth had a pug named Trump, who has his own Wikipedia page, but Trump doesn't feature in the story.) "A Sentimental Education" features an upper-class young woman slumming with a garage mechanic, and lots of raunchy sex. "The Perfect Couple" is fable-like, featuring two men on adjoining farms who one day each acquire a young child, a boy and girl, and the town realizes that these two children are destined for each other. But is it the two children, or the two fathers, who are the perfect couple?

The remaining five stories won't stick in my memory. By this evening they will have vanished.

[John]

(no 27 of 2026)

... title story reads like a history term paper

[Brandt]

This short story collection is divided into two halves, and it is this division that gives me pause to recommending it with anything more than a "meh" for anyone who is looking to read Russell Banks. The first half of the collection is brilliant and Banks at his best, including a nascent version of Hamilton Stark called "The Conversion." However, unlike Hamilton Stark, which concerns itself more with the author of the fictional account of miscreant Hamilton Stark, "The Conversion" is more a look into how someone could become like Stark is in the novel.

The second half of the collection is not so successful, as Banks dips his toe into historical fiction that sometimes comes off as a book report rather than fiction. There is an obvious linkage of the title story to Banks' next novel The Book of Jamaica, but again, I feel that the historical fiction of "The New World" falls short of Banks' best work.