...furiously driven ...One of the main strands of Banks’s fiction has long been what you might call a working-class New England existentialism ... Foregone is in the same vein, only here the protagonist is an artist. And what Banks reveals of this artist’s life is a profound emptiness, seeded early on, which Fife has run from ever since ... As always, Banks’s prose has remarkable force to it ... The book’s real theme is the curse of being convinced that one is unlovable. And who among us hasn’t suffered that conviction to one degree or another?
The mixture of bravado and vulnerability is characteristic of Mr. Banks’s impressive body of work, whose range has been underappreciated ... a gruff exterior covers an abyss of sentimentality ... This is a sensitive but dreary novel of valediction that pursues atonement without any apparent belief that such a thing is possible.
Drawing at times on the broad outlines of his own life, Banks presents the story of a man tearing through the affections of others in search of a sense of purpose commensurate with his ego. In many ways, this is a well-worn story in America and American literature — the facile White male darting from responsibilities he considers too restrictive and too beneath him ... But Banks has embedded that self-indulgent tragedy in the larger context of an anguished confession ... Without ever collapsing into nonsense, it’s a remarkably fluid use of prose to represent the experience of delirium while wrestling to the final moments with the challenge of absolution ... in this complex and powerful novel, we come face to face with the excruciating allure of redemption.
Foregone is, by far, the most cunningly metafictional novel of the author’s career ... readers, especially those who have already read Voyager and have begun to recognize the reverberations, can be forgiven for feeling as if they are trapped in a metafictional—and autofictional—echo chamber ... Foregone captures this sense of irremediable artifice in its very form, which resists straightforward chronology in its palimpsest of hazy memories, and even confuses interior and exterior worlds by refusing to circumscribe dialogue from introspection and narrative summary ... a crafty sense of recollection as fabulation, as well as a bracing willingness to place at the narrative center a character it is almost impossible for readers to like. The fact that this character is, here, a quasi-autobiographical surrogate only makes the strategy braver and more complexly engaging. This is not to say that Fife is totally unsympathetic. His rage at his failing body, and his terror in the face of imminent death, are captured with poignant precision. Indeed, I can think of few recent novels that have conveyed the fear of looming extinction...more powerfully, and Fife’s fervent urge to tell his tale before the curtain falls is ultimately admirable ... The only (somewhat) false note the book strikes is in the character of the Haitian nurse ... Renée thus comes as close as any character in Banks’s corpus to filling the dubious role of Magical Negro, though any reader who knows the author’s other fiction will probably be willing, as I am, to give him the benefit of the doubt here ... If Foregone turns out to be Banks’s final novel (and, given its many strengths, one hopes not), it is a profoundly compelling valedictory.
Depending on how you slice Foregone, you might find a book about a temperamental, privileged, cishet white male artist, a book about capturing art, a book about dying, a book about personal truth, or even (and finally) a book about how the spotlight lies to us ... Banks has crafted a powerful novel about what remains.
... unfolds as a daring and deftly constructed film-within-a-novel about the ethical quagmire of deathbed confession. With even its extended flashbacks told in the present tense, as if Fife were watching these scenes from his life as he recounts them, Foregone at times feels like a film recreated in written form ... a remarkable reflection on the ways that guilt, regret, narcissism, faulty memory, not knowing when to shut up, and simply running out of time shape the stories we tell at the end of our lives, and how quickly we lose control of those stories after we die.
... the protagonist of Russell Banks' exuberant new novel, Foregone, is such an unreliable if captivating narrator ... that tension is just one of the book's many delights ... It's a thrill to watch Banks pull off so many risky formal maneuvers. Foregone is a brilliantly cinematic novel; it moves in and out of the past and present like a camera, with montages, dissolves and jump cuts. There are memories embedded with memories, agonized mashups of Fife's betrayals ... Few writers have explored the regrets of aging and the door-knock of mortality with Banks' steely-eyed grace and gorgeous language. Foregone is a subtle yet unsparing achievement from a master.
Banks, a conduit for the confounded and the unlucky, a writer acutely attuned to place and ambiance, is at his most magnetic and provocative in this portrait of a celebrated documentary filmmaker on the brink of death ... In this masterful depiction of a psyche under siege by disease, age, and guilt, Banks considers with profound intent the verity of memory, the mercurial nature of the self, and how little we actually know about ourselves and others.
The novel’s structure, which alternates two very different narrative segments, seems awkward at first and then strikingly effective ... Banks, who turned 80 this year, explores aging, memory, and reputation in thoughtful and touching ways, enhanced by the correspondence between aspects of Leo’s life and the writer’s own history ... A challenging, risk-taking work marked by a wry and compassionate intelligence.
... sinuous if uneven ... Fife’s reminiscences are generally vivid, though the spell is dissipated by the weaker scenes in which, for instance, Emma repeatedly objects to proceeding with the interview and the sycophantic Malcolm reiterates the novel’s themes in windy proclamations. Still, Banks keeps the audience rapt.
