Isn’t the finest example of his talents, but it’s a user-friendly introduction to his sensibility, fit for an election year when delusion is part of the narrative. In Banks’ parcel of America, residents try to escape the past, but the past always has a way of getting back at us.
If the residents of Sam Dent were merely stereotypes of a political movement, then American Spirits wouldn’t have the impressive heft that it does. Instead, they are, to a person, indelible characters, with lives full of meticulously observed details.
Banks’s stories are about fragile, everyday people whom, despite their resilience and strength, life still manages to break. An imaginatively constructed novel from a late master storyteller.
Each story is a model of grotesque beauty ... Anyone keen to discover why Banks was one of the most celebrated writers of his day will find ample evidence in these brutal, propulsive works.
The tone in these passages is almost elegiac: hymns to a past when fewer wounds were self-inflicted. Grim but compelling narratives from this fine writer.
Elegant ... Told in a wry and folksy first person, its tangled plot involves not only kidnapping but blackmail, murder, and a late night heart-to-heart over Double Quarter Pounders. As ever, the reader senses the confidence in Banks’s narrative voice. This is a welcome addition to the legacy of a master storyteller.
