A few days ago someone on Facebook was asking what writers deal with the lives of blue-collar Americans. Russell Banks immediately came to mind. Another one would be Bobbie Ann Mason or Bonnie Jo Campbell. There are lots but there should be more. Too many novels are about academics, the rich, the almost rich.
Continental Drift, Russell Banks.
It is hard for me to choose between AFFLICTION and CONTINENTAL DRIFT as
my favorite novel by Russell Banks. But I am going with this one today.
You may have seen the filmed version of AFFLICTION, a tremendous film
with Nick Nolte and James Coburn.
Bob Dubois is a furnace repairman in a blue-collar town in New
Hampshire, a state the American Dream has bypassed. Although Bob has a
wife, three kids and a steady, if low-paying job, he is persuaded to
look for a better life in Miami by his brother.
Bob is a good man although not a smart one. The sixties has persuaded
him that there is something better out there. That it is foolish to be
satisfied with a meager living in a depressed town.
Another character is also seeking a better life in Miami. A female
Haitian refuge, who truly does need asylum and comes to the U.S. in a
perilous manner. These two lives intersect in a Florida that is the
antithesis of paradise, both characters suffering tragedy. This is not a
happy book or one to escape into, but it is one that presents
characters and situations that seem real and compelling.
Banks died in January. Here is his NYT obit.
8 comments:
This sounds really interesting, Patti. I'd heard of his work but not read it. I should.
I'm with you on Russell Banks. A very underrated writer. CONTINENTAL DRIFT is powerful...and true.
January 8 we were on the road to Florida so I missed his obituary.
Blue collar writers? Of course there was Andre Dubus and Raymond Carver.
As a former New Hampshire resident, I remember well how that state, along with every other state everywhere, if full of people for whom the American Dream and its local equivalents have passed by and flipped them the bird while doing so.
I'm finally writing up a Lawrence Block book I've been meaning to do (and had lumped it in with one of my too-ambitious 400-volume assemblies that never get finished enough), and he's certainly another who has at least touched on this general state of being in some of his work...Liza Cody...Theodore Sturgeon...hell, some of my favorite kids' books dealt graphically with these sorts of things, at very least how they affected the kid protags...DeSantis and similar clowns would have to dig back into the '40s, at very least, to ban them retroactively from young eyes (I think of Esther Forbes, Eleanor Clymer, Marijane Meaker, Ester Wier--women who have E names might predominate! That corrupter of youth Dickens, along with that Steinbeck et al.)...
I think George again has referred to someone who isn't read as widely as he might be as underrated...I think Banks is about as highly-regarded, much as BA Mason is, as writers tend to be these days. Well, of course, he's no Bret Easton Ellis, but, really, who sensibly would want to be? Quite aside from the presumable state of Ellis's finances, or possibly where they were before coking them away.
SHort CUTS.
Indeed. That one a slightly more mixed bag in the film version, but a brilliant cast, as well.
In terms of fiction involving blue collar americans, I've been pretty into proletarian lit of late--which generally focuses on the working class or in some cases (my favorite) the lumpenproletariat (a la jim thompson). Some working class writers I've liked:
Henry Roth
Jack Conroy
Meridel Le Seuer
Thomas Bell
James T. Farrell
Tillie Olsen
Steinbeck
Agnes Smedley
Carlos Bulosan
Len Zinberg (aka ed lacy)
jim tully
thomas kromer
edward dahlberg
nelson algren
chester himes
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