‘A Permanent Member of the Family’ stories by Russell Banks (2013) – 228 pages

As a fiction writer, Russell Banks deals with the world as it is, not with what it could or should be.  He can make us feel the agony of a town when dozens of its schoolchildren die in a horrific bus accident or the pain of the family when their dog dies.   He writes of severe misunderstandings between men and women, of divorce, of families breaking up.  Russell Banks is one of our best realists when it comes to these poignant matters. 

I went through a spell when Russell Banks was my favorite writer back in the early Nineties.  I first read, ‘The Sweet Hereafter’, his novel about a small town in the aftermath of the terrible school bus accident.  In that novel, Banks was able to capture the emotions of many of the town’s inhabitants.  ‘The Sweet Hereafter’ was made into an excellent movie by Atom Egoyan. After reading it, I quickly went on to read Banks’ ‘Continental Drift’ and ‘Affliction’ as well as his book of stories ‘Success Stories’, and my opinion of him as a writer went even higher.  But somehow I did not get back to reading Russell Banks until now when I read his latest collection of stories, ‘A Permanent Member of the Family’.

This collection has all of the qualities of his fiction I admired before.   Perhaps my favorite story in the collection is ‘Snowbirds’ about a woman helping another woman cope with the death of her husband.  The urn with the ashes of her husband sits in their Florida room, but the new widow is so cheerfully intoxicated with her new single life so that the woman her helping begins to question her own marriage. I liked this story because it wasn’t as depressing as some of the others, and it did not have a male protagonist as many of the other stories do.  A male protagonist in a Russell Banks story always comes across like Russell Banks himself rather than as a separate distinct character in the story.

Russell Banks is quite inventive in the setup of his stories, and every one of these stories was unique and satisfying to me. The stories have enough original situations and twists to keep me interested.  Each story is well-formed with a strong emotional payoff.     

However my attitude toward realism in fiction has changed since the early Nineties. I never did believe that capturing real life was the end-all and be-all goal of good fiction.  Today I am even less enamored of stark realistic portrayals in fiction or movies.   I want fiction that makes room for the playful and the ‘merely’ pleasant.   I prefer sentences that are frivolous and vivacious rather than plain and sparse. 

So where does that leave Russell Banks, our ultimate realist?  Don’t get me wrong, I still like his down-to-earth fiction.    However realism is just one little room in the mighty house of fiction.