The New Yorker:

In his last book, “American Spirits,” Banks took stories from the news about rural, working-class life and turned them into fables of national despair.

By Casey Cep

What’s wrong with . . . everywhere? We traditionally ascribe the pathologies of American life to any place that isn’t where we live: blue states lament red states, rural areas despair over inner cities, downstate frets about upstate, our somewhere pities your anywhere else. Lately, though, that cultural pessimism seems to have come closer to home: fear of neighbors with a different flag in their apartment windows, anger at other parents in the school pickup line with the wrong stickers on their bumpers, even disdain for close relatives at the Thanksgiving table.

The three long stories in “American Spirits,” the latest and last book by Russell Banks, are set in these intimate chasms within our communities. Banks, who died, of cancer, last year, at the age of eighty-two, published more than twenty books, most of them novels. He often wrote about the sort of Americans he was descended from, working-class people who were stubbornly stuck in dysfunction or poverty or both. People who, as he once said, saw success as an attack on their own lives and were too tired for the American Dream. In his final book, such characters have something else in common: in all three stories, there’s a conspicuous reference to their choice to vote for the forty-fifth President. “Trump might be a bastard,” one of them says, “but he’s *our *bastard.”

“American Spirits” might easily be misread as an effort to explain how the past two Presidential elections turned out, or to predict the outcome of the next one. But the book isn’t an attempt to transform diner journalism into literature. As he did in the novels “Continental Drift” and “The Reserve,” Banks is working here in one of the great points of view in American literature: neighborly omniscience. Like the unnamed narrator who finds Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter in the Salem Custom House and then sets about telling her tale, Banks’s narrators are anonymous busybodies and town gossips, nosy neighbors or observers once removed from the action. 

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