Continental Drift

But it was not until the publication of his eighth book, Continental Drift, in 1985, that Banks first achieved critical success. The novel is the story of Bob Dubois, a burned-out oil-burner repairman from New Hampshire struggling to escape mediocrity, and Vanise Dorsinville, a refugee struggling to escape Haiti for the promised land of America, and the tragedy that ensues when they become involved in each other’s destiny. The novel’s title refers to the theory that the earth’s continents were once a united land mass that broke up and continues to drift slowly apart. Banks, however, is referring to demographic, not geologic, drifting, as people all over the world flee their homes in search of new lives. He is also describing the drift that occurs between human hearts, leaving an unbridgeable gap between husbands and wives, families and friends.

In order to capture a narrative voice capable of encompassing the disparate worlds of blue-collar New England and Caribbean voodoo, Banks invokes the Haitian loa, or mouth-man, the spirit of the dead that speaks through the mouth of the living, to help tell the story. “I’m really interested in reinventing the narrator. It’s a convention that went out the window in the twentieth century. I want to feel I have my arm around a shoulder of this reader and I’m explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to this person that I’ve stopped, like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ I’m like the ancient mariner stopping the wedding guest in his rush to tell this wonder to him. And I want to have that sense of intimacy, a face-to-face, arm-around-the-shoulder contact”. Continental Drift, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the John Dos Passos Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. James Atlas, writing in Atlantic Monthly, hailed the book as “a great American novel … a lesson in history…. It is the most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America.”

Writing also helped Banks come to terms with his past. Though he made peace with his father before the older man’s death in 1979, the theme of troubled father-son relationships continues to play a large role in Banks’s novels. In Affliction, he explores the terrible legacy that an alcoholic and abusive father, Wade Whitehouse, has upon his son. “Writing Affliction, and dealing with Wade Whitehouse, gave me a kind of mercy and certainly forgiveness and understanding of my father that if I had just turned my back on him and walked away and acted bruised and hurt the rest of my life, I never would have obtained.”

In The Sweet Hereafter, Banks again explores the world of troubled blue-collar families. The novel takes as its central event the fatal crash of a school bus and the devastating effect it has on a small town’s emotional life. Banks was initially inspired by a newspaper clipping of a similar crash, as well as the tragic early death of his younger brother. The freight train his seventeen-year-old brother hopped onto was caught in a mudslide in Santa Barbara. “It was an inexplicable event. It was a mystery, finally.” The novel wrestles with issues of blame and causation in cases of accidents.

“I want to feel I have my arm around a shoulder of this reader and I’m explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to this person that I’ve stopped, like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’”

“In Rule of the Bone], Banks borrows from Huckleberry Finn in order to create a contemporary American odyssey of race relations and alienation of youth.”

Rule of the Bone returns to the author’s twin obsession with Jamaica and dysfunctional American families. The novel tells the story of a teenage misfit’s flight from an unhappy home in an upstate New York trailer park and the series of adventures he embarks upon until his final redemption in Jamaica. Banks borrows from Huckleberry Finn in order to create a contemporary American odyssey of race relations and alienation of youth.

Buoyed by the success of these novels, as well as the film adaptations of The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, Banks retired from teaching and gave up his professorship at Princeton. “A funny thing happened when I quit Princeton “he recalled in The Irish Times. “My attention shifted. I immediately forgot opinions I had on things like deconstruction. And I started noticing things like: ‘Why is the television set on in my neighbor’s house at five in the morning? Is that woman really unhappy? Or has the old man got drunk again and passed out?’ I sat in on a murder trial in the next town. I read the local paper instead of the TLS.”