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Continental Drift PS Russell Banks Books

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Continental Drift PS Russell Banks Books

As I read this novel, I found myself thinkinga about John Updike's Rabbit novels as well as John Barth's "Henderson the Rain King" because Bob Dubois is a character created within the same mold, the existential American who is discontent with the lot he has drawn in life and imagines, without benefit of insight, a better life.
For me the settings are more personal maybe because I was born in Vermont, lived there much of my life, then moved to Key West and now Miami Beach. I say this because Bob is from New Hampshire, a high school graduate working repairing people's furnances, married to a young woman, the father at the time of two daughters. And, of course, Bob seeks sexual trysts. A rather typical type of beginning for this type of story with this exception: the details provided to give the reader such an intimate point of view of everything.
Bob's older brother lives in Florida, a man whom Bob believes is a financial success. So off they go after having sold their house in New Hampshire. And that is when the Florida story takes hold, moving the reader from the dreariness of central Florida to the Keys and back to the greater Miami area. And I can attest to how right-on his descriptions are of both place and character.
I cannot agree with the one-star reviews. Not at all. Sure, this is a very pathetic character who interacts with other pathetic characters including drug runners. But what makes this different is that Russell Banks has the skills of a John Updike and a John Barth, something I do not say lightly.
And then there is this wonderful component: the parallel Haitian story.
It is so powerful, all elements of this wonderful novel.


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Continental Drift PS Russell Banks Books Reviews

Unexpected and exceptionally entertaining and stylistically beautiful with a very strong nod towards trying to decipher the why and how race and culture impacts us in very personal ways. I do wish he'd given just a bit more "air time" to the female protagonist, but it is art, not agenda, and his story is beautifully sculpted.
This book was introduced to me by my eldest son who is a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Apparently, it was on a reading list for an English class in which he was enrolled. It came with his strong recommendation. I can only concur with his judgement.

"Continental Drift" is a modern American gem. It covers two ultimately intersecting lives. In the first place, Bob Dubois is a working class oil burner repair man from snowy New Hampshire. He is hard working but clearly going no where. He has a dead end job and can only see ahead of him a hard life of toil and just making do. The novel's other key character is Vanise Dorsinville, a young Haitian woman trying desperately to avoid the abject poverty of Haiti and start a new life in America. At first glance, there lives have nothing in common. However, such is the tide of events that their lives do, indeed, cross. The circumstances are not joyful.

Russell Banks has crafted a work where continental drift has a much wider meaning than that implied by geology. Here we see the drift not as land masses but as individuals with events bring them closer together. The term might also be seen as applying to marriage. Bob Dubois has a family but, again, events conspire against it. Forces are at work that are tearing at its very fabric. Again, the outcome is not propitious.

I can highly recommend this book to all readers. It presents an image of America's underbelly not widely seen. Banks is a modern master. In many respects, he reminds me of a John Steinbeck. Such praise is not hyperbole; rather, it is warranted.
The writing and construction were excellent. The author presented a desultory view of the lower middle class in America along with terrible problems faced by people from Haiti trying to improve their situation and come to this country. One of the beginning chapters describes the randomness of geological events on Earth.
It would seem that crime is an option considered to "get ahead" in this country by those who are dissatisfied with their lives and it maybe just the way some business is done. One of the characters takes a job out of necessity which doesn't involve any dishonesty, but the rest are all involved in shady dealings which ultimately result in a terrible tragedy. If you buy the premise that life stinks and no matter what you do the forces of nature or uncontrollable, random events will work against even if you work to right them, you can add a star.
"Continental Drift" is a novel about poverty and social class, in the line of Dreiser, Steinbeck, and Carolyn Chute. Two protagonists, the struggling oil burner repairman Bob Dubois and the defenseless Haitian immigrant Vanise Dorsinville, drift gradually toward their eventual meeting off the coast of Florida.

Banks is interested in characters who appear ordinary on the surface but who harbor deep longings that set them apart. These characters are not particularly admirable. Bob Dubois loves his wife but has casual affairs with other women; he loves his children but has little interaction with them; he has a moral sense that never leads him in quite the right direction. Vanise Dorsinville is so abject a figure that she seems in incapable of any decision at all, whether for good or bad. Each has a sense that a better life must await, somewhere.

Like Steinbeck, Dreiser, and Chute, Banks has a gift for portraying those who live in poverty or, as in "Lost Memory of Skin," his most recent novel, individuals who live on the margins of society. Bob Dubois has as complex an inner life, endures as difficult a series of moral dilemmas, as any character in a Henry James novel. At times he looks in a mirror or at his reflection in the eyes of another and is astonished at what he sees.

"Continental Drift" is a compelling tragedy. Although it was first published more than two decades ago, its depictions of poverty and of striving for a better life are as relevant as they ever were.

M. Feldman
As I read this novel, I found myself thinkinga about John Updike's Rabbit novels as well as John Barth's "Henderson the Rain King" because Bob Dubois is a character created within the same mold, the existential American who is discontent with the lot he has drawn in life and imagines, without benefit of insight, a better life.
For me the settings are more personal maybe because I was born in Vermont, lived there much of my life, then moved to Key West and now Miami Beach. I say this because Bob is from New Hampshire, a high school graduate working repairing people's furnances, married to a young woman, the father at the time of two daughters. And, of course, Bob seeks sexual trysts. A rather typical type of beginning for this type of story with this exception the details provided to give the reader such an intimate point of view of everything.
Bob's older brother lives in Florida, a man whom Bob believes is a financial success. So off they go after having sold their house in New Hampshire. And that is when the Florida story takes hold, moving the reader from the dreariness of central Florida to the Keys and back to the greater Miami area. And I can attest to how right-on his descriptions are of both place and character.
I cannot agree with the one-star reviews. Not at all. Sure, this is a very pathetic character who interacts with other pathetic characters including drug runners. But what makes this different is that Russell Banks has the skills of a John Updike and a John Barth, something I do not say lightly.
And then there is this wonderful component the parallel Haitian story.
It is so powerful, all elements of this wonderful novel.