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In 1936, the United States was, as we all remember, in the savage grip of the Depression, with one-third of its workforce unemployed and desperate. Not everyone was suffering, however, least of all the millionaires who still maintained their "Adirondack Great Camps" in the forests of northern New York State. There they played out a wilderness fantasy in elaborate houses, which, in the absence of electricity, they could pretend were rustic camps. Here they could insulate themselves against the uncertainties of the present by a retreat into an imagined, and purer, American past. The Reserve, which provides the title for Banks's newest novel, is just such an enclave, a vast private club from which all motorized craft are banned. On one fatal evening, Jordan Groves, a rich, dashing, left-wing local artist with a national reputation, a character loosely based on the artist and illustrator Rockwell Kent, breaks the ban by landing his pontoon plane on one of the private lakes. Invited by a Reserve resident to drop by to view some paintings by another artist, Jordan stays longer than absolutely necessary, long enough for his host's daughter, Vanessa, to come on to him with the kind of dramatic directness for which she is notorious. Vanessa has been married rather often for a woman of 29 and is mad as a hatter. But Jordan is already well married, though that has never stopped him before and thus he rejects her advances, chiefly on grounds of class. He does not know, though he will soon find out, that his wife, tired of his infidelities and his indifference toward her, has begun an affair with Hubert St Germain, a recently widowed local wilderness guide and man of few words. It would take an extraordinary literary talent to achieve a serious novel from this collection of clichés. Despite his earlier successes, Banks is here not up to the job. His intention was clearly ambitious – to call upon the history of American literature to inform a fiction that turns upon a crime (though why he might want to do this is far from evident). Jordan Groves, despite the references to Rockwell Kent, is closer to Robert Jordan or, indeed, to Hemingway himself – an adventurer, undomesticated, aggressively masculine, and, truth be told, not terribly bright. Banks turns to Hemingway's literary rival, Fitzgerald, for his femme fatale, or perhaps to Fitzgerald's wife, poor mad Zelda, who perished dreadfully in a fire. And finally, of course, there is Hubert, who is descended in a direct line from James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, in the book that claimed this landscape for American literature, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. It is difficult to generate any great sense of immediacy in so schematic a fiction and particularly difficult in one that includes rather a lot of only semi-digested period research. Do we really need to be told the cubic capacity in pounds of the Zeppelin or that GONE WITH THE WIND was a very popular novel? The reader can never be confident of what time it is, as Banks will pursue backstory at the slightest provocation. When, for example, Groves hops in his Ford with his two children and a couple of dogs to drive to the clubhouse on The Reserve, he doesn't go a yard before we learn how long he's had the dogs, where he bought them, how he got them home, and what their names are. Once they get loose on the manicured ground of the clubhouse and are recaptured, having done no damage, they do not appear again. Rarely is a character introduced without a long, often clinical, analysis of his character and past history, detailed to the point that there seems nothing left to find out. Yet, at the climactic moment, when the two central male characters act in inexplicable ways, we cannot really understand what they imagine they are doing. Another device that undercuts the sense of time are the italicized flash-forwards that appear between chapters, accounts which inform us of the characters' futures long before we know what they have done and before we are in a position to judge the justice of their fates. The marketing of THE RESERVE is puzzling, as there seems to be a desire to present it as a crossover novel, part mystery, part 'literary' fiction. There's little mystery to it nor is it, as William Kennedy states in his back cover blurb, "a cool noir thriller." Literary it certainly is, and in the worst sense of the term, drawing as it does on a literary tradition and a set of cultural concepts, but extremely thin when it comes to character, motivation, and even, except perhaps intermittently, drama.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, February 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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