Russell Banks. Cormac McCarthy. Milan Kundera. Three novelists who captured my attention during the late 1980s and into the mid-1990s, who addressed big ideas and language and the impact of memory and who influenced me as a writer in ways that may not seem apparent.
Each of them were unabashedly masculine in their interests, crafting characters that owe as much to Hemingway as they do to any other writer. Banks was probably the most conventional of the three — his prose was crisp and vibrant, but clear and accessible, and his willingness to explore some of the seamier aspects of modern American life left him vulnerable to criticism.
I remember, shortly after I read Rule of the Bone, a novel about a homeless teen who flees to Jamaica, reading a review that criticized Banks for trivializing homelessness — a criticism that seemed unfair then and continues to make little sense to me. Banks was not a journalist. He was a novelist and the novelist and storyteller takes chances, borrows from others’ lives, and remakes what he encounters into something new. His choices do not imply endorsement, though Banks did imbue even his most reprehensible characters with a modicum of humanity (See Lost Memory of Skin).
Banks sought in his writing to “excavate and redeem the dregs of modern society,” as NPR reviewer Maureen Corrigan wrote about Lost Memory of Skin. His oeuvre was the impact that American culture — capitalism and consumerism, in particular — had on individuals, how it impacted their lives and their belief systems. Cloudsplitter is probably his most important work, telling the story of John Brown as an allegory for American myth making. Brown, whose raid on Harpers Ferry is generally thought to be the first salvo in the Civil War. Brown is presented as religious fanatic, who sees the American creed “All men are created equal” as a religious imperative that warrants the most extreme acts of violence to accomplish. Brown’s son tells the story, which adds a layer of distance, an unreliability that colors our judgements. Brown is neither unabashedly good nor evil, mostly because his son struggles to understand his father and what his father demanded, but also because Brown’s goal of emancipation cannot be argued against.
This sense of ambivalence is centered in all of his work, and invites us to return to his best novels over and over again.
If Banks offered precise and accessible prose, McCarthy in his best works — the Border trilogy, and much of his earliest novels — follows Faulkner’s model, crafting twisting and difficult sentences that obscure meaning and stylize the violence. His novels are as much about language and its limits as they are about a particular place — usually the West of American mythology — or questions of morality or man’s place in society.
Kundera occupies a different space. A Czech living in France for much of his adult life, writing about the distortions of totalitarian Communism in Eastern Europe. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, John Updike wrote when the book was released in the United States in 1980, “the theme of forgetting is masterfully, effortlessly ubiquitous,” showing itself in official and private spaces.
On the official level, erasure achieves comic effects. The comrade named Clementis who solicitously placed his own cap upon Klement Gottwald's head on the cold day of party annunciation in 1948 was hanged four years later, and airbrushed out of all propaganda photographs, so that "All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head." The president the Russians installed after Dubcek, Gustav Husak "is known as the president of forgetting.." Official forgetting is echoed by the personal struggle of the subjects of so revisable a government to recover lost letters, to remember details that give life emotional continuity. The expatriate native of Prague called Tamina, in the central and perhaps best of these disparate though linked chapters, recites to herself all the pet names by which her dead husband ever had called her, and, less and less able to remember his face, resorts to a desperate exercise: ". . .she developed her own special technique of calling him to mind. Whenever she sat across from a man, she would use his head as a kind of sculptor's armature. She would concentrate all her attention on him and remodel his face inside her head, darkening the complexion, adding freckles and warts, scaling down the ears, and coloring the eyes blue. But all her efforts only went to show that her husband's image had disappeared for good."
This “forgetting” is political, but it infects all else, fractures the connection to truth, and allows the totalitarian government to replace journalism with propaganda that portrays those in power as the stewards of the nation. Anything that contradicts the narrative pressed by the leaders of the totalitarian regime must be erased or assimilated and redefined.
We have been living through a version of this, since well before Donald Trump and Fox News. Ronald Reagan was adept at this, normalizing what had been a fringe sensibility, and the inheritors of his coalition — the Bushes and Trump — have only built upon it, pushing us closer to a form of fascism than many are willing to admit.
These flawed writers (their women characters were never as well drawn as their men) captured elements of our contemporary moment, elements that are universal, and it’s why we continue to read them. They will be missed, but at least we have their work.