Fugitive

By R.Z. Sheppard

AFFLICTION

by Russell Banks

Harper & Row; 355 pages; $18.95

Russell Banks' 1985 novel, Continental Drift, linked the fate of a blue- collar New Englander with the tragedy of Haitian boat people. In case the reader missed the serious point, Banks began his story with an "Invocation" and ended with a war cry, "Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is."

Minimalists trying to imitate the pin-drop prose of the late Raymond Carver would consider Banks' style uncool. But judging from the author's output, cool seems like a social disease. His structures lack grace but carry the weight of his passion and concern.

Affliction is about a dismal town in New Hampshire and its effects on one of the inhabitants, Wade Whitehouse, part-time well digger, snow-plow operator, police officer and school-crossing guard. He has lived in a trailer ever since his wife left him for a man with better prospects. Smoldering with resentments, he lets routine things slip his mind. "Sometimes you just forget who you are. Especially when you're sick of who you are," he tells his brother Rolfe.

At least that is what Rolfe tells us. He is the narrator of the novel, which includes a fatal deer-hunting accident and Wade's role in two murders, one the bludgeoning death of his father. Rolfe is a teacher who is up on modern literary devices. Ambiguity and a tendency to make the teller as important as the tale are conspicuous elements of his account. Rolfe's self-consciousness can be intrusive, though not nearly so much as his need to be the village explainer. Seemingly unsatisfied with his powers of observation and ability to convey male emotions, he reaches for generalizations from sociology and psychology.

Wade is also abstracted. He becomes a fugitive whom Rolfe imagines to be "the gray-faced man who shoves circles of frozen dough into an oven at the Mr. Pizza at the mall and lives in a town-house apartment at the edge of town until his mailman recognizes him from the picture at the post office." Rolfe's message that despair breeds violence is forcefully delivered. Too bad that he keeps getting in the way of an even stronger story.