Searching for a State of Grace

By John Skow With Reporting By Andrea Sachs/Princeton

The professor removes his tweed jacket, hangs it on the back of a chair and prepares to teach what is widely acknowledged to be unteachable. Things are going well for him. His big new novel, Cloudsplitter (HarperCollins; 758 pages; $27.50), about the raging, God-haunted 19th century abolitionist John Brown, is about to hit the bookstores, and he has learned this very day that director Atom Egoyan's movie of his novel The Sweet Hereafter has earned two Academy Award nominations. Another film, drawn from his novel Affliction and starring Nick Nolte, is ready for distribution. He smiles. Equal to equal, a diamond stud in his left ear glinting encouragingly, he addresses the 11 Princeton freshmen and sophomores in this creative-writing seminar as "writers."

On the blackboard, he chalks the elements of a short story: "character, language, situation, structure, plot." He does not add "drugs, booze, angry sex, bar fighting, class resentment, familial dysfunction." The kids will learn to chord this country music on their own. Or not. Now they seem shy and tentative. The professor tries to loosen them up: "A good writer steals from other writers," he says. "Got to be willing to steal, to pillage." Got to be willing, Russell Banks might say to himself, to be merely very good in novel after novel while critics use words like talented and valuable and consign you to the respectable second rank.

Being a promising writer at 57 may keep you young--there's that diamond stud. But beyond the extra dollars, "breaking through" at that age, as it seems likely that Banks has done with the monolithic and masterly Cloudsplitter, may be worth little more than a wry smile. In any case, it has been a long wait and a hard climb. When Banks was the age of his students, he was a plumber in Concord, N.H., working construction. Plumbing was how the Banks men, his father and grandfather, earned their living. Russell had tried college (Colgate, on a full scholarship) but had busted out after a few months with a case of what he calls "turbulence." By 19 he had married. By 20 he had fathered a child and would soon be divorced. (He has been married for nine years to his fourth wife, poet Chase Twichell.) He had written a novel, not published, and had run off to fight for Castro (not quite getting there; instead dressing mannequins for a department store in Lakeland, Fla.). Before this, at 16, he had stolen a car and Kerouacked off to California. Earlier still, he had learned to keep his head down; his father, a wife-beating alcoholic who "pretty much abandoned the family" when Russell was 12, sometimes took swipes at his kids.

Banks made his peace with his father before the old man's death in 1979. Still, the tensions of this gritty past, and in particular the clenched, bone-bit anguish between son and father, appear and reappear in his 13 books of fiction. Like writers Richard Ford and Raymond Carver, he knows the lives of men who drive dented pickups, show up for work with beer headaches and hold back, most of the time, from battering their wives and children. The protagonist of his strong, flawed 1989 novel, Affliction, is the violent, alcoholic son--a part-time cop in a small New Hampshire town--of a violent, alcoholic father. Frustration and unfocused rage blur the character of Bob Dubois, an oil-burner repairman in a decayed New Hampshire mill town, who is the central figure of Continental Drift (1985). An Adirondack hamlet's children die in a school-bus accident in The Sweet Hereafter, leaving the reader to feel that had the crash not occurred, they would have died of dreariness.

But by now, one might guess that Banks has said most of what he has to say about blue-collar New England. And while writing crystalline paragraphs isn't hard--there are one or two good stylists in every English department, newspaper city room and ad agency in the country--finding a big, new issue to novelize is the white whale of modern literature.

Nobody who reads the first chapters of Cloudsplitter can doubt that Banks has found his big subject. It is surely his best novel, a furious, sprawling drama that commands attention like thunder heard from just over the horizon. In 1859, at the time of his capture of the Federal Government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., and his subsequent hanging, the religious zealot, failed businessman and antislavery revolutionary John Brown was closer to the roiling center of his country's anguish than was the still wavering Lincoln. And well into this century, Brown was still being called an insane fanatic and, variously, a saintly martyr. His raid failed to catalyze a slave rebellion, but by outraging the South and inflaming the North, it may have preserved the Union by making the Civil War inevitable.

To give flesh to heroism, or doubt to mania, Banks needed a narrator. He chose Brown's son Owen, who survived the Harpers Ferry raid and who had participated in his father's bloody guerrilla skirmishes against proslavery settlers in Kansas. Because he wanted his novel to look backward to the pre-Civil War period and forward to the nation's 20th century torments with race, Banks envisioned Owen, who in fact died in 1889, setting down recollections after 1900 for the Columbia University historian Oswald Garrison Villard. (Three of John Brown's 20 children did live to testify for Villard.)

At the outset, Banks' imagined Owen asks the central question, "Was my father mad?" The answer, arrived at over 700 pages of gospel and fury, must be either "No, but..." or "Yes, but..." Owen is not religious, and his father's hot-eyed fervor seems delusive. But Owen despises slavery, and his father, whom Owen loves and bitterly resents, rules him with appeals to conscience. It is tyranny, the author's archetypal theme: father crushing son.

The novelist's other recurrent theme is race. But as a white American writing about blacks, a trick managed by Faulkner and few others, Banks seems too carefully respectful, an earnest '60s liberal. When Owen Brown realizes that he regards a black farmer as an equal but not wholeheartedly as a friend, his self-conscious queasiness seems oddly modern. Like Owen, the author has often been confounded by his good intentions. When Bob Dubois migrates to Florida in Continental Drift and has a love affair with a beautiful black woman, Banks sets aside his gritty naturalism, and that is all we learn: she is black and beautiful. Another black woman in that book, a Haitian refugee, remains mostly a symbol of mute, heroic survival, despite chapters devoted to her.

Banks admits that when he was young, he tended to identify with blacks, perhaps because he felt alienated from white society. "I've learned to examine that a little more closely," he says. The deep interest remains, however, and he plans two more novels about the African diaspora, one set in 17th century Africa, the other in contemporary Liberia. For now, he's delighted with the Academy Award fuss about The Sweet Hereafter (in which he appears briefly as a local doctor). Director Egoyan, with whom he worked for two years advising on the script, overflows with praise: "One of the greatest living novelists." That may be gratifying, but Banks knows there's still more work to do. He'll quit teaching after this semester and move with his wife to their house in Keene, N.Y., not far from John Brown's grave. "You can start to see the horizon getting closer when you get to your late 50s," he explains. He has a writing cabin about a thousand yards from the Keene house. He will hike there each morning at 8. And from this outpost, six or seven days a week, he will scan the horizon.

--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/Princeton