“I used to write historical romances full of rape and adverbs,” says a character in one of Elmore Leonard’s novels.
“The Reserve,” like any bodice- ripper, has its share of rape, as well as the wanton couplings, deflorations and assorted ravishings you would expect in any romance novel. And it has the adverbs in spades: The characters smile gratefully or winningly. They roll their cigarettes skillfully — even expertly. When they’re not feeling strangely agitated, they’re feeling strangely aroused. They touch each other slowly, dreamily, or delicately, teasingly.
What’s most surprising about this work is not the style or subject matter but its author. “The Reserve” was not written by one of the usual suspects — Catherine Coulter or Karen Marie Moning or even Kathleen E. Woodiwiss — but by the manly and much-laureled Russell Banks.
The novel takes place in the 1930s in and around the Reserve of the title, an enclave in the Adirondacks devoted to the vacation homes of the ultra-wealthy. As the novel begins, the hero, a successful Rockwell Kent-like artist named Jordan Groves, lands his seaplane on the Reserve to view the world-class art collections of one of the members.
He manages to catch the attention of Vanessa von Heidenstamm, the beautiful, reckless daughter of a famous surgeon. The impulsive Vanessa hops a ride on Groves’ plane, which precipitates a heart attack in her father and sets in motion the action of the novel.
Like any romance novel, this one is as much about pursuit as it is about capture, and hate is as strong a turn-on as love. Groves is macho, married, an Ayn Rand superman who takes what he wants and doesn’t live by other men’s rules.
Vanessa is an alluring borderline personality with two failed marriages, including one to a German count (hence the von; a title or two is de rigueur in one of these steamy novels).
There is the obligatory parallel affair between Jordan’s homebody wife and his humble, taciturn drinking buddy, a sort of Ashley and Melanie to the alpha couple’s Rhett and Scarlett.
A prolific but not always fluent writer, Banks is at his best when writing about American obsessives: the ’60s revolutionary marooned in Liberia in “The Darling”; the abolitionist John Brown in “Cloudsplitter”; the paranoid alcoholic in “Affliction.”
A more facile writer like Joyce Carol Oates could tell this oft-told story smoothly and give its unconscious themes a subterranean charge. Away from his familiar terrain, Banks produces a stiff, dead-in-the-water tale, rich in unintentional humor.
Much of the dialogue, in fact, reads like extracts from a lost Firesign Theater parody:
“Miss von Heldenstam, to a man like me you’re nothing but trouble.”
And: “Oh, I know I might be partly to blame for driving you into the eager arms of the noble Adirondack woodsman Hubert St. Germain.”
Or, best of all: “We’re going for a drive together, mother. The Hindenberg will have to leave without me.”
The Hindenberg: Banks splices his main story with short, ominous, all-in-italics chapters detailing the flight of the doomed zeppelin. The reader girds his loins for a great gaseous explosion, but when it arrives, it comes in a form altogether different from expected: as one of those passages that in their unique mishmash of the lofty, the prurient and the pedantic, tend to get short-listed for the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award:
“It had begun slowly, tenderly, face-to-face, with long, lingering looks at each other, like devoted siblings at the start of a long absence . . . He had to be brought … to complete awareness of his body, moving, as if he were a woman, from the inside out, rather than from the outside in … Making love with men like Jordan Groves let Vanessa . . . believe for a few seconds in the sustained reality of her essential being, even though afterward she could not remember ever having experienced it as such. . . .”
To give Banks his due, there is a fascinating short essay buried in this book that chronicles the transformation of the area around the Reserve from a brave and independent community of farmers, trappers, guides and hunters to a service economy controlled by a few plutocrats. “A mutual parasitism based on a rigid set of class distinctions very much to the advantage of the outsiders took its place,” he writes.
Banks probably intended a parallel to our country’s more recent social upheavals. It’s a shame he didn’t expand on this theme: It would have made for an interesting novel.
The Reserve
by Russell Banks, $24.95
John Broening is a Denver- based freelance writer.
