Second Growth Forest: A Review of Russell Banks's “American Spirits”
Second Growth Forest: A Review of Russell Banks's American Spirits
by Martin Dolan
On a hike in the third and final story of Russell Banks's American Spirits—a collection of dark, interlocking tales set in an imagined Adirondack village—the unnamed narrator spots a tree scarred by lightning. Watching moss and fungus overtake the burnt wood, he reflects that “a second growth forest is not the same as the first." After centuries of human intervention—Iroquois, Algonquin, Dutch, English, American, and beyond—"the forest was not replaced by itself.” The only constants in these woods are eruptions of violence, man-made or otherwise, and the rot and regrowth which follow.
The residents of Sam Dent, the Adirondacks town that Banks’s fiction has revisited for decades, are something of a second growth forest themselves. Their families migrated north for work in 20th century sawmills or for social work degrees from SUNYs. They’re all transplants from somewhere. And yet, having spent enough time as a part of Sam Dent’s ecosystem, it’s hard to imagine the village without them. They curse “downstaters” for their seasonal homes and elitist attitudes. They vote Trump for his sensible economics and hard stance on immigration (despite being mortified by the uncouth things he says on television). They spend Saturdays at Spread Eagle, the local watering hole, spending cash they don’t really have.
It's easy to imagine American Spirits’s unnamed narrator as a version of Russell Banks himself, who died at eighty-two last year. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer, Banks was a Saratoga native from a working-class background. And even though success would turn him into a global writer, jumping across oceans and continents, Banks never lost track of his Northeastern roots. Most of his work concerns the impossible stress of “just getting by,” how it seems to breed entire towns on the brink of self-destruction. His fiction details how the mundane so often veers into the grotesquely violent: 1991’s The Sweet Hereafter, also set in Sam Dent, follows a predatory attorney who swoops in after a school bus crash kills most of the town’s children. 2011’s Lost Memory of Skin describes the life of a homeless sex offender as he attempts to reassemble his life.
American Spirits is in the same tradition. The three novella-length stories, connected by a shared setting and narrator, give a portrait of the powder keg that is post-Trump provincial American. “Nowhere Man” follows a rural family man feuding with his neighbor, an Israeli ex-mercenary who has turned his woods into a training ground for private militia groups. “Homeschooling” is also about neighbors: a working-class family worried that the (white) lesbian couple next door might be holding the four black siblings they’ve adopted hostage. In “Kidnapped,” a retired couple is taken at gunpoint by a pair of small-time Canadian crooks claiming the couple’s grandson owes them drug money. What’s most striking about these stories isn’t their plots, but how they present violence. In a place like Sam Dent—where residents are undone by jealousy, pride, and oh-so-many guns—it seems there’s no other way for a story to end than in death.
Beyond brutality, this set of characters are plagued by “feeling small.” They are small compared to their “summertime” neighbors, who hire them for seasonal small jobs. They are small compared to their politicians, who forget their interests the moment there’s any pressure from lawmakers in D.C. and Albany. And they’re even small compared to their own kids, who are less enamored by the prospects of small-town life, eager to escape to bigger things.
This idea of feeling small has long been a talking point of the MAGA movement and the so-called “crisis of masculinity” accompanying it. Or rather, it’s been a trademark of liberal commentary about such movements: a way of writing off the Right’s populist rhetoric as a death rattle of a disappearing way of life. Banks avoids these cliches but remains skeptical of his characters’ tendency toward chest-beating, misogyny, and apathy.
In “Nowhere Man,” protagonist Doug sells off half his family’s property for quick cash. Yet to assure that he can still hunt on the land once his, he insists on a handshake deal with his new neighbor. But for Doug’s Proud Boys-coded, militia-raising neighbor, the villagers of Sam Dent are just an anachronistic nuisance, easily duped out of what little resources are still theirs. He goes back on his agreement with Doug; what follows is a harrowing sequence of escalating (and heavily armed) altercations.
The showdown—and the tragedy that follows—is the darkly satiric heart of American Spirits. While the whole story can be chalked up to a misguided pissing contest, the real tragedy is the ubiquity of mutually destructive violence. Doug, the archetypical Sam Dent local, is stubborn and short-sighted. His pride and insistence on his honor end up becoming his own downfall. And yet, contrasted with his new neighbor, who doesn’t even have that, Doug’s pride is a virtue. It’s a vestige of a different America, perhaps just as messy, where a handshake deal still meant something.
All three stories end with this sort of reversal, where the Sam Dent protagonists find the social ecosystem they’ve taken for granted suddenly turned inside out. Yet while the local characters always lose, it’s not to make an example of their narrow-minded pride. Rather, Banks shows that for all their flaws—their drinking, their superstition, their spite—Sam Dent-ers are not willing to resort to the casual cruelty of the outsiders. A handshake deal, to them, is everything. It’s nostalgic, certainly, probably even naïve. But there’s a level of love and respect in Banks’s stories for how these Adirondack villagers remain committed, however hopelessly, to a quiet, live and let live version of American life. And while Banks’s fiction exists partially to poke holes in the “redneck” narrative, his criticisms are those of an insider: skeptical, yet cautiously optimistic.