Trump’s America, Seen Through the Eyes of Russell Banks

What’s wrong with . . . everywhere? We traditionally ascribe the pathologies of American life to any place that isn’t where we live: blue states lament red states, rural areas despair over inner cities, downstate frets about upstate, our somewhere pities your anywhere else. Lately, though, that cultural pessimism seems to have come closer to home: fear of neighbors with a different flag in their apartment windows, anger at other parents in the school pickup line with the wrong stickers on their bumpers, even disdain for close relatives at the Thanksgiving table.

The three long stories in “American Spirits,” the latest and last book by Russell Banks, are set in these intimate chasms within our communities. Banks, who died, of cancer, last year, at the age of eighty-two, published more than twenty books, most of them novels. He often wrote about the sort of Americans he was descended from, working-class people who were stubbornly stuck in dysfunction or poverty or both. People who, as he once said, saw success as an attack on their own lives and were too tired for the American Dream. In his final book, such characters have something else in common: in all three stories, there’s a conspicuous reference to their choice to vote for the forty-fifth President. “Trump might be a bastard,” one of them says, “but he’s *our *bastard.”

“American Spirits” might easily be misread as an effort to explain how the past two Presidential elections turned out, or to predict the outcome of the next one. But the book isn’t an attempt to transform diner journalism into literature. As he did in the novels “Continental Drift” and “The Reserve,” Banks is working here in one of the great points of view in American literature: neighborly omniscience. Like the unnamed narrator who finds Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter in the Salem Custom House and then sets about telling her tale, Banks’s narrators are anonymous busybodies and town gossips, nosy neighbors or observers once removed from the action. They try to account for the recent and ancient past, arraying barstool stories, Facebook posts, rumor-mill secrets, and Nextdoor-style scandals alongside folklore and myth, making sense of their lives in ways that illuminate larger aspects of our communal existence, not only class politics and political extremism but all the tumult that characterizes the past eight-going-on-eighty years of American history.

In Banks’s books, whether fiction or nonfiction, the atomic unit of story is the family. His own was certainly determinative. He was born outside Boston in 1940, and raised in Barnstead, New Hampshire, the oldest child of an abusive, alcoholic father who left his wife and their four children when Banks was twelve. Two generations of the Banks family had worked as pipe fitters and plumbers; his grandfather hauled his tools and parts around in a hearse. Banks himself practiced those trades, along with other odd jobs, including dressing mannequins at a department store, to support his mother and siblings and, after he married, at nineteen, his own family. He ultimately had four daughters and four marriages, shuffling them up and down the Atlantic seaboard, everywhere from Florida to Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, and Jamaica. The last of those four wives was the poet Chase Twichell, to whom this final book is dedicated. “I can really see my life as a kind of obsessive return to the ‘wound,’ ” Banks once told an interviewer. “Going back again and again trying to get it right, trying to figure out how it happened and who is to blame and who to forgive.”

That cycle of revision, recrimination, and attempted absolution animates “American Spirits.” All three of its stories draw on recent real-world events, things you may have read about in the news, transposed from their actual Zip Codes to the fictional town of Sam Dent, a place close to Ausable Chasm, in upstate New York, where Banks spent much of his later life and which featured in some of his previous books. They are also all transformed into morality plays of sorts—although, unlike in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the morals in Trump’s America are inscrutable. Readers find ourselves, as we so often do in real life, unsure of what anyone should have done or could possibly do now.

The first story, “Nowhere Man,” explores and ultimately enacts the hostility and homicidal danger latent in a local news story: the fight over a tactical-weapons training facility that divided the tiny town of Pawlet, Vermont. In Banks’s version, a struggling handyman and caretaker, Doug Lafleur, sells off three hundred and twenty acres of his family’s woodlands just outside Sam Dent, and then becomes obsessed with the buyer, an I.D.F.-trained outsider, Yuri Zingerman, who builds a paramilitary training center on it for men affiliated with the likes of the Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys. When Doug’s world of recreational hunting with Rugers and Springfields collides with the paranoia and terror intrinsic to the world of AR-15s and AK-47s, his wife, Debbie, and their three children become collateral damage.

Banks is a master of mastery: some of his best descriptions are not of emotions or thoughts, as with so many contemporary novelists, but skills and trades. In “Nowhere Man,” the most striking passages convey the unconscious choreography of a family of hunters on a hillside, one generation teaching the next to drive prey into their sights; then the graceful swiftness with which one of those hunters fells a twelve-point buck; and finally the efficient ritual by which that man field-dresses the deer, making what he calls a “slouch pouch” to walk the animal out of the woods. “Doug took the strip of pelt dangling from the right front leg just above the dewclaw,” Banks explains, “and tied it in a square knot to the strip dangling from the left rear leg, then did the same with the left front and right rear legs, so the strips crossed in the middle. Still on his knees, he swung around and leaned back against the warm body of the deer and drew the tied strips over his shoulders like the straps of a backpack.”

Doug was “one of those men whose body seems more intelligent than his mouth,” Banks writes, and in a way the same can feel true of the stories in “American Spirits.” They accomplish so much, so purposively with the brute mechanisms of plot and suspense, rather than the stranger, subtler pleasures of language. These might not be stories you’ll read more than once, but once you read them, you won’t stop thinking of their unnerving violence and elegiac endings. The shocking climax of “Nowhere Man” is followed by a gradual, dialogue-less fadeaway to the slow reforesting of the Lafleur family’s abandoned homestead. No monologue makes sense of the events that have taken place; no sermon redeems them. Instead we are left to ruminate on a familiar question: What happened here?

Neighborly omniscience proves to be the ideal perspective for communicating an uncanny contemporary feeling: somehow knowing almost everything about our neighbors without knowing the things that matter. In the book’s second and best story, “Homeschooling,” Banks uses a moblike first-person plural, “We in town,” to tell the story of the Webers, avatars for the real-life Jennifer and Sarah Hart, who murdered their six adopted children, in 2018, by driving the family’s Yukon off a hundred-foot cliff in Mendocino County, California.

The Harts’ murder-suicide is the most harrowing of the incidents that Banks fictionalizes, and the one readers are most likely to remember and be troubled by, even before encountering his haunting version. The narrator in Banks’s story begins in an unlikely place: “The story about the Weber family starts with a pair of identical houses built side by side one hundred fifty years ago on an east-facing, sloped meadow on a narrow dirt lane that’s called High Street,” he writes. The houses were constructed by Dutch cousins in the early days of Sam Dent, but generations later the “Victorian stick-style piles of wood and slate with towers and gables and narrow, shuttered windows and wraparound porches and balustrades and an excess of gingerbread trim” are in disrepair.

The Webers have been living in one of these down-and-out Dutch manses, and after their neighbors, an elderly accountant and his wife, sell the other, so that they can retire to Florida, a new couple, the Odells, moves in next door with their kids. Comically named Barbie and Ken, the Odells are Trump voters who have relocated for Ken’s new administrative job at a nearby prison. They decide to befriend the family next door, married white lesbians and their four adopted Black children, because they “didn’t want to seem prejudiced or racist in any way, because they weren’t.” But the Odells are discouraged from their very first overture, when the Toll House cookies they leave for the Webers are returned with a curt note: “Thank you, but we are strict vegans.”

Curiosity turns to concern as the months pass and two of the Weber children show up one after the other, hungry and hurt, on the Odell family’s porch, then try as a group to escape their adoptive parents during a snowstorm. An urgency creeps into “Homeschooling,” and the same neighbor who introduced readers to the historic houses in Sam Dent where these two families live starts to explain how he knows what he does about their fate—from radio and television coverage, social media, and the reports made by child-protective services in two different states.

Banks practices the same withholding here as at the end of “Nowhere Man,” but in this case it is even more unsettling to let motive and meaning remain unresolved; almost every “why” goes unanswered, not just among the kids who socialized with the Weber children but among the adults who tried to intervene on their behalf. The narrator himself is deeply, if unconsciously, equivocal about all that happened and what the town should do about it. After going to all the trouble of donning a medical mask during the pandemic to tour the house abandoned by the Webers, he suggests it would be better for no one to see it at all: “Most of us in town say that, if it were ours, we’d hire a demolition company to bulldoze the buildings and haul the wreckage away and let grass grow over it.”

These days, it’s hard to imagine anything worse than the actual news, yet Banks often managed it. In the last of the stories in “American Spirits,” “Kidnapped,” readers meet fictional versions of James and Sandra Helm, septuagenarian grandparents who were kidnapped from their home in Moira, New York, smuggled across the border into Quebec, and then held captive in the city of Magog. Their kidnappers contacted the couple’s son with a three-and-a-half-million-dollar ransom demand because they believed he could help them find the fifty kilograms of cocaine they were missing. Banks makes the couple into Bessie and Frank Dent, a direct descendant of the town founder, a Revolutionary War hero named Sam Dent—“the first permanent white resident of the valley, our town’s founding father,” Banks writes. “Dentville was not acceptable to him, nor was Denton nor simply Dent. A man with an Olympian ego, he had insisted that it had to be the one and only Sam Dent.”

Invoking the long arc of history, human and nonhuman, “Kidnapped” opens with a man out walking his dog while musing on the distinction between forests and woods and offering an encyclopedic explanation of the difference between old growth and new. We learn nothing about the Dents until a few pages in, after Banks has made good on the premise of the book’s title—not merely a brand of cigarettes but our national ghosts and the national mood. The charged metaphoric register of this opening frame connects this story with Banks’s earlier portrayals of American radicals, such as John Brown, in “Cloudsplitter,” or the members of the Weather Underground, in “The Darling.” It builds to a resonant account of the generations that came before this country was founded and those that will follow, new and old growth of a different variety.

All three stories in “American Spirits” reference the Colonial and pre-Colonial history of the region: the British settlers who came to New York and the French and Dutch who came before the British and the Mohawks and Mi’kmaqs who were here before all of them. But the narrator of “Kidnapped” articulates a view of civilizational change that is ongoing: “We would think it was the forest primeval itself, timeless, unchanging, the way the world at this exact crossing of longitude and latitude and altitude and soil and climate was meant to be and had always been. But we would be wrong. A second-growth forest is not the same as a first, and a third is not the same as a second. . . . the forest was not replaced by itself. It was displaced and replaced by these woods, which is a different and lesser thing.” Lest that sound like an ecological echo of nativism, the narrator is actually thinking about the youngest branch of Sam Dent’s family tree, and getting ready to tell us a tragic story about it.

But neighborly omniscience is sometimes more knowingness than knowledge. As the narrator admits, his own relationship to the story he’s about to tell is not entirely straightforward. “I remembered again a story from the village,” he says, “part of which I saw, part of which I heard from witnesses, and part of which I imagined.” Frank Dent, the narrator explains, was a Vietnam vet and the son of a veteran of the Second World War. He encouraged his son, Chip, to enlist in the military after 9/11, only to lose him to a roadside bomb in Iraq. Chip leaves behind a young son, Stevie, who is eventually abandoned by his grief-stricken mother. The Dents raise Stevie as their own—a substitute son they coddle but others fear, whose malfunctioning moral compass is the reason that they end up kidnapped and smuggled across the border into Canada. In real life, the grandparents survived their ordeal; in Banks’s version, the ensuing devastation all but ends the family line.

Like Doug Lafleur, Frank Dent wears a MAGA hat, and Stevie Dent cast his first vote ever for Donald Trump. Banks populates the big tent of Trumpism with an assortment of characters from this one small, fictional town: people who have “reservations about what they called [Trump’s] personal style” but are for gun rights or against war, which they’re convinced he’ll end; who fear socialized medicine or want immigration reform; who think he’s better for the economy, or who simply are so angry that they like that Trump is “freakin’ pissed,” too. If the residents of Sam Dent were merely stereotypes of a political movement, then “American Spirits” wouldn’t have the impressive heft that it does. Instead, they are, to a person, indelible characters, with lives full of meticulously observed details, from their cat-food-can ashtrays to the thank-you-for-your-service packages they assemble and their children decorate for deployed soldiers.