'Affliction' sets action standard

Affliction

Harper Perennial

In Hollywood, there are only about four or five ideas going around at any given time. So if a nonentity like John Grisham can become a cottage industry, why can't an unsung standout like Russell Banks catch fire?

With "Affliction," the second seemingly uncinematic Banks novel in a year to be cinematized, the upstate New York author is just beginning to attain widespread recognition. After more than a dozen novels, most of which are now being re-released in paperback, "Affliction" looms particularly large as a standard bearer for American fiction.

The novel is deceptively unassuming in a number of ways. It is not overlong, checking in at 350 pages that move quickly via Banks' studiously simple prose. It is almost instantly accessible, but instead of a denigration, that is perhaps its highest praise, when combined with its stirring artistry and magisterial portrait of a character, and, through him, much more.

The character is Wade Whitehouse, who by virtue of his gone-but-not-forgotten star status in high school baseball, is the only policeman in Lawford, New Hampshire, population 757. In Lawford, that job consists mostly of knowing people's names, operating the snowplow and serving as crossing guard for children on their way to school. As a result, Wade supplements his income working as a foreman for the oil rigs of the town's leading citizen.

The plot unfolds almost entirely in the recollection of Wade's younger brother, Rolfe, who fled Lawford directly out of high school to escape his family. He remains within their orbit, and seems to regurgitate the shocking events of his and Wade's life in order to alienate that part of his life for good.

Shocking is certainly the word for Wade's behavior, but Banks makes it entirely comprehensible within his given canvas. Almost every resident of Lawford that the reader meets seems necessary to the total picture, and almost all are recognizable triumphs of characterization.

Rarely, in fact, has a novel been so achingly human, and yet so pointedly significant, taking on an entire cultural curse: the violence that Banks hypothesizes is an inexorable result of the "affliction" of American manhood. Wade is a weak man; a bully, a coward and a hopelessly naive romantic. He is unable to deal with the limitations of his existence, let alone his disintegrated relationship with his wife and estrangement from his preteen daughter. He has no meaningful understanding of human relationships that is not based on fear and power.

And yet, Wade has an inarticulate, relentless passion to be good, to make himself understood and worthy of understanding, that convinces the reader that he is not just rotten clay, but has been irredeemably tainted by the macho tradition he and all his neighbors have grown up with. Some, like Rolfe, retreat into private shame; some, like Wade and Rolfe's sister Lena, into a cruel farce of evangelical religion. The only "winners" are those who die young, preferably in combat, like their oldest brothers, Elbourne and Charlie, who died in Vietnam.

The rest remain jogging in place and smolder, perchance, like Wade, to someday explode. This is a novel of a man who reacts unforgivably when he can no longer tolerate the sight of himself turning into the all-too-real monster that haunts him, his father Glenn Whitehouse. Glenn is a figure almost incapacitated by the ravages of time and alcohol, and through Banks' vivid descriptions the reader can easily imagine his remorseless sway over the Whitehouses's.

The portrayal of Glenn is so scrupulously prepared and compensated for that it transcends the dilapidated cliche of the dysfunctional family. It is like the rest of Banks' novel, which attains its success the most old-fashioned way, through blood and sweat and honesty. The honesty of "Affliction" shines through even the bleakest words to carve a truly lasting place for this novel in any reader's mind.

--Jeff Druchniak

Courtesy of Harper Collins

Russell Banks, author of "Affliction," will speak at a special sneak preview of the film at the State Theater.

01-27-99