The Reserve (Paperback)

SignatureReviewed by Scott TurowLike Banks's two most recent novels—Cloudsplitter, a 1998 book about the abolitionist John Brown, and The Darling, about the wages of '60s radicalism—The Reserve looks backward, this time to the 1930s. The reserve of the title is an Adirondack preserve, a membership-only sanctuary where the very rich partake of woodland leisure, hunting, fishing, dining, drinking, utterly remote from the anxiety and want that most Americans experienced in 1936. Jordan Groves, a noted artist and illustrator, makes his life literally and figuratively at the border of the property, along with his wife, Alicia, and two sons, Bear and Wolf. In a note that accompanies the advance reader's copy of the book, Banks says he was drawn back imaginatively to the world of his parents. But this novel is not merely an homage to the class-riven universe of the Depression but also to the way it was portrayed in its own time. Some plot elements nod in the direction of Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Much more clearly, the ghost of Ernest Hemingway, who is even an offstage character, treads the pages of The Reserve and leaves his tracks. Banks acknowledges that Jordan Groves is loosely based on the real-life Adirondacks artist, Rockwell Kent, but Groves, as Banks creates him, is a man in the Hemingway mold, whose first name seems to acknowledge Hemingway's quintessential hero, Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls. Jordan Groves is a man's man, flying his airplane daringly around the Adirondacks and trekking the world in search of imagery and lovers. As is true of all the characters in this novel—and in Hemingway's—Groves is a person utterly without any sense of irony about himself, and thus any awareness of the degree to which he is a creature of what he claims to despise.Groves's unrecognized conflicts are forced into consciousness through the agency of Vanessa Cole, the twice-divorced adopted daughter of one of the Reserve's member families. Free of her last husband, a European nobleman whom she calls in her own mind Count No-Count, Vanessa is an alluring and determined seductress who sets her sights on Groves in the book's initial chapter. Death, adultery and homicide follow, shattering each of the would-be lovers' families.This is a vividly imagined book. It has the romantic atmosphere of those great 1930s tales in film and prose, and it speeds the reader along from its first pages. In fact, Banks talents are so large—and the novel so fundamentally engaging—that it continued to pull me in even when, in its climactic moments, I could no longer comprehend why the characters were doing what they were doing. By then, the denouement has been determined largely by the literary expectations of a bygone era where character flaws require a tragic end. Despite that, The Reserve is a pleasure well worth savoring. (Feb.)Scott Turow is at work on a sequel to Presumed Innocent.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

"[A] riveting narrative, featuring an almost pot-boiling love story . . . tantalizing . . . Banks works with a vast palette and a sure stylistic command. The Reserve gratifies page by page." (Los Angeles Times )

"...sexy, almost guilty pleasure of a read..." (Elle Magazine )

"Banks's new novel, The Reserve, may well be the best--and darkest--work of fiction written to date about the storied regiou of high peaks, glacial lakes, and vast forests covering an area nearly teh size of Massachusetts." (Boston Sunday Globe )

"As a love letter to the mountains and greenery and water, [The Reserve] conveys deep feeling." (Chicago Sun-Times )

"[The Reserve] is beautifully and elegantly written, showing the author as a lover of language....[T]his powerful and beautiful Russell Banks novel is close to a masterpiece." (Deseret News )

"[The Reserve]...holds lessons for our own time. It's a supremely well-written book..." (San Diego Union-Tribune )

"...this powerful and beautiful Russell Banks novel is close to a masterpiece." (Deseret Morning News )

"A cool noir thriller...This is new and wonderful turf for this masterful storyteller." (William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed and Roscoe )

"The Reserve is a page-turner from the moment mad beauty Vanessa Cole insinuates herself aboard the biplane of Hemingway-esque antihero Jordan Groves." (Express )

"...[A]n almost pot-boiling love story set against a backdrop of global unrest and clearly demarcated class tensions...[it] has character and scene--as well as suspense and surprise--in abundance." (Los Angeles Times )

"Banks peels back [the characters'] gloss so that we can enter their interior." (Cleveland Plain Dealer )

"The novel's strength...is the story Banks has to tell... 'The Reserve' captures the drama, not just of these characters' lives, but of this moment in American history." (Atlanta Journal-Constitution )

"Banks...displays a vivid immediacy that puts you right in the middle of things." (Philadelphia Inquirer )

"...[Russell Banks] carved out a reputation with words, bu producing some of the best fiction of our time." (Miami Herald )

"...Banks has immersed himself in the time he's writing about and manages to evoke Hemingway without ever aping his style..." (Christian Science Monitor )

"Banks ranks among our boldest artists." (Boston Globe )

"Like our living literary giants Toni Morrison and Thomas Pynchon, Russell Banks is a great writer wrestling with the hidden secrets and explosive realities of this country." (Cornel West )

"Russell Banks's work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time... I trust his portraits of America more than any other-the burden of it, the need for it, the hell of it." (Michael Ondaatje )

"A vividly imagined book. It has the romantic atmosphere of those great 1930s tales in film and prose, and it speeds the reader along from its first pages.Banks' talents are so large - and the novel so fundamentally engaging.THE RESERVE is a pleasure well worth savoring." (Scott Turow, Publishers Weekly )

"Banks's willingness to confront. the hard truths about the world we live in. goes a long way toward explaining his longstanding reputation as one of America's finest contemporary fiction writers." (Boston Globe )

"Russell Banks's work presents without falsehood and with tough affection the uncompromising moral voice of our time. I trust his portraits of America more than any other." (Michael Ondaatje )