Product Description

Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules. Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondack wilderness to the skies above war-torn Spain and Fascist Germany, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #213689 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-01
• Released on: 2009-02-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Russell Banks is turning down the heat. His most recent novels -- released to wide critical and popular acclaim -- were fiery tales of revolution: Cloudsplitter (1998) told the explosive story of abolition terrorist John Brown, and The Darling (2004) raced us through the sprawling horrors of Liberia's modern-day civil war. But with The Reserve Banks has narrowed his scope dramatically, returning to the smaller scale of his earlier fiction, even the compressed time frame of his fine short stories.

The title refers to a private sanctuary in the Adirondacks, a pristine wilderness maintained by a few families so wealthy that the deprivations of the Depression do not affect them at all. Banks provides a sobering description of the sad economic conditions that developed during this time and still prevail in such resort locales. A staff of servants and caretakers live like medieval serfs on the 40,000-acre Reserve, abiding by regulations set down by the summer people to maintain the area's idyllic atmosphere. "They were allowed onto the Reserve and club grounds," Banks writes, "but only to work, and not to fish or hunt or hike on their own. . . . The illusion of wilderness was as important to maintain as the reality."

That tension between illusion and reality is what interests Banks most here. This is primarily a novel about right and wrong, and how class and sex cloud that distinction. He focuses on a man who moves confidently among the haves and the have-nots: Jordan Groves, a left-wing artist who sells his pictures to wealthy collectors, seduces their wives, and pals around with their servants. He's loosely based on Rockwell Kent, the celebrated illustrator and labor advocate who donated a number of his works to the Soviet Union, ran afoul of Sen. McCarthy and eventually appeared on a U.S. postage stamp.

But Jordan is entirely Banks's own invention; The Reserve alludes to historical events, but it isn't built on them the way Cloudsplitter and The Darling are. Instead, Banks has created a small collection of characters from different levels of society and then brought them together for a disastrous encounter in this pastoral setting during the summer of 1936.

The novel opens when Jordan flies his plane to the wilderness palace of a wealthy collector, Dr. Cole, "an internationally renowned, if somewhat controversial, brain surgeon." Dr. Cole's only daughter is a scandalous beauty named Vanessa, 30 years old, already twice divorced. "She was rumored to have had affairs with Ernest Hemingway and Max Ernst and Baron von Blixen," but Jordan's not interested: "Plutocrats," he decides at once. "Leisure-class Republicans. People with inherited wealth and no real education and, except for the doctor, no useful skills." He recognizes Vanessa from the pages of Vanity Fair, but to him "the woman was nothing more than a socialite . . . a parasite." Nonetheless, when she bends down close to his face and whispers, "I won't be happy until you take me for a ride in your airplane," he immediately agrees, a decision that entangles him far more than he realizes.

After Dr. Cole dies from a heart attack later that night, Vanessa appeals to Jordan to give her another ride in his plane so that she can spread her father's ashes over the lake. It's a violation of the Reserve's rules, but such an innocent, harmless one that, again, Jordan can't resist.

Unfortunately, Vanessa is plotting something much more forbidden than spreading her father's ashes -- or sleeping with Jordan Groves, who's married with two boys. Behind her celebrated beauty is the dangerous and unbalanced character of a woman frightened into moral idiocy: "The truth was somewhat transient and changeable" for Vanessa, "one minute here, the next gone. It was something one could assert and a moment later turn around and deny, with no sense of there being any contradiction. Merely a correction."

That expedient attitude is completely alien to Hubert St. Germain, a proud woodsman who also gets dragged into Vanessa's deadly plot. He considers himself a throwback "to men of an earlier era, when the region had not yet been settled by white people -- solitary, self-sufficient hunters and trappers and woodsmen who thought of themselves as living off the land, regardless of who owned title to it." Now, of course, those days are gone. Once a man of "calm good sense and moral clarity," he too falls into a quagmire, "where he could no longer choose between right and wrong." But how different that challenge appears to someone who has no money, no options, no escape from his own sins.

Banks is a genius at showing people slipping into crises that scramble their moral reason, but this story depends on several startling revelations that alter everything we thought we knew about these characters. In some ways, The Reserve is a romantic thriller laboring away in the heavy costume of social realism. It vacillates oddly between aha moments and long passages of subtle analysis. And the novel's complicated political and aesthetic concerns are too quickly upstaged by romantic angst and bedroom shenanigans: e.g., "They made stormy love the entire rest of the night, until dawn broke." Sure.

The scandal that develops is periodically gripping, but what doesn't work is a series of italicized, intercalary chapters that show glimpses of Jordan and Vanessa in the future, serving in the war in Europe. At first, these episodes are so brief and elliptical that they convey no meaning at all, and even when they eventually do come into some focus, they remain unresolved. They're one more incongruous element in this alternately engaging and frustrating novel.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Though Pulitzer Prizeâ€"winning Russell Banks made his name writing about the down-and-out, blue-collar side of Adirondack society (The Sweet Hereafter, Cloudsplitter), The Reserve represents a rare foray into chronicling the lifestyles of the rich and morally depraved. Inspiration for the novel’s many plot twists and turns (and even more twisted characters) reportedly came from sources as varied as the life of flamboyant leftist artist Rockwell Kent to rumors about Ernest Hemingway’s troubled affair with a gorgeous but unstable mistress. Unfortunately, the New York Times expressed a majority opinion when it stated that the many threads of the story just didn’t coalesce, resulting in a mere “potboiler” with “silly and stereotype[d]” charactersâ€"a world away from Banks’s best work.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Art Imitates Art?
I've never read Russell Banks before, so I wasn't sure what to expect of THE RESERVE. The dust jacket copy and cover art reeled me in, so I bought it. This is apparently his homage to the American literary giants of yesteryear, notably Hemingway and Fitzgerald, with a distinctly modern point of view. It is certainly well-written, and the soapy plot is lively, and the contrast between the very rich and the working class at the height of the Depression is well-drawn. The two principal male characters are another study in contrasts, and they're interesting men. But the woman at the center of the story, the fabulously beautiful Vanessa Cole...well, much of your enjoyment of THE RESERVE will depend on your tolerance for her, and she is truly irritating, a charmless variation on any number of Hemingway and Fitzgerald characters. Still, the evocation of time and place is vivid, and there's a swoony romanticism to it all that's fun to read. Now I think I'll try some of his other, less derivative works.

Russell Banks' Gift Outright
Russell Banks' latest novel THE RESERVE, set in the Adirondacks in the second half of the 1930's, opens with a beautiful description of a beautiful woman, Vanessa Cole, the twenty-nine-year-old adopted daughter of a rich New York brain surgeon, Dr. Carter Cole, who is credited with the invention of the lobotomy, and his socialite wife Evelyn. Several times married, a participant in many affairs-- she is rumored to have slept with Ernest Hemingway-- impulsive, selfish, Vanessa seems on the surface to be a spoiled rich girl as her life intertwines with three other central characters. Jordan Groves is a handsome man's man, an artist-- whom I believe Mr. Banks said he may have modeled in part after Rockwell Kent-- also a pilot, with leftist political leanings and a womanizer and adulterer although he only sleeps with women one time and lets them seduce him; hence, he has no guilt. Jordan is married to Alicia, his long-suffering and pretty wife and the mother of his two sons, whom he has insisted on naming after animals he likes, Bear and Wolf. Finally, Hubert St. Germain is a competent, muscular guide for the rich summer vacationers, in his 30's, one of the locals-- he voted for Herbert Hoover-- who lives alone in a cabin, having lost his wife in an accident. These four characters find themselves in a quagmire that they have gotten themselves into by their own actions.

In prose as transparent as the Adirondack lake Jordan Groves sets his biplane down in, Mr. Russell creates a story in the noir tradition that in the hands of a lesser skilled writer would have been a potboiler. The plot has some unexpected twists and turns although some of the things that happen to these characters ultimately are unavoidable. Like other Banks characters, as the author himself has described, as the plot progresses, there are fewer and fewer things possible for them and they cannot survive. Even though these four individuals commit bad acts, they in the end are not villains but rather engaging sympathetic characters-- in a word, all too human.

The novel has an authentic feel to it and is full of details from the 1930's: Lucky Strike cigarettes, GONE WITH THE WIND, the dirigible, Packards. There are references to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the singer Jimmy Rogers, and John Dos Passos who once at a party allegedly made a drunken pass at Alicia.

THE RESERVE is about class: the lives of the idle rich are contrasted with the locals, the victims of the Great Depression, who are little more than servants of the vacationers who employ them. Jordan Groves is in many ways caught between classes. He moves in the circles of the Coles but is more comfortable drinking beer with the local workers. Hubert, however, is the most admirable character in the novel. He values honesty and understands the value of decent work. It is no coincidence that Mr. Banks ends this novel with the thoughts of Hubert. This bleak novel is also about the loneliness that each individual feels, that can be filled, if only briefly, by giving love to someone else-- and finally about duty. Alicia knows what she will do with the rest of her days. "She will raise her sons, and when they become men she wil cling to them and want to ask constantly of them if they love her, but she will hold her tongue. Instead, over and over she will ask herself, and now and again will dare to ask her sons, if she did badly by them, and they will sigh and reassure her one more time that she did not do badly by them and they are grateful."

Ideas like these so well-written are why we read fiction. Russell Banks is one of our best writers.

Don't judge Banks by this one
I've read everything by this prolific and profound master of written language and I have difficulty understanding how or why he wrote this book. Neither the characters or the plot is compelling- I found myself skimming the book towards the end. I just hope that you try any one of Russell Banks other books. They are ALL better than this one.