Luc Sante reviews Russell Banks’s new novel, The Reserve, for the NYT Book Review, and he doesn’t seem to like it very much:
It is 1936, and we are in the Adirondacks, at a party at a luxurious camp on a vast private reserve. (“Camp” is a local upper-caste understatement, comparable to the use of “cottage” in Newport, R.I.) As the sun begins to dip behind the mountain range that dominates the horizon, a beautiful young woman detaches herself from her elders and walks barefoot to the shore of the lake. Suddenly a seaplane appears in the air and all look on, stunned, as it lands on the surface of the water. Such a thing has never before occurred, and furthermore is taboo under the largely unspoken laws of the reserve. A dashing aviator — we will discover that he is a famous artist, a radical, a free spirit — steps out of the plane and locks eyes with the glamorous yet troubled young woman.
You can picture this on the movie screen, can’t you: all golden light and exquisite set design and dazzling wardrobe and starring, perhaps, Keira Knightley. Russell Banks’s new novel begins this way, and the scene exemplifies both its strengths and its weaknesses — it is not necessarily evident which is which.
I’m a bit disappointed, because Banks’s Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter are among my favorite novels, and I always hope to find the magic again.
I’m about half way through final edits for my new novel, The Outsider, and I am so tired these days I can barely keep my eyes open past eight p.m. While reading Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year the other day, I had to smile at this exchange between Señor C., an aging novelist, and Anya, the attractive neighbor he has hired to be his secretary:
A novel? No. I don’t have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today.
Still, I said, we have all got opinions, especially about politics. If you tell a story at least people will shut up and listen to you. A story or a joke.
Stories tell themselves, they don’t get told, he said. That much I know after a lifetime of working with stories. Never try to impose yourself. Wait for the story to speak for itself. Wait and hope that it isn’t born deaf and dumb and blind. I could do that when I was younger. I could wait patiently for months on end. Nowadays I get tired. My attention wanders.
I will be giving a reading with my colleague Reza Aslan (No god but God) tomorrow in Rancho Mirage. Here are the details:
February 14, 2008
Reza Aslan and Laila Lalami
1:30 - 3:30 PM
Reading & Discussion
Writing from the Desert Series
Rancho Mirage Public Library
Rancho Mirage, California
If you live in the desert, come on by and say hello.
At a meeting in Cairo called by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, a charter was adopted allowing authorities to withdraw permits from offending channels. The only country to refuse to endorse the charter was Qatar, the home of leading satellite station al-Jazeera.
Correspondents say the satellite channels have thrived on controversy. The often privately financed stations give airtime to government critics and viewers, and discuss issues which state channels would never dare approach, says the BBC’s Heba Saleh in Cairo.
Qatar’s reservations, according to the BBC reporter, were more ‘legal’ than ‘political’ in nature.
The Levantine Center is a Los Angeles-based organization that brings the arts, literatures, and films of the Middle East and North Africa to American audiences. It regularly puts together wonderful events (some of which I’ve written about in this space) and now they are in need of your support. This month, a generous donor has offered to match every pledge up to $10,000, so every penny you give the Levantine Center will be doubled. Please: Reach out for that checkbook or credit card and go here.
A Moroccan man by the name of Fouad Mourtada has been arrested and put in jail because he created a fake Facebook profile for the king’s brother, crown prince Moulay Rachid. The official Moroccan news agency MAP did not even bother with the presumption of innocence:
Les services de sécurité marocains ont procédé à l’arrestation, mercredi à Casablanca, pour pratiques crapuleuses d’un individu qui a usurpé l’identité de Son Altesse Royale le Prince Moulay Rachid sur le site Internet www.facebook.com, a-t-on appris de source policière.
The accused is referred to as having “villainous practices.” The release has since been taken down from the site, but you can read its Google cache. It’s unclear how the police found the man, and whether Facebook released his IP address.
Just the other day, a New York Times reporter called to ask me about blogging in Morocco, and the relationship between new media and traditional media. The Moroccan government has so far–and wisely–left bloggers alone, but if someone can get put in jail for something as silly as a fake Facebook profile, then bloggers should be worried.
A few weeks ago in my non-fiction class, we discussed James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. Here is how the essay “Stranger in the Village” concludes:
One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
