It’s not memory you need for telling this story, writes Russel Banks in the italicized introduction with which he begins Continental Drift: With a story like this, you want an accounting to occur, not a recounting, and a presentation, not a representation, which is why it’s told the way it’s told.This is an American story of the late twentieth century, writes Banks and he means it: this is a powerful novel of hope and loss set in the recession of the early 1980's, concerned with characters who could not be different but who both strive for something they feel is withing their reach: a different, better life.The novel begins with the introduction of Bob Dubois, an American everyman: 30 years of age, he has lived all his life in Cattamouth, New Hampshire, working as a repairman for the Abenaki Oil Company since he finished high school. At 30, Bob is married with two daughters and another child on the way. He lives a small duplex in a working class neighborhood and rents the back to four tenants (whom he calls hippies), drives an old Chevrolet and owns a 13 foot Boston whaler he built from kit. He still owes the Cattamouth Loan Company a little over $22,000 in payments for the house, car and boat. A question haunts Bob Dubois, which is relevant to many to us: "I am smart - why I am not rich?""We Have a good life", his wife tells him, but Bob longs for more: he wants out of the small New Hampshire town with its snowny hopelesness, where nothing ever seems to change; he longs for a slice of the American Dream for himself. When his brother offers him a job with Florida, Bob thinks that this is his chance to start again. A new hope waits in the unexplored land down south, where ripe oranges hangs from trees all year round and and success wait for those willing to grasp them.Vanise Dorsinville also longs for a better life: a native resident of Haiti, she longs to escape its instability, poverty and violence, and secure a better future for herself and her baby. She saves up enough money to pay the coyotes to smuggle her to America, the promised land where Haitians have been taken to and prospered: she is aware that the journey is dangerous but is willing to take the risk to get to the city of Miami, where there is a Haitian community which will help her accomodate and start a new life.For Bob, a native New Englander, Florida is also like a different part of the world: althought still a part of his homeland, The United States, it is so far removed from New Hampshire both geographically and culturally that it might as well be a separate country. Having lived in homogenously white New Hampshire all his life, Bob experiences a true culture shock when he sees so many people of color: hundreds of them, thousands!. In Florida it is Bob and his family who are seen as curiosities, "white folks" and strangers. Elaine, Bob's wife, is amazed, and asks: All those black people working in the fields and everything, they’re not really Americans, right?, to which he replies: I’ve read they’re from Cuba and those kinds of places.Bank's Florida is a place where people wake up from their dreams, and not fulfill them: as Bob and his family drive through central Florida, their first reaction is of disappointment: they keep their eyes away from the horizon to avoid seeing the flat landscape, spotted with endless franchised stores and restaurants, lonely and isolated neighborhoods which turn into miles of grids of trailer parks, automobile graveyards, vast and disordered, dreary, colorless and indestructible.. As they see more of Florida, the realization that they no longer can return to New Hampshire fills them with fear, as they know that this is their home now. A place where people play dirty to get rich quickly, where violence is commonplace and crime prospers. Bob has made the bed, and he must now sleep in it: as the novel progresses it becomes obvious that he has no succesfully transformed his life but merely lost his past, the job and posessions which gave him a sense of status, in exchange for the life which is slowly spiralling out of his hands among the palm trees and scorching sun.Right in the introduction Banks writes that the "sad story of Robert Raymond Dubois" will end in the back alleys of Miami, on a February morning in 1981. The ending is indeed powerful and striking, if not unexpected, but the novel is all about the journey: about Bob's life disintegrating further and further, and Vanise's hopes for reaching Miami, and their lifelines intersecting. Banks develops Bob's character with significantly more detail than he grants to Vanise - he seems to try to make up for that with references to Haitian culture and customs, of which there are plenty, but Vanise herself is more of a personification of the general immigrant dream. As he admits in his epilogue, the purpose of the book is to "destroy the world as it is"; this is a strongly ideological work, with an important message. Therefore, his characters never seem to not be controlled by the fate predestined for them by their creator: Bob's life goes out of control almost too neatly in its tragedy, and Vanise is almost saintlike in her complacency: her only active decision seems to be the escape from Haiti, and she remains resigned throughout the rest of the novelNevertheless, this is a powerful and important novel about the failure of the American dream and the struggle of the working class, and made me want to read more of Banks's work. Bob Dubois is a fragile character who seems to have been already broken and put back together from different pieces of glass, each shard reflecting on us with our own faces. Like continets we drift and dislodge, and Banks's novel made me grieve for his characters, which are but images of many contemporary lives to whom no one will ever give a platform to voice their woes before they wither away into eternity. With this novel Banks lets them be heard, and they speak loudly and clearly.
Bob Dubois might be suffering from what we call "White People Problems" in modern-day parlance, that is to say he's dissatisfied with a life that, by all measures is "comfortable": wife, children, a steady job, food and shelter. Somehow for Bob—who considers himself washed-up at 30—an age where, by today's standards, people are unsteadily navigating the world of adulthood, never mind shacking up and procreating—the trappings of suburbia are not nearly enough to sustain the emptiness in his soul. The trouble with his life, if he were to say it honestly, which at this moment in his life he cannot, is that it's over. He's alive, but his life has died. He's thirty years old, and if for the next thirty-five years he works as hard as he has so far, he will be able to stay exactly where he is now, materially, personally....Bob has survived in a world where mere survival is insufficient, so if he complains about insufficiency, he's told to look down below to see how far he's come alreadyBob's elder brother is a slick, fast-talking, snake oil salesman who tries to convince his brother that the streets are, in fact, paved with gold in Florida. With a combination of youthful ennui and realization that his life is, in fact, sliding into a dull monotony of comfort and predictability at the ripe old age of 30, Bob finally gives in to his brother's admonitions to move to the Sunshine State, figuring that the risks of failure and destitution from a misguided plan will only enhance the sweet success he plans upon arrival. Soon after he arrives, though, his life rapidly goes downhill in a way I can't explain here without spoiling the end. Some lives are lost in the process and I can't help but wonder if this novel would have different interpretations in the present day with the Ferguson/Baltimore riots. But I digress. Meanwhile, Russell Banks is just getting started here. At some point in the novel, the narrative rapidly shifts to a completely different character, Vanise, a young, Haitian woman living in circumstances so desperate she must routinely risk life and limb just to survive. Couldn't be more different than Mr. Dubois who's simply leaving town to avoid boredom, more or less. Fearing that her family will be blamed for a minor crime that her nephew commits, Venise flees Haiti with her nephew and her young child, bound for America. Along the way, her body literally becomes the currency that she uses to pay for the trip and silence from those who can report her to immigration and have her deported. It was at this point of the novel—in a scene in the cabin of a ship bound for "America"—where I openly wept for Vanise, trapped on a boat with two children and utterly at the mercy of the depravity of a group of men who gleefully used her body over and over again until they got bored and moved on. As the reader you want to shake Claude, the adolescent boy she's traveling with, to make him do something while his aunt is repeatedly raped. I almost couldn't bear it. Another strange element in this novel is the reliance on voodoo symbolism. I'm not too familiar with voodoo religion outside of the goat and chicken-sacrificing rituals that most Westernized movies seem all too happy to exploit for the sake of ticket sales, but, in the novel, it's a source of strength and meaning for Haitians who suffer tremendously at the hands of unscrupulous smugglers. But, mostly I was impressed by the depth and quality of research that the author put into this novel. I'm not sure how much time he spent in Haiti or the Bahamas to be able to write with this level of detail—I did read that he was fascinated by Jamaican culture, having spent some years there—but his masterful description of both scene, location and character (on the micro level, we know what direction the wind was blowing on a stormy night and how that affects the character's perception of both water and sky) gives the reader permission to live the story along with him. It's that good! The fact that he can weave together two very disparate characters whose fate eventually becomes intertwined in a significant way is also pretty mind-blowing.I'm not sure I would classify this book as the "quintessential American novel," but I think it touches on many themes that are just as relevant today as they were in 1985: dissatisfaction with suburbia, race relations, morality and the inequalities in our society.
What do You think about Continental Drift (2007)?
When I saw Russell Banks speak at the Brooklyn Book Festival a few years ago, he read a couple of passages from Continental Drift. He prefaced his reading with the comment that while it might seem strange that he was revisiting a book he'd written in the 80s, its themes had been on his mind lately. I can see why. Set in a recession, Continental Drift is interested in things like the cost of pursuing the American dream, the definition of contemporary manhood, and the relationship between the fate of an individual and the fate of a civilization. The passages that Banks read at the book fest outlined the book's elegant "big idea" -- that the currents that push people to pick up their families and homes and look for a better living are a kind of force of nature. These ambitious, meditative passages are some of the book's finest. They're what made me seek this book out, what pulled me into this story and what made parallel protagonists Bob Dubois and Vanise Dorsinville's travails so gripping in the first place. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for this book waned a bit as things unfolded and I spent a little more time with Banks' main characters. Bob (leaving a factory job in New England) and Vanise (leaving hurricane-stricken Haiti) have much to deal with in their quest for a new, better life in Florida, and neither is quite up to the task. Bob ruminates and flounders; Vanise submits and endures. Both are sympathetic characters in their way, but the story progresses (and their fates meet), Bob and Vanise serve the plot a little too well. As a result both are too-readily martyred for Banks' larger message. Continental Drift is a powerful novel about powerlessness, masterfully rendered, one might say. There are diverting subplots, raw scenes of abuse and human weakness, and shifting perspectives but the novel holds steady to its larger concerns through it all. It's a good thing and a bad thing. For all its strengths, in the end this book suffers from being a novel-y novel -- the kind of book that never lets you forget that it's carrying the weight of the world.
—Mythili
Ugh. I kind of hated this book (and I've only truly disliked approximately 5 books that I've ever read.) I know Russell Banks is supposed to be this extraordinary writer, and I will readily admit that he has a way with words but the story was bleak and depressing. Banks writes effectively about the loss of the American Dream and what happens when you take a perfectly average life, gamble on a move and end up spiraling into disaster with one bad decision after another. In the meantime, Banks interweaves the story of a Haitian trying desperately to get to the freedom of America and what an unending nightmare that turns into. I read this book because it was mentioned in The End of Your Life Book Club (Schwalbe) which I really enjoyed, but this was just one page after another of unending disappointment. I am definitely not one to need a happy ending nor do I need every book to be an uplifting read but this novel seemed to nosedive into a pit of quicksand for me.
—Lynn
I read this right after "An American Tragedy" by Theodore Dreiser. I know I have a tendency to see how everything in life links up nicely - but these dang books just were too crazy alike. Not to the point that Russell Banks should be called out. But just a reminder that life is hard and we pay for our mistakes. We might be able to skip merrily around for a while - but eventually mistakes will be right on your left shoulder ready to collect. My husband said he wouldn't have seen the parallels if I hadn't been talking about them every time I read another chapter. So I guess it could still be just me and my life linking tendency. And my power of persuasion.
—Melody
