Every beautiful spot in North America has this kind of class divide arising and turning one group of people into a servant class and the other group of people into the grandees who reserve and preserve a place at the same time.
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The setting for Russell Banks's eleventh novel, The Reserve (2008), is a private Adirondack camp for wealthy sophisticates circa 1936. A noir atmosphere permeates this story of passion, adultery, and murder, not to mention the economic struggles, social hierarchy and political upheavals that rocked the world during that tumultuous time. Banks—the revered author of such award-winners as Continental Drift (1985), Affliction (1989), and Cloudsplitter (1998)—loosely based his main character on socialist American artist Rockwell Kent, while other historical references (the Hindenburg, the Spanish Civil War, early lobotomies) appear, too, in this rollercoaster of a book. In this illuminating interview with Victoria Lautman on her radio program "riters on the Record," Banks discusses the arc of his long writing career.
Above: Detail of postcard depicting the Robert Louis Stevenson House in the Adirondack Mountains. Card dated June 8, 1907.
