The Reserve by Russell Banks

A half-mad heiress desperate to avoid institutionalization. A dashing painter and part-time aviator. A laconic working-class man still brooding over the untimely death of his wife.

These are the central characters of Russell Banks’ 11th novel, The Reserve, and if they sound like they’ve just stepped out of a 1940s Hollywood melodrama starring Bette Davis and Fredric March, that’s very much part of the point.

Banks, who made his reputation exploring the hardscrabble lives and disappointments of rural New Yorkers and New Englanders in books such as The Sweet Hereafter and Continental Drift, here tries to add a bit of old-fashioned sweep and glamour to the realism. But the experiment doesn’t quite work. Engaging without being especially insightful or memorable, The Reserve feels like the work of a writer going through the motions. Banks once again explores his familiar themes, about class differences, adultery and the way the American dream so often collapses in on itself.

Only this time his heart doesn’t seem to be in it, and The Reserve turns increasingly manufactured and false.

The year is 1936, the height of the Great Depression, but you wouldn’t know it from the goings-on at The Reserve — an exclusive tract of vacation property in upstate New York, near the Adirondack Mountains, owned communally by a group of doctors and lawyers. There, the famous neurosurgeon Dr. Carter Cole hosts his annual July Fourth picnic. And this year, he has invited Jordan Groves, a very successful painter and illustrator who lives in the area, to look at his art collection.

The first few chapters of The Reserve serve up an entertaining flurry of plot: Jordan’s showy arrival by airplane, landing on the lake behind the Coles’ home, immediately attracts the attention of Dr. Cole’s daughter, Vanessa, a beautiful but unstable former countess. That same night, Dr. Cole suffers a fatal heart attack, which sends Vanessa on a downward emotional spiral. The next morning, Jordan stirs up a fight on the grounds of The Reserve that pits the wealthy landowners against the impoverished townspeople who work there and are desperate to keep their jobs.

Writing in a third-person omniscient voice that moves fluidly among the perspectives of the main characters, Banks seems to be itching to serve up some kind of vast historical epic like his much-praised Cloudsplitter (1998). And the best thing about The Reserve is how vividly it describes the impact of the Depression on this unique corner of New York.

“In two generations, a class of independent yeomen and yeowomen had been turned into a servant class, with all the accompanying dependencies, resentments, insecurity and envy,” he writes plaintively. Banks is one of the few contemporary novelists able to synthesize his vast research into a larger story without wearing said research on his sleeve.

But did the larger story have to be so rote and dopey? As The Reserve continues, it turns into a familiar, overwrought love quadrangle involving Jordan; Vanessa; Jordan’s wife, Alicia; and the Coles’ handyman, Hubert St. Germain. Fearing that her mother will have her lobotomized, Vanessa decides to kidnap Mrs. Cole from their home in Connecticut and take her back to The Reserve, where she holds her hostage. Both Hubert and Jordan are unwittingly drawn into the scheme.

Meanwhile, Alicia misinterprets one of Jordan’s gestures and mistakenly comes to believe he has figured out her scandalous secret.

Perhaps if the secrets here were a bit more shocking, or if the characters’ actions felt a bit more convincing, the reader might have cared about how all of this gets resolved. Instead, too much of The Reserve feels like it was written following too many late nights spent watching Turner Classic Movies marathons. Banks even serves up some token Hitchcockian “intrigue” in the novel – a series of flash-forwards interspersed between the chapters, which hint at some sort of espionage unfolding in Germany and Spain that somewhat relates to what’s happening in upstate New York.

Alas, this mystery is a lot less scintillating than you might think, and when the true meaning of these flash-forwards is revealed, The Reserve seems all the more puny and attenuated. This book, finally, reads as if Banks got bored with his own ideas long before he was able to see them to completion.