American Spirits, by Russell Banks, translated from English (United States) by Pierre Furlan, Actes Sud, 222 p., 22.80 digital edition.
Just over three years ago, on January 7, 2023, the man who initially promised to follow in his father’s footsteps in plumbing, but was then guided almost by chance towards writing by Nelson Algren, the American lover of Simone de Beauvoir, became one of the greatest politically engaged novelists of contemporary America: Russell Banks.
Throughout his writing career, without ever succumbing to ideological simplification, Banks criticized ultraconservative brutality and the blindness of some progressives, while also highlighting the danger of rising populism. To culminate his work, the author of “American Darling” (Actes Sud, 2005) had given us the magnificent “Oh Canada” (Actes Sud, 2022), a semi-autobiographical text depicting the poignant exposure of a sick filmmaker, aware of his impending death. This was a year before his own death. Today, Actes Sud publishes a posthumous work, “American Spirits,” a triptych of short stories that we dive into with surprise and curiosity.
The book brings us back to the small town of Sam Dent – previously featured in “Cloudsplitter” (1998) – in the Adirondack forest region in upstate New York. But while the setting is familiar, the population has changed. They no longer go out without their MAGA caps, they drive SUVs with American flags and stickers on the bumper advocating for the right to bear arms, libertarian slogans like “Don’t tread on me,” or apocalyptic biblical verses. Above all, they are angry. “Yeah, you’re right, I’m angry,” confesses Doug in “The Man from Nowhere,” the first story, “as though declaring his religion or race.” That’s why Doug loves Trump: because, unlike Obama or Clinton, “Trump, he’s got a damn anger.”
In the same ravine
Anger, violence, boredom, drugs, and alcohol are the ingredients of these bleak and gloomy stories, all of which end in bloodshed. In “The Man from Nowhere,” Doug sold his land to a man who turned it into a paramilitary training camp. He misses the time when, from home, he could hear “the wind in the pines” instead of the explosives the new owner tests on old broken-down cars “for the day when the world needs saving from the socialist threat.” He especially misses being able to hunt deer on his former land, and when he dares to defy the ban, the story unfolds…
