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Characters shaped by temptation
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“NEVER been there myself,” a bartender tells a customer looking for exotic sex in Russell Banks’ incisive new collection of stories, “A Permanent Member of the Family.” “But I’ve heard no matter what you’re into, you can find it behind the Green Door.”
There’s no shortage of green doors in Banks’ fictional world, and they don’t all lead to clandestine brothels. His characters are repeatedly given opportunities for transgression — for marital infidelity, violence, criminal behavior or for simply becoming, if fleetingly, something other than what they’ve been. But they know there’s a price to be paid when they take that step into terra incognita. Most, like the aging bartender in “The Green Door,” ultimately decide just to watch from the threshold, resigned to the “cloudy dissatisfaction” of their safer, less complicated lives.
In “Lost and Found,” Stanley, who runs a plumbing supply company, attends his industry’s annual convention in Miami. Like many of Banks’ protagonists, he’s a man of a certain age, standing halfway down the rough backslope of midlife virility, wondering whether there were things he should have done differently. He bumps into Ellen, a much younger woman with whom he had a near-affair at the same convention five years earlier. Ellen is still alluring, still interested, and Stanley finds himself once again on the brink of betraying his marriage. But this second chance proves no easier to grasp than the first. In the end, the only certainty for Stanley is that whatever choice he makes will lead to regret.
“Snowbirds” begins with Jane Deane, a high school guidance counselor, flying from upstate New York to Florida to comfort her newly bereaved friend, Isabel, whose husband has just died of a freak heart attack. Jane expects to find a grief-stunned widow at the airport, but Isabel turns out to be disconcertingly chipper, full of exciting plans. After the funeral, she confesses to Jane that her husband’s death has been a liberation: “I’ve been feeling high, almost stoned, more excited by my life than I’ve felt in years.” And when the time comes for Jane to go back north, back to her husband, “her dour companion and the permanent witness to her remaining years,” she hesitates.
“I would be happy if you stayed here,” Isabel offers.
“Until?”
“Until you decide what you want.”
What these characters want, of course, is never easy to articulate, and as Oscar Wilde observed, getting it is often as tragic as not. An artist in “Big Dog” wins a MacArthur “genius” grant, but finds the award comes at the cost of his confidence, his artistic unassailability and perhaps his marriage. An ailing sales rep in “Transplant” receives a young man’s heart but realizes — too late — that it won’t replace another part of himself he lost along the way.
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