Description
A searing story about memory and betrayal from the acclaimed and bestselling Russell Banks
In his late seventies and dying of cancer, famed Canadian-American documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders who fled to Canada to avoid Vietnam, has agreed to one final interview, determined to bare all his secrets and demythologize his mythologized life. But the story that unspools in front of the camera and an intimate chorus of observers, including Fife’s wife, his nurse, and his acolyte and former star student Malcolm Macleod, is confoundingly unexpected, the dark and affecting account of a man entirely unknown to all.
A searing novel about memory, betrayal, love, and the faint grace note of redemption, Russell Banks’s Foregone is a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man’s mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.
PRAISE FOR FOREGONE
“Foregone is a subtle meditation on a life composed of half-forgotten impulses and their endless consequences, misapprehensions of others that are accepted and exploited almost passively, a minor heroism that is only enhanced by demurral. In the rages of a sick old man profound questions arise—what is a life? A self? And what is lost when truth destroys the fabrications that sustain other lives?”—Marilynne Robinson
“Strikingly effective…. Banks explores aging, memory, and reputation in thoughtful and touching ways…. A challenging, risk-taking work marked by a wry and compassionate intelligence.”—Kirkus (starred review)
“Banks, a conduit for the confounded and the unlucky, a writer acutely attuned to place and ambiance, is at his most magnetic and provocative in this portrait of a celebrated documentary filmmaker on the brink of death…. In this masterful depiction of a psyche under siege by disease, age, and guilt, Banks considers with profound intent the verity of memory, the mercurial nature of the self, and how little we actually know about ourselves and others…. [For] all lovers of richly psychological and ethical fiction.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Sinuous… vivid… Banks keeps the audience rapt.”—Publishers Weekly
“Russell Banks, as cinematographer, is known to move in close. Foregone focuses his sharp eye on the feints and fictions amid life’s ‘facts,’ as he reveals his fascinatingly fallible character, Fife, whose personal life has been contextualized by history. As we zig-zag through the character’s past and present, it becomes apparent that the writer is simultaneously, and subtly, demonstrating the act of writing fiction. Fife is aptly named; he’s an instrument piercing the soundtrack we call life, as the drummer marches on.”—Ann Beattie
“Russell Banks is, word for word, idea for idea, one of the great American novelists. Foregone is a book about not coming to a conclusion. Banks presents us with a series of mirrors, some of them broken, some of them intact, and all of them wildly reflective of our times. It is a book about the shifting shapes of memory and the chimerical nature of our lives.”—Colum McCann
PRAISE FOR RUSSELL BANKS
“Few writers look as closely at life as Banks and render it into an art that is truthful and unsettling … while he is one of the most underhyped of writers, he is also among the very best, with a better-developed sense of black humour than some readers may suspect of him … Exactly how good a writer is Russell Banks? How about wonderful? Alert to his society, he has a campaigning conscience, yet his art invariably transcends polemic because he is as committed to story as he is to the way people live, suffer and fall.”—Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
“Banks is a master of the kind of old-school, unadorned realism that hasn’t really been the fashion in short stories since the days of Raymond Carver. But here he executes it with a psychological precision that would be the envy of any of the latter-day fabulists or word-drunk genre-benders currently in vogue.”—Gary Krist, New York Times Book Review
“Russell Banks’s fiction holds such a simple, internal authority … The story he tells is grave and unusually urgent, his prose as careful as a trail of stones left in the forest … These voices ache with a particular brand of reality [and] Banks evokes each of his characters with fluid authenticity … Russell Banks is a writer of extraordinary power.”—Boston Globe
“Russell Banks is a great American writer … He studies and learns from his predecessors and competitors—Hemingway, Cheever, Carver and Dubus, for instance. He’s certainly in that league.”—Winnipeg Free Press
“Banks’s forthright style is the perfect mode for scrutinising family life … It’s hard to resist the power of such clear and bracingly honest writing.”
—The List (Scotland)
