Russell Banks found the heart of Trumpism

For years now, writers have tried various ways to capture the heart of Trumpism. Attend a rally. Convene a focus group. Find a Panera Bread outside of Ohio. Russell Banks, in his first book published since his death in January 2023, seemed to realize that he needed to look no further than his own bibliography.

In a triptych of interconnected stories, “American Spirits,” Banks imagines a rural area of ​​upstate New York that evokes the rugged settings of her bleak novels, including “Affliction.” He does not discover surprising ideas, but novelty is beside the point. Rather, he wants to emphasize that the core of Trumpism – rapacity, ego, territorialism, the will to violence – is fundamental to American society.

The setting for all three stories is Sam Dent, a fictional New Yorker Banks introduced in previous works. He is a symbol of the country's great effort: “Sam Dent is not the kind of town where a few people earn and the rest receive welfare,” she writes. “Everyone here gets by, even if it's just barely.”

In the opening story, “Nowhere Man,” the person barely getting by is Doug, a laborer and sport hunter who sold a plot of land he inherited. The man he sold to, Yuri Zingerman, has turned the land into a paramilitary and survival training camp. It's a Chekhov gun story, only with AR-15.

Doug, an anonymous “we” informs us, was promised the right to hunt the land after it was sold. But tensions rise when Yuri breaks that promise. After a bar fight, Yuri pins Doug down in an instant and threatens him, a scene full of labor exploitation and might-makes-right amorality: “Zingerman's ability to do it so fast that Doug couldn't see it happen.” “. until it was finished. “That baffled Doug.” The end here is inevitable, but Banks artfully captures the precariousness of existence before it becomes tragic, the way feelings of masculinity become entangled in that precariousness, and how macho posturing only makes it worse.

The middle story, “Homeschooling,” is more ambiguous, focusing on a young conservative couple unsure what to do with their new neighbors, a white lesbian couple with four adopted black children. The neighbors' live-and-let-live approach is challenged when one child, then another, arrives at their door claiming hunger and abuse at the hands of his adoptive mothers.

The fate of the children is a horror, but the inability to understand the difference is crushing in its own way. The narrator suggests that Sam Dent is consumed by a viral rage straight out of “The Lottery”: “It was almost as if people had decided that they were tired of being tolerant of the presence of the Weber women and their four black children and were no longer is obliged to treat them as legitimate members of the community.”

An anonymous narrator tells the stories of “American Spirits,” giving them a glimpse of past legends, folklore or cautionary tales: “Winesburg, Ohio” with all the magic stripped away. The narrator informs the reader that Sam Dent's namesake made his fortune from land purchased through fraud, making the town a place of “looting, misappropriation, forgery, outright theft, personal aggrandizement, selfishness and greed in times of war”. The MAGA hats that the characters proudly wear throughout the book both crystallize their willful ignorance of that past and underscore the injustice they perpetuate in the name of red-blooded patriotism.

The irony is most clearly shown in the final story, “Kidnapped,” in which a retired couple is taken hostage by French-Canadian drug traffickers, who are held ransom for the poor decisions of their daughter and grandson with special needs. Banks delivers this dynamic, over-the-top treatment in some ways: There are a lot of gunfights and a TV blares “America's Got Talent.” One of the merchants mocks the Trumpian simplicity: “You are all worried about Mexico and the construction of Trump's wall, and in the meantime, whoever wants can walk across from Canada.” But Banks raises a more subtle subtext here: that all this lurid violence arises from the inability to see our shortcomings clearly and the unwillingness to denounce the forces (sexist, intolerant) that manipulate it.

That sensitivity is what we lost when Banks died last year. Violence intertwined with politics and human weakness was its hallmark, shown in contemporary classics such as “Continental Drift”, in which a New England worker becomes involved in human trafficking, or “Cloudsplitter”, a historical novel about John Brown's slave revolt, and even to 2022's “The Magic Kingdom,” in which the all-American cult destroys a man and a community simultaneously.

Because Banks's concern was always with the way Americans deceive themselves in the name of freedom or righteousness, he never ran out of material. “American Spirits” is not the best example of his talent, but it is a user-friendly introduction to his sensibility, suitable for an election year in which deception is part of the narrative. In Banks' plot of America, residents try to escape the past, but the past always has a way of getting back at us. As he himself writes: “In the end someone had to pay, because in the end everyone has to pay.”

Mark Athitakis is a Phoenix writer and author of “The New Midwest.”