The Reserve
Russell Banks
The Reserve
It is July, 1936, and it is the height of the Depression, and the looming threat of Fascism is spreading across Europe. And somewhere high above the Adirondack mountains, beautiful and doomed, floats the vast Hindenburg airship. Vanessa Cole is the stunning debutante daughter of the famous brain surgeon Carter Cole. Notorious for her scandalous affairs with the rich and famous, she has returned to her parents' home in upstate New York after the collapse of her second marriage. Rumours are rife as the family gathers to celebrate the 4th of July at the rustic but elegant Adirondack Camp deep in their privately-owned wilderness, The Reserve.This scene of luxury and privilege is disturbed by the arrival of the internationally famous painter and political radical, Jordan Groves, who brazenly lands his bi-plane on the pristine Second Lake. Groves, celebrated as much for his leftist politics, Hemingwayesque exploits and romantic conquests as for his art, is easy prey for Vanessa Cole's blend of electrifying charm and destructiveness. But in order to protect his two young sons and his marriage, already made fragile by his years of compulsive infidelity, he must try to keep his distance. Especially when it becomes clear that Vanessa carries a deeply scarring family secret...
2.2 out of 5 based on 6 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
304 |
| RRP |
£14.99 |
| Date of Publication |
May 2008 |
| ISBN |
978-0747593676 |
| Publisher |
Bloomsbury |
| |
It is July, 1936, and it is the height of the Depression, and the looming threat of Fascism is spreading across Europe. And somewhere high above the Adirondack mountains, beautiful and doomed, floats the vast Hindenburg airship. Vanessa Cole is the stunning debutante daughter of the famous brain surgeon Carter Cole. Notorious for her scandalous affairs with the rich and famous, she has returned to her parents' home in upstate New York after the collapse of her second marriage. Rumours are rife as the family gathers to celebrate the 4th of July at the rustic but elegant Adirondack Camp deep in their privately-owned wilderness, The Reserve.This scene of luxury and privilege is disturbed by the arrival of the internationally famous painter and political radical, Jordan Groves, who brazenly lands his bi-plane on the pristine Second Lake. Groves, celebrated as much for his leftist politics, Hemingwayesque exploits and romantic conquests as for his art, is easy prey for Vanessa Cole's blend of electrifying charm and destructiveness. But in order to protect his two young sons and his marriage, already made fragile by his years of compulsive infidelity, he must try to keep his distance. Especially when it becomes clear that Vanessa carries a deeply scarring family secret...
Reviews
The Daily Telegraph
Lionel Shriver
“The power of a novel to immerse readers in a corner of the world, both in place and time, that they'd never been interested in, is proven by The Reserve... Banks writes in a muscular style, and the plot is well paced. This is an enjoyable and involving read... A crucial scene between three principals does not proceed plausibly... However, Banks is a solid and entertaining author and The Reserve is a gratifying addition to his 15 other books.”
10/05/2008
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The Washington Post
Ron Charles
“Banks is a genius at showing people slipping into crises that scramble their moral reason, but this story depends on several startling revelations that alter everything we thought we knew about these characters. In some ways, The Reserve is a romantic thriller laboring away in the heavy costume of social realism. It vacillates oddly between aha moments and long passages of subtle analysis. And the novel's complicated political and aesthetic concerns are too quickly upstaged by romantic angst and bedroom shenanigans... alternately engaging and frustrating...”
03/02/2008
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The Observer
Geraldine Bedell
“...The cliche pile-up is close to comical. It's a symptom of a recurring problem in this novel, which, for all that it reaches after insights about class, authenticity and illusion, keeps tripping over its film-noir conventions... It's too rich, with too few nuances or contradictions... Yet The Reserve is a tremendous, page-turning read. There's madness, misunderstanding, adultery, accidents, moral choices and conflagration still to come, all bathed in the swoony atmosphere of a Thirties movie... For all its pleasures, The Reserve is a frustrating novel, sowing several ideas that never quite take root.”
24/04/2009
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The New York Review of Books
Jennifer Schuessler
“For all the care of its construction and clear beauty of its descriptive prose, The Reserve has a curiously cold-blooded and stagy quality, as if it were worked up from its multiple historical sources and abstract themes rather than allowed to grow from the exfoliating revelations of character... disappointing... cluttered...”
20/03/2008
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The New York Times
Michiko Kakutani
“The plot of “The Reserve” moves... in a hokey, herky-jerky fashion that never lets the reader forget that Mr. Banks is... pulling the characters’ strings. Even the language he uses is weirdly secondhand: a bizarre mélange of Hemingwayesque action prose and romance-novel clichés... Banks has struggled to concoct a plausible narrative... his two central characters remain paper-and-paste constructions... devoid of any sort of coherent inner life... a novel unworthy of a writer with as many gifts and as impressive a track record as Russell Banks.”
29/01/2008
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The Guardian
Stephen Amidon
“...The Reserve proves a singularly clumsy offering. The characters all carry impressive curriculum vitae, but prove uniformly disappointing... More baffling still is Banks's prose... At times, it reads almost like a deliberate parody of popular romance fiction, though it is impossible to figure out the end such satire might serve... Perhaps the only real consolation the author's fans can take from this ill-considered book is that it is so slight that it will soon crumble and blow away, leaving intact Banks's reputation as one of American's better novelists”
17/05/2008
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