Family Life

I know people mostly hated this book, then and now. I love the way the little novella comes charging in with acid portraits of all of us but the author knows he can't keep the thing at that intensity. So the prose goes over to a slow boil. Big props for the reframing of the fairy tale form but by th......more

Russell Banks’ first novel, Family Life, is a satirical romp through a contemporary but mythical kingdom. It is an allegorical story of a royal family led by the bombastic king Egress "the Hearty"(or "the Bluff”). The queen, Naomi Ruth, writes a novel which is embedded in the book as a sort of inter......more

I've been a Russell Banks reader for over twenty years, since my dear friend Pete gave me a copy of Rule of the Bone, not even realizing that not only a) was it set in the very town in which I was born, but b) contained a great deal of parallels to my own upbringing. In the ensuing decades, I've re......more