Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Family Life
    Family Life
    Family Life
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Family Life

    By Russell Banks

    3/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In Family Life, Russell Banks's first novel, he transforms the dramas of domesticity into the story of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom. Life inside this kingdom includes the king (dubbed "the Hearty" or "the Bluff"), who squeals angrily as is his wont; the queen, who, while pondering the mirror in her chambers, decides to write a book; three adolescent princes who are, respectively, a superb wrestler, a fanatical sports car driver, and a sullen drunk. Then there are the mysterious Green Man with a thing for princes; the Loon, who lives in a tree house designed by Christopher Wren; and a whole slew of murders, mayhem, coups, debauches, world tours, and love and loss and laughter.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 26, 2013
    ISBN9780062335814
    Author

    Russell Banks

    Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two.  

    Read more from Russell Banks

    Related to Family Life

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      The Born Free legacy

      Jun 24, 2020

      A rare, almost saintly man.” This was how the renowned ITN foreign correspondent and author, Sandy Gall, described George Adamson in his biography of the man made famous around the world by the 1966 film, Born Free, starring Virginia McKenna and Bill

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Kremlin Must Be in Crisis

      Sep 21, 2022

      The Kremlin Must Be in Crisis
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Strong, Clear Voice Of Ottessa Moshfegh

      Jul 23, 2018

      AN UNNAMED YOUNG woman—blond, beautiful, a graduate of Columbia University—hates everything and everyone in shiny, brittle Manhattan, circa 2000. So she decides to hibernate in her Upper East Side apartment for six months. Maybe, she thinks, if she s

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Of The People

      May 19, 2019

      Of The People
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Álvaro Enrigue Won’t Romanticize Mexican History

      Mar 26, 2024

      "'You Dreamed of Empires' is at open war with the romantic representations of the Mexican past." The post Álvaro Enrigue Won’t Romanticize Mexican History appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Write As You Live

      Aug 14, 2024

      IN 2019 I quit my full-time job to turn a short story I’d been working on for years into a book. My husband agreed to cover our living expenses while I wrote and “figured things out.” I wanted to appear serious. So I sought guidance. I signed up for

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      As the Shore Comes to Meet Us

      Sep 1, 2024

      HARPER AND I were only two Red Hooks deep on a rented pontoon when I spied the heads bobbing dark against Lake Hartwell's shimmers. There hadn't been another boat all morning so I growled us over to the man and woman fighting to keep their faces abov

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Benjamin Nugent

      Jun 15, 2018

      Claire’s roommates threw her out on November third, for falling behind on rent and hogging the Xbox. During the next three weeks, she lived in other people’s houses. She missed the Xbox, but couch surfing was like a game. She had to not smell like co

      20 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson

      Dec 2, 2022

      Chantal V. Johnson reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Chantal V. Johnson appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Family Life

    3/5

    6 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Banks' first published novel. Short, slightly absurd, often humorous chapters combine to create a moving book. Feels a bit like Donald Barthelme. Unlike any of his later works.

    Book preview

    Family Life - Russell Banks

    1

    ———————

    1.

    TO GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING would be fruitless, timewasting, pretentious. It’s much more productive, faster and more sincere to commence in medias res with the king squealing angrily, the princes, all three of them, lolling through their extended adolescences, the queen quietly comforting herself in her chambers, and the several secondary characters gathered together in small groups scattered variously about the palace—the Green Man (so-called), the Loon, the Twit, Genghis, etc., etc.

    This, then, is not unlike the opening scene of a favorite opera, The Trojans, by Hector Berlioz (after The Aeneid, by Virgil), Part 1, The Sacking of Troy. That is, one thinks of that narrator, and of Cassandra, Coroebus, Andromache, Astyanax, Aeneas, Priam, Hecuba, Panthus, Helenus, Ascanius, Polyxena, Hector’s Ghost, and others (in order of appearance), and one thinks of Troy or Carthage or of a castle-like citadel inside a ravaged city, of city walls and a vast plain beyond, and one recalls that particular narrative line and obtains thereby a pretty fair idea of how it all begins.

    2.

    This is intended, actually, to be a family story, after the Greeks. But after Thomas Wolfe, too. And Gertrude Stein. Certain late nineteenth-century Russian novelists. William Faulkner. Marcel Proust. Thomas Hardy. Henry James. D. H. Lawrence. New England poets of the mid-twentieth century. André Gide. The Scandinavian playwrights. Truman Capote. Wright Morris. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Vladimir Nabokov. John Milton. Philip Roth. George Bernard Shaw. Washington Irving. James Agee and Walker Evans. Charles Dickens. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sigmund Freud. Eudora Welty. William Burroughs, Jr. Laurence Sterne. Thorstein Veblen. William Carlos Williams. Edna Ferber. The Grimm Brothers. William Saroyan. Anton Chekhov. William of Occam. James Branch Cabell. John Steinbeck. Ellen Glasgow. Sarah Orne Jewett. Frank Norris. Katherine Anne Porter. J. D. Salinger. Franz Kafka. Anne Frank. Sinclair Lewis. Bede. Erskine Caldwell. Charles Addams. Tennessee Williams. James T. Farrell. Rollo May. Giovanni Boccaccio. Theodore Dreiser. Elia Kazan. Sherwood Anderson. Henry Fielding. Louisa May Alcott. Zelda Fitzgerald. Oscar Handlin. Thornton Wilder. Flannery O’Connor. The King James Version of the Old Testament. William Makepeace Thackeray. Ed Sanders. Jane Austen. Ignazio Silone. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Ernest Jones. And Ford Madox Ford. —After these, too.

    After them in time, of course, if not in manner. Yet also, and perhaps more important than either time or manner, after them in a subtler way, and suggesting through that a previously unrecognized, yet ancient tradition, the nature of which should be apparent as soon as one has considered which authors, insofar as their names are absent above, cannot be said to participate in that tradition: The Tradition of the Bloody Orange.

    3.

    THE TRADITION OF THE BLOODY ORANGE—A PARADIGM

    Someone appears on the horizon as a black speck, a fly stuck against the lavender sky. He draws closer and closer, at first slowly and then more rapidly, until he has drawn face-to-face with the viewer, whereat he is repelled. He tries not to reveal the depth and extent of his revulsion, nausea, disgust, boredom, by describing himself, his family, his friends and lovers, and the enemies of all. At last, unable to conceal his true feelings any longer, he draws from the leather pouch at his waist a large Florida orange (of the hybrid type, called navel). He brings the perfect sphere slowly up to his mouth, which is ample, and chomps suddenly into it, splattering billows of blood over his face, hands, green lamé shirt and tan suede boots. Then, continuing to eat at the orange, he turns and withdraws quickly to the horizon again, where he remains, a speck of changing color from black to red to orange and sometimes (to the naked eye) appearing cadmium yellow or even, as he should, green. From such a distance, he is quite beautiful to observe, changing color like that, especially against the lavender sky!

    4.

    This is the start of the action. A handsome youth who wore slick green suits and strangely decorated hats went to the king with three sons and expressed in public a passionate desire to have one of the sons for his lover.

    —I don’t care which one, he cried. —Any of them will satisfy me. I have this thing about princes, he said.

    5.

    For two days and nights, the king ambled down the many-tapestried corridors of the palace, laughing and murmuring to himself. —A thing about princes, indeed. That’s rich!

    6.

    It was a late, amber-colored afternoon. In the gymnasium the three princes practiced the sports. Naked and oiled, they ran and kicked and threw. Soft light from the windows above drifted down and shimmered over their sleek bodies.

    One of the ballboys attending them, a cripple desperately seeking favor and possible advancement, told them about the young man in the slick green suit and his strange request. The way the ballboy told it, the man’s request was actually a demand, ominously put.

    —He gave your father, His Royal Highness the King, just three days to decide which one it would be, the ballboy told the athletes.

    They laughed and called the ballboy a twit. —Far out, twit! they teased.

    7.

    In defense of himself, the ballboy changed his story and said that he’d made up the part about the funny-looking hat with the geraniums in it and the tan suede boots and the moustache and even the accent with all the flat As. But it availed him nothing. The princes pelted him with handballs, badminton birdies, medicine balls, and basketballs. They even fell to rolling a shot put at his feet, aiming for the arches. They were disturbed.

    8.

    The king fucked the queen on two successive nights, keeping the lights on throughout copulation on both occasions. He was obviously disturbed.

    9.

    —I like a plucky faggot, he breathlessly confided to the queen after each of her orgasms. After his own, however, he remained silent.

    10.

    The queen, pondering both his remark and the timing of his silences, had difficulty sleeping. At breakfast following their second night of love, she asked her husband, —Have you ever performed a sex act with a man? Or with a boy?

    —My dear, he answered. —I once caught and screwed a loon. Unforgettable! Jesus, I had an appetite! he bellowed, heading swiftly for court.

    11.

    The three princes were already there, waiting nervously for him to arrive. They wanted to know beforehand how the king was going to handle this one. In this matter, they each had a private ambition for the king’s policy. The oldest son was named Orgone. He was a well-known wrestler and bachelor. The second son, Dread, drove sports cars and was a big-game hunter. The third prince was named Egress (the Wild), a bad drunk, melancholy, a favorite of those fallen from grace of any kind. He was rumored to be dying of consumption. He kept a brace of fighting cocks and a kennel of Staffordshire pit bull terriers and wrote very successful leather-rock song lyrics.

    12.

    The story is about all these people, then: the queen, of course, and the king, the youth in the slick green suit, Orgone, Dread, young Egress, and the loon. The queen’s name was Naomi Ruth, the king’s

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1