By Michiko Kakutani
NY Times
''THIS is an American story of the late 20th century,'' writes Russell Banks in the Faulknerian invocation that opens ''Continental Drift,'' and this remarkable novel goes on to fulfill that ambitious introduction - in the largest sense. Sweeping in narrative and vivid in its depiction of fragmented, fragmenting lives,
''Continental Drift''
accelerates like a fast, sleek railroad train to its swift conclusion, but Mr. Bank
s's sure command of plot proves to be only one of many novelistic tools employed in the service of a larger vision.
Like Graham Greene and Robert Stone, Mr. Banks is concerned with moral ambiguities and their consequences on ordinary lives, and his tale of how one man named Bob Dubois went in search of a better life and got in over his head becomes, at once, a visionary epic about innocence and evil and a shattering dissection of contemporary American life.
At 30, Bob Dubois has a wife whom he loves, two daughters and another child on the way. All his life, he's lived in Catamount, N. H., and since high school he's worked as a repairman for the Abenaki Oil Company. ''He stays honest, he doesn't sneak copper tubing or tools into his car at night, he doesn't put in for time he didn't work, he doesn't drink on the job.'' He owns a run-down duplex in a working-class neighborhood, a 13-foot Boston whaler he built from a kit, and a battered Chevrolet station wagon, and he owes the local savings and loan - for the house, the boat and the car - a little over $22,000. ''We have a good life. We do,'' his wife, Elaine, keeps telling him.
Although Catamount may, at first, recall Bedford Falls, the setting of ''It's a Wonderful Life,'' that surface image soon dissolves into another - an image more reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting. There's something somber, depressed and even vaguely menacing about this community ''closed in by weather and geography, where the men work at jobs and the women work at home and raise children and there's never enough money,'' where ''the men and the women tend to feel angry toward one another much of the time, especially in the evenings when the work is done and the children are sleeping and nothing seems improved over yesterday.''
Bob is no exception. Never having really grown up, Bob finds it hard to know right from wrong; instead, ''he relies on taboos and circumstances to control his behavior, to make him a 'good man' - and lately, he's begun to feel even more confused and disconnected. He hates his humdrum life, feels trapped and angry that none of the dreams he grew up with are likely to come true. He feels there are two Bob Dubois's: the version he's invented for the real world - a man ''who's dutiful, prudent, custodial, faithful and even-tempered;'' and another, secret self - a man who's ''feckless, reckless, irresponsible, faithless and irrational.''
So far, there's not much to distinguish Bob Dubois from the host of disaffected characters who people the fiction of Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason and Mary Robison: not- so-young survivors of the dislocations of the 60's, afflicted with vague existential doubts and given to drifting, absentmindedly, from day to day. Bob, however, determines to try to make a new life for himself - to start again; and one fine day, he abruptly picks up his family and moves to Florida, where he's soon drawn into partnership with his fast-talking brother, Eddie, and with Ave, a childhood pal who's making a bundle running drugs.
For Mr. Banks, Florida is what California used to be for Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West - a seedy, dangerous place, a magnet for dreamers, entrepreneurs and people with no place else to go. It's the final frontier, where all that's left of the old pioneer spirit is a sort of lawlessness and ''me-first'' individualism, where those willing to play fast and dirty can get rich quick but where other, more tentative folk, like Bob Dubois, see their dreams disintegrating in damp, pastel-colored trailer parks. Bob, in fact, discovers that his life has skidded out of control in Florida. By moving there, he hasn't lassoed the bright future he fantasized about; he's only succeeded in losing his past - the job, the house, everything that once gave his life a modicum of coherence and meaning.
To refugees from the Carribean, however, Florida still represents the promised land, the tip of the American dream, its palm trees whispering ''luxury and power.'' And in a series of alternating takes that counterpoint the story of Bob Dubois, Mr. Banks tells the tale of a young Haitian woman named Vanise, who literally risks everything to get to Miami. Because Vanise's inner life is never delineated with the care lavished on Bob's, the reader sometimes feels the author straining to use her as a metaphor for the yet unspoiled immigrant dream. All the same, the collision between her life and Bob's is so powerfully orchestrated that it takes on the terrible inevitablity of real life, and it lingers in our mind long after we finish the novel.
One of the reasons ''Continental Drift'' possesses such emotional resonance is that Mr. Banks makes the tenuousness of contemporary life - our fears of not being able to hold onto our dreams and protect the people we love - seem entirely palpable, a by- product of our individual failings and our susceptibility to all the changes wrought by recent history's manic metabolic rate. While the scope of ''Continental Drift'' is huge - the author wants to do nothing less than capture American life as it exists today - it remains, somehow, acutely personal; in the story of Bob Dubois's sad, brief life, we catch a frightening glimpse of our own mortality.
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