by Russell Banks
|
| List Price: | $24.95 |
| Amazon Price: | $16.47 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
| You Save: | $8.48 (34%) |
| Average Rating: |  |
| Lowest New Price: | $9.95 |
| Availablitiy: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
 |
|
Product Description
Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness—and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules. Twenty-nine-year-old Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, the adopted only child of a highly regarded New York brain surgeon and his socialite wife. Twice married, Vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. But on the night of July 4, 1936, at her parents' country home in a remote Adirondack Mountain enclave known as The Reserve, two events coincide to permanently alter the course of Vanessa's callow life: her father dies suddenly of a heart attack, and a mysteriously seductive local artist, Jordan Groves, blithely lands his Waco biplane in the pristine waters of the forbidden Upper Lake. . . . Jordan's reputation has preceded him; he is internationally known as much for his exploits and conquests as for his paintings themselves, and, here in the midst of the Great Depression, his leftist loyalties seem suspiciously undercut by his wealth and elite clientele. But for all his worldly swagger, Jordan is as staggered by Vanessa's beauty and charm as she is by his defiant independence. He falls easy prey to her electrifying personality, but it is not long before he discovers that the heiress carries a dark, deeply scarring family secret. Emotionally unstable from the start, and further unhinged by her father's unexpected death, Vanessa begins to spin wildly out of control, manipulating and destroying the lives of all who cross her path. Moving from the secluded beauty of the Adirondack wilderness to the skies above war-torn Spain and Fascist Germany, The Reserve is a clever, incisive, and passionately romantic novel of suspense that adds a new dimension to this acclaimed author's extraordinary repertoire.
Customers who bought this item also bought
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Disappointing, 2008-10-01
Overwritten, under-edited. Implausible plot-line, unlikeable characters. Self-important and superficial. Oh well, they can't all be winners.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Waste of Time, 2008-09-11
Any book that includes the phrase "Oh, she had heard the old rumors around town..." deserves to be thrown across the room. If you insist on reading this, you can start around page 130, since every bit of clumsy character exposition is repeated again and again and you won't have missed a thing. There's nothing original or interesting here, not even skillful writing to make the reading less painful. A blurb on the jacket calls it a noir thriller. It is neither.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I do not believe.............., 2008-08-24
..........that the man who wrote Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, and Continental Drift also wrote The Reserve. Into the second chapter, I had to double check that there weren't two authors named Russell Banks. The story is just plain odd - the characters have no depth, no nuance and their actions ring false (an understatement.) I was reminded of Fountainhead (I noticed another reviewer mention Ayn Rand, so I am not necessarily losing my mind)only without the philosophical underpinnings. Any.
I, too, skimmed, which I only do when the author has totally failed to engage me, but I want to give some benefit of the doubt without a huge time investment. By the end, I suspected I'd lost absolutely nothing. There is no THERE there.
I have been a Banks fan for twenty years and all I can say is, I am baffled.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
UNRESERVED loss of innocence..., 2008-08-09
Russell Banks never does take the reader quite to the moment of the explosion of the Hindenburg.
But that image - haunting, ominous, and looming - weaves through the pages of The Reserve to suggest what is one of its overarching themes... loss of innocence - as it applies to the novel's individual characters as well as within the historical context of the story.
In a pre-World War II setting, with America in the grip of the Great Depression, the geographical and historical context of The Reserve adds considerable depth and richness to a book that has many of the hallmark traits of the pot-boiling page-turner. So movie-ready I could smell the popcorn!
Action plays out against the backdrop of pristine upstate New York at a storybook retreat called The Reserve, a secluded, ritzy resort, inhabited by The Beautiful People - people of privilege.
It is as though they are living in suspension, occupying a mist-filled dream life before the nightmare begins. Banks' lush depiction of a sequestered, complacent lifestyle of entitlement forms a sharp and telling contrast with the understated but inevitable horrors of the war to come.
Stepping from this lovely setting comes the book's equally lovely heroine, the glamorous, mysterious, and perhaps seriously unstable heiress, Vanessa Cole, who stays at the Reserve with her parents, wreaking havoc on those hapless souls who come under her spell. [I admit, I also found myself wicked in love with her until she turned into a bit of a whackbar!]
Working within classic mystery genre tradition, Banks skillfully manipulates multiple narrative stances, keeping us guessing about the reliability of each of the narrators' visions, especially that of Vanessa, who vacillates from scheming siren to vulnerable waif with alarming speed.
Ultimately unable to resist her charms - or to discern the degree of validity in the stories she spins - is Jordan Groves, the swashbuckling, notoriously independent artist and pilot that Banks has [my theory] modeled on real life artist Rockwell Kent.
Into this mix, pour a working class character trying to recover from the sudden death of his young wife, a possible case of sexual abuse, an ever intensifying double love affair, and a murder cover-up. Then set them smack down into the romantic twilight haze of America's upper crust in the mid-thirties. You have the building blocks of a story that feels destined for Hollywood.
[Whether that is a compliment or not will depend on the reader's perspective.]
All the big themes are here. Fidelity to one's spouse and country, mental and emotional instability, the effects of social constraints on the individual, and difficulties of self-awareness, the absolute unending beauty of an impartial natural landscape, bearing mute witness to the flaws of humans.
If it all sounds too plot-packed and grandiose for a simple summer read that has a hint of dime store romance hanging about it...well, maybe it is.
But Banks has also laced this barn-burner of a novel with enough artistry to satisfy - or at least to appease - the reader who is looking for more than a conventional escapist plot with slapdash action.
One of the novel's most interesting artifices is in Bank's use of inter-chapters, fast-forwards which he alternates with the time-bound linear plot.
The inter-chapters provide tantalizing, if hazy, glimpses into events that will happen after the main timeline of the book has ended.
As The Reserve's crystal ball, their futuristic setting makes these inter-chapters initially puzzling. For the impatient reader, perhaps even maddeningly so. Readers simply have to trust Banks to eventually bring us into their sharper focus. At first I was confused by them, clueless as to what was happening or even who the characters were. But ultimately, they turned out to be a kind of afterword, resolving many things in the book that would have otherwise been left unanswered.
There is plenty in The Reserve to please all types of readers. Difficult to categorize, it may be read as a love story, murder mystery, historical sketch, or an artfully rendered literary novel.
Maybe all of the above.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The Reserve, 2008-07-09
I was enthused about reading my first Russell Banks novel. It started with great promise: Adirondack setting in the 1930s, good mix of rich v. rural cultures, powerful and eccentric personalities and attention to the current themes of those times. Unfortunately, the plot unfolds in such a way that there is no satisfactory denouement. This novel could have gone on for much longer, but the author only obliquely addresses the main character's futures. The latter chapters begin with an italicized preface that points to their fates. I was hoping for a little more.
Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.
|
Store Categories
|