What people have said of Banks’ work…
“Russell was a moral compass for many, in the tradition of such writers as Melville, Hawthorne and Conrad, for whom the moral ambiguities of life are of fundamental concern; but an early, abiding influence was Nelson Algren whom Russell had met as a young man and much admired for his stark, gritty, unflinching urban realism.”
— Joyce Carol Oates
“He became quite a brilliant chronicler of race tensions in the country and what it takes to survive in this country — and what it takes from you to survive in this country.”
— Michael Coffey, poet and former editor of Publishers Weekly
“The trailer park, grim and dreary as it may be, is the neighborhood and into it, Banks has crowded a small but vibrant cast of characters.”
— Critic Jonathan Yardley on the theme of working-class devastation in Banks’ writing
Themes of the film…
“One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else's sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.”
— Russell Banks, Affliction
Toxic Masculinity
“The title comes from the verb form because the book talks about the men who have been afflicted by this and therefore have afflictions.”
— Paul Schrader, producer/director of the film Affliction based on the book of the same title
“The difference, of course, was that they had learned centuries before something which I, the descendant of an incomparably more favored people, had never been obliged to acquire. They had learned to survive. Survival for me was a fact granted to me in advance, and it was therefore more than likely that in similar circumstances I would be unable to survive. I would become the old curmudgeon, the bitter man who walks with his eyes glued to the ground, the pessimist who everywhere prophecies the disaster and failure he yearns for; I would be the suicidal person who wants to drag others into his fall. There was no room in my culture for the kind of optimism that kept them safe in their world, and there didn't seem to be room in their culture for the kind of rigor and completeness and search for symmetry which I thought would preserve me within mine.”
— Russell Banks, The Book of Jamaica
Class and Race
Deindustrialization and the Loss of Economic Power
“It was like a ball of snakes, and he couldn't separate the many strands of oppression and humiliation and identify their individual weaknesses and kill the snakes by cutting off their heads one by one and wake up one morning brimming with self-respect, a man among men admired by women and children and other men...”