01 Page 8 - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, October 19, 1989 Accidental novelist Russell Banks abandons visual for literary art BY CAROLYN PAJOR RUSSELL Banks' achievements and accolades reach as far and wide as the places he writes about. His latest novel, Affliction, has received critical acclaim on both coasts and points in between. The New York Times says this novel "breathes cold from every page" and calls it "magnificently convincing." Banks has written six novels and four books of short stories and was a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1986. From blustery winters in New Hampshire to sticky trailer homes in Florida to boats filled with bilgewater, Haitians and rats in the waters near Jamaica, Russell Banks writes about poverty. His characters are the peo- ple one would see yet look through in hopes of finding someone more pleasing to the eye, or at least someone not so average. Poverty is the black dog lurking behind the corner waiting for the chips to fall before it bites again - and his characters can't escape it. Russell Banks' successes have not come without a price: he writes about what he knows. "I grew up in that kind of environment," he says. "My family has spent many generations trying to escape that condition. It isn't re- ally an ideological commitment to start with... that's what I end up with as a subject." Banks continues, "What I want readers to do is to imagine and come to respect the lives of people they might otherwise have not imagined and might otherwise have only treated as stereotypes." These are fair words from a man who originally wanted to be an artist, a painter. In his early 20s, he "came in by accident" and found himself writing poems and stories, and that's what he continued. As the author of Searching for Survivors, Fa Life, Continental Drift and Success Stories, Bank; plains the difference between writing a short story and a novel in terms of time: "A novel is inside the flow of time, a short story takes a moment out, a moment that looks both ways - forwards and backwards. A novel imitates time, whereas a short story is just a snapshot." His writing is bitterly emotional and bleak, though not depressing. Readers come to an understanding of seem- ingly thoughtless violent actions committed out of des- perate urgency as Russell Banks leads us through the minds of characters who try to escape some part of their lives. With full blown sympathetic characters and com- plex novels not easily reduced to a paragraph or two, how is it, then, that Russell Banks can say he's "not necessarily happy with what he's doing"? Despite his Guggenheim fellowship, his many out- standing awards for literature and his current teaching position in the creative writing program at Princeton, like any serious artist he's never finished nor adequately pleased with his work. "It's almost an old saw to say you don't ever finish anything, you abandon it, but ac- tually it's true," he says. He's currently immersed in another novel, and hav- ing finished Affliction nearly a year ago, sees it to be "full of flaws." But he doesn't think his writing will change dramatically in the future, though he hopes it will become "more emotionally and intellectually ma- ture and coherent." He also hopes to be more "artistically ambitious, writing bigger and better." These words don't come as a surprise from a man whose characters spend their lives yearning and seeking out a better future. Though for Russell Banks, an auspicious future will probably come easier than did his past. RUSSELL BANKS will read today at 5 p.m. in Lorch Auditorium. Little Charlie and the Nightcats seem greasy, but don't be fooled: it's low-cholesterol oil. Biting social criticism and searing emotions are conspicuous in their absence on the Nightcats' new album, The Big Break. Little Charlie and the Nightcats The Big Break Alligator Hey, it's Little Charlie and the Nightcats - champions of bub- blegum blues, wonder group of the marriage circuit - with their new album, The Big Break. They're not bad. They're not good. They aren't much of anything. They are safe, they are inoffensive, and they are sponsored by the Miller Brewing Company. Little Charlie seems more like a record executive's idea to promote a middle-of-the-road blues band to a soul-less white audience than a group of hardcore blues artists. The band plays a recycled brand of blues, with little of the power or punch of their predecessors. With guitar, bass, drums and harmonica, they have all the ingredients but half the meaning of your regular blues band, sort of "light blues." It's as if the Stray Cats sat in on a Stevie Ray Vaughn session and everyone was half asleep. Every song is good for either one guitar or harmonica solo of equal length, each similar enough to give ammunition to those people who think that all blues music sounds the same. But there's no law which states that all blues music has to be filled with primal screams or biting social commentary. Little Charlie just says to those who cause him problems: "that's OK, you'll get yours some- day." He's clearly not trying to make any sort of significant social state- ment with his song "Hurry up and Wait," where he smirkingly be- moans: "I was late for my job/ down to the wire/ stuck on the highway! someone's changing a tire/ ooh if there's one thing I hate, it's to hurry up and wait." But with lyrical gems like "I'm going to get up when I wake up/ and go to sleep when I lies down," it's hard to see what appeal this band could have. Not quits funny, not really driven, Little Char,, lie and the Nightcats are, in a word, dull. With the existing blues musician population either dead, aged, or do- ing commercials for McDonalds, it's up to blues-oriented labels such as; Alligator to find and promote a new: generation of talent. But in selecting a band for its easy listening charac} teristics rather than its ability, Alli- gator is sterilizing over a hundred, years of musical tradition. -Bill Fink A For graduates who, enjoy F JOY multiple choice. At Novell, we offer recent Computer Science grads something novel- options. As a member of our engineering team, you can choose from a wide variety of projects. You can even choose where you want to begin your career, whether in Provo, Utah, the Silicon Valley area of California, or Austin, Texas. 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