Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Russell Banks

Critical Essay by Russell Banks

When a plot grossly outweighs the main story, as it does here, the form is inefficient or else the novel is satirical. Bellefleur is definitely not satirical. It is an incredibly elaborate gothic romance, stuffed to overflowing with outsize, grotesquely intense characters who speak to one another breathlessly, in a rage or merely incoherently, and who beg to be taken as emblems for moral qualities or historical forces, or both. (p. 4)

It is certainly possible to read and enjoy a novel with characters and incidents like these: Faulkner, Garcia Márquez, Flannery O'Connor, and many other modern writers have asked us to face grotesque forms of violence, and by so doing have explored basic themes of character and destiny. But when there is no dramatic logic to those events and characters, when what happens is not inevitable but merely gratuitous, the book fails to move or inform us. Particularly disturbing...
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