SOURCE: “Moving Upwards,” in the Times Literary Supplement, October 22, 1986, p. 920.

In the following essay, Fonseca offers a mixed review of Success Stories.

Russell Banks's novel Continental Drift, published in the UK last year (TLS, October 25, 1985), traces the fate of two unsimilar families—one from Haiti and the other from New Hampshire—as they travel to Florida in search of the idea of America. The newcomers' innocent dreams of opportunity inevitably collapse into nightmares of exploitation, humiliation and death. Rude awakenings are also the subject of Success Stories, although, as befits the shorter form, the migrations tend to be closer to home—excursions into family history, journeys of the heart.

Success Stories is not a particularly coherent collection—it has the makings of two books (and one of them is a novel). Half of the dozen stories are connected by way of Banks's fictional alter ego, who recurs as...