Foregone

At the centre of Foregone is famed Canadian American leftist documentary filmmaker Leonard Fife, one of sixty thousand draft evaders and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. Fife, now in his late seventies, is dying of cancer in Montreal and has agreed to a final interview in which he is determined to bare all his secrets at last, to demythologize his mythologized life. The interview is filmed by his acolyte and ex-star student, Malcolm MacLeod, in the presence of Fife's wife and alongside Malcolm's producer, cinematographer, and sound technician, all of whom have long admired Fife but who must now absorb the meaning of his astonishing, dark confession. Imaginatively structured around Fife's secret memories and alternating between the experiences of the characters who are filming his confession, the novel challenges our assumptions and understanding about a significant lost chapter in American history and the nature of memory itself. Russell Banks gives us a daring and resonant work about the scope of one man's mysterious life, revealed through the fragments of his recovered past.

The story of Fife's early life - heavily based on Banks's own - is graphic, gripping, It's little wonder that Russell Banks has won major awards for his subtle, seductive novels, and Foregone - the author's first new novel for a decade - also deserves a place among prize-winners. Banks's style is haunting, meditative and gripping, with its protagonist's personal revelations striking compelling rhythmic, resonant beats, The questions of what is true, what is a consequence of Fife's disintegrating mind, and whether the story of a life can ever be marshalled into a coherent whole, run through this...artful slice of meta-fiction like quicksilver. Hard-going sometimes, but worth it, Foregone is, by far, the most cunningly metafictional novel of the author's career... Banks is one of the most sociologically minded of contemporary American authors... he is still working at the height of his powers... a tale of deep grace and significance... If Foregone turns out to be Banks's final novel (and, given its many strengths, one hopes not), it is a profoundly compelling valedictory, Gripping, human, beautifully written - Foregone is there with the best of Russell Banks' work. I loved it

Russell Banks published ten novels, six short story collections, and four poetry collections.  His novels Cloudsplitter and Continental Drift were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.  Two of Banks's novels have been adapted for feature-length films, The Sweet Hereafter (winner of the Grand Prix and International Critics Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival) and Affliction (which earned a 'Best Supporting Actor' Oscar for James Coburn).  His work has won numerous awards, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. One of America's most prestigious fiction writers, Russell Banks was president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He passed away in January 2023.