Voyager

Starred review from March 21, 2016
Although billed as “travel writings,” the 10 introspective essays collected in this volume explore their author’s emotional geography as much as the far-flung lands he visits. In the lengthy title piece, which recounts “a winter-long, island-hopping journey through the Caribbean,” Banks finds occasion to relate the details of his three failed marriages to his travel companion, his fourth-wife-to-be. Acknowledging that the wanderlust that spurs his travels is an outgrowth of his personal tendency to flee from those whose emotional needs he cannot satisfy, he observes, “I could see clearly that my courtship narrative and this peripatetic voyage through the archipelago ran parallel to each other in ways both exculpatory and condemning, the one reflecting, enabling, and explicating the other.” Banks’s descriptions are visually evocative, and his eye for detail is sharpened by the near-spiritual resonance that his travel destinations have for him. Recalling a Zen moment experienced while mountain-climbing in the Andes, he reflects that “one climbs a mountain for the same reason one enters a monastery: to pray.” Whether he’s traveling through the swamps of the Everglades, the former slaving grounds of Dakar, or the Russian settlement of Alaska (which he describes piquantly as “a Chekhov story waiting to be told”), Banks makes a magnificent tour guide for landscapes both within and without. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group.

Starred review from May 1, 2016

Novelist Banks (The Sweet Hereafter; Affliction), on the cusp of his fourth marriage, spends the first half of this collection of travel writing telling readers what went wrong with the first three. He does this by interspersing these erstwhile faulty relationships with descriptions of the Lesser Antilles. This is not a logical pairing, but oddly enough, it works. Banks owns up to his past and somehow convinces the woman who is to become No. 4 into marrying him--successfully this time. Between the ups and downs of his past one learns that the Virgin Islands are overcommercialized, Saba is wonderful, and the French side of St-Martin/Sint Maarten is better than the Dutch. The second half of the book includes recollections of a hodgepodge of places: Cuba, North Carolina, Scotland, Alaska, the Everglades, and the Andes and Himalaya mountains. VERDICT Banks puts the literature back in travel writing in this extremely well-crafted book.--Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2016
Acclaimed fiction writer Banks (A Permanent Member of the Family, 2013, etc.) turns an able hand to nonfiction in this expansive, elegiac reflection on the pleasures and deceptions of travel.The 75-year-old author recognizes the failings of narratives based solely on fading, self-serving memories, yet he cannot resist indulging in recollections from 30 years ago. "A memoir is like a travel book," he writes. "Whether short or long it's a radical reduction of remembered reality and is structured as much by what it leaves out as what it puts in." In the lengthy title essay, set in 1988, Banks and his soon-to-be-fourth wife embark on a wide-ranging odyssey of the Caribbean, one that wakens many ghosts (of wives and adventures past) while conjuring encouragement and despair in equal measure. The author loves the Caribbean and its people but loathes what is happening to the islands to accommodate, then as now, ever increasing hordes of cruise-ship and package-tour visitors, to homogenize distinctive cultures, and to obscure the real history of slavery. Resolution was a principal reason that Banks, who lived for a time in Jamaica, undertook this return journey to the tropics. Written in 2015, the piece is at least as much about Banks' courtship narrative, his personal history, and his regrets as it is about an enviable assignment in the Caribbean. But the frequent self-flagellation occasionally feels excessive. The other essays in the book are less melancholy, offering observations and insights that, despite their ages, seem timeless. After all, the point of travel is knowledge, not topical information. Of the more "conventional" travel pieces here, the most resonant and vivid are those on the Everglades and the author's mountaineering in South America and the Himalayas, the last at age 72. Banks' ecological warnings might strike even the most fervent environmentalist as rather apocalyptic, yet in the best of these pieces, his clarity of vision and muscular prose are as transporting as a mountain ascent.

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Starred review from April 15, 2016
Fans of Banks' exceptional fiction (A Permanent Member of the Family, 2013) and all readers enamored of travelogues will clamor aboard this compact, gusto-filled, retrospective anthology. A teenage Banks hits Florida with delusions of joining the Cuban Revolution, then, 42 years later, is extravagantly hosted by Fidel Castro. He complicates an island-hopping magazine assignment to the Caribbean with provocative scrutiny of his three failed marriages. Banks takes blame for the divorces yet suggests that his mother and ex-wives wanted to control his life. Banks' warm, probing intellect guides readers on thoughtful journeys whatever the destination: a 1980s hippie reunion near the University of North Carolina, the Berkeley of the South; a solitary paddling trip in the Everglades; and visits to historic slavery sites in West Africa and the Caribbean. He treks the Andes and the Himalayas and takes a cynical drive in a Humvee along the Alaskan coast. Banks meets an oil-company executive in the Eden-like Seychelles and is unimpressed when he opines that it's too late to save the planet. Marriage comes a fourth time, in Edinburgh, a match that has lasted for almost 30 years. Readers will be hard put to find a more engaging travel companion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)