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 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.)