Foregone

November 2, 2020
In this sinuous if uneven novel, Banks (Lost Memory of Skin) depicts the protean character of a filmmaker who turns the camera on himself at the end of a storied career. In the last stages of an incurable cancer, Canadian documentarian Leonard Fife sits to be interviewed in his Montreal apartment for a film being made by his former student, Malcolm. Fife’s life has been built around lies and evasions, and now he seeks to set the record straight, though the confession is directed less to the public than to his third and current wife, Emma. Instead of answering questions about his Errol Morris–like style, Fife delivers a leisurely self-portrait of serial flight: running away from home in Massachusetts as a teenager; leaving his first wife and young daughter as a confused young bohemian to be a writer; abandoning his second wife and young son to dodge the draft in 1968. However, only some of Fife’s confessions might be true, as one side effect of his medication is “confabulation.” Fife’s reminiscences are generally vivid, though the spell is dissipated by the weaker scenes in which, for instance, Emma repeatedly objects to proceeding with the interview and the sycophantic Malcolm reiterates the novel’s themes in windy proclamations. Still, Banks keeps the audience rapt. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group.

January 1, 2021
A man nearing death tries to tell his wife certain things about himself in this dark, affecting work. Leo Fife, a documentary filmmaker and teacher, sits in a wheelchair at home with a morphine drip and a bladder bag, dying of cancer at 77. For most of one day, April 1, 2018, he's on the other side of the camera as former students want to record him explaining how he made his famous films. Leo has other plans, namely to reveal to his wife of more than 35 years facts about himself, tapping into "a tsunami of memories." They include dropping out of college with plans to fight for Castro, divorce, drinking with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, betraying a longtime artist friend, and his real Vietnam War draft status. The novel's structure, which alternates two very different narrative segments, seems awkward at first and then strikingly effective. There are the bare, Beckett-like present-day sections in which Leo as talking head delivers his tale to the camera under one spotlight and chats testily with those in the room. Longer, time-hopping sections present Leo's past in a less-flattering light than his public persona enjoyed. It can be hard to know what's true in any of this, for Leo is a highly unreliable narrator given his illness, his medications, his own doubts about his memory, and the challenges his story elicits from the former students, who regard him as hero and mentor, as well as from an unexpected source. Banks, who turned 80 this year, explores aging, memory, and reputation in thoughtful and touching ways, enhanced by the correspondence between aspects of Leo's life and the writer's own history. At one point a character says, "It's like trying to tie a novel to the author's real life." Maybe setting the story on April Fools' Day is the broadest nod to such delusive links and to the deceits and truths of creativity. A challenging, risk-taking work marked by a wry and compassionate intelligence.

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January 1, 2021
Banks, a conduit for the confounded and the unlucky, a writer acutely attuned to place and ambiance, is at his most magnetic and provocative in this portrait of a celebrated documentary filmmaker on the brink of death. Leonard Fife found love and renown in Canada, after arriving in 1968 as one of many young Americans fleeing the draft to protest the Vietnam War. It's now 2018 and Fife is succumbing to cancer under the care of an implacable nurse from Haiti as a film crew headed by a former prot�g� sets up to interview him about his influential life's work. Instead Fife launches into a grand and bewildering confession, insisting that he's finally telling his beloved wife the full truth about his past. He recounts intensely detailed, engrossing, and disquieting tales about a gloomy Massachusetts childhood, heady sojourn in Greenwich Village, and precarious marriage to a wealthy Virginian, presenting himself as a liar and a thief who betrays his loved ones. But under the bright lights, mere moments have elapsed and everyone listening is confused and concerned, leaving the reader wondering if these perhaps dubious stories are only playing in Fife's mind. In this masterful depiction of a psyche under siege by disease, age, and guilt, Banks considers with profound intent the verity of memory, the mercurial nature of the self, and how little we actually know about ourselves and others.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Banks' first novel since the Carnegie Medal shortlisted Lost Memory of Skin (2011) will catalyze his fans and all lovers of richly psychological and ethical fiction.

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