Book Review: “The Magic Kingdom” by Russell Banks
Simply Magical
American author Russell Banks needs no introduction, even if he might not exactly be a household name. He’s been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and at least a couple of his novels have been turned into award-winning feature films. (Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, I’m looking at you.) However, it may come to pass that his most recent novel in a long and storied career, The Magic Kingdom, could go down as his masterpiece. It is a book that deals with solitude and obsession and is a towering piece of fiction that is essentially flawless. The Magic Kingdom is a somewhat lengthy read, being some 350 pages long, but it is an utterly addictive one that may have you turning the pages within a sitting or two. It’s simply a stellar book. Superlatives don’t come easy for this work because it is so near pitch-perfect that it seems as though saying just how tremendous this tour de force is wouldn’t do the novel justice. This is something you must read for yourself and feel deep in your bones. It’s simply that good, and any chance to read this novel should not be passed up.
The structure of the novel is a little complicated. Though based on real-life events, the book has a framing device where a fictional version of the author stumbles across some old reel-to-reel tapes dating back to the early 1970s in the waterlogged basement of a public library in southwest Florida. It turns out the tapes were made by an 81-year-old man named Harley Mann, who, nearing the end of his life, has decided to dictate his coming-of-age story in a religious commune run by Shakers near present-day Orlando, Florida. The bulk of the novel then is a narration of Mann’s story, set at the dawn of the 20th century, transcribed from the tapes themselves — with a little embellishment added here or there by the author’s fictional persona. Mann’s story details how his family escaped from a life of White slavery to the Shaker community, and the relationship he had with a woman seven years his senior. However, was it love, or was it just childish pining? The truth is just as complicated as how the story is told itself.
I’m not sure what else there is to say about this spellbinding work. The prose is air-tight to perfection and the story winds up being a powerful one. The reason why the tale is so successful is that it is written for the ear as much as the eye. You get the sense that this is a real-life transcript of an old man talking about the regrets of his life and the consequences of some of the follies of his youth. It feels authentic, and even I would have been fooled if you were to tell me this was a non-fiction book rather than a novel. The other thing that makes The Magic Kingdom so successful is that it has characters you care about — even if their motives may be ambiguous. That makes the stunning conclusion so heartbreaking — and I’m not giving anything away there as this tale telegraphs tragedy practically from the first page. Thirdly, the setting of the story in a Shaker commune is fascinating because this is a religion based on celibacy, and it is in the very throes of dying when the story opens because it was based on only attracting widows and orphans to fill its ranks and keep growing without the need for procreation. (As an aside, readers may learn something about Shaker society in the book. Before reading this, I’d only been familiar with the furniture the group was wont to make and sell that still serves as an inspiration for some country homes even today.)
I can’t find too much to fault about The Magic Kingdom. It clearly shows the work of a master not only at writing prose but at research as well. Again, the gullible reader would be fooled into thinking the story is entirely real (how much it is and isn’t is left to the imagination, or so it would seem from reading the book). All in all, this novel is an intriguing look at the oral history genre and how the needle could be moved further in terms of representing it creatively in fiction. This book is immensely readable and likable. It’s the sort of thing that may get taught in high schools in future generations because it is both literary and easily comprehensible. (I guess the only thing prohibiting the book from being taught there might be its length and the fact that there are some non-explicit references to sex peppered throughout the read — but the lack of detail of the act itself, which is kept off the page largely, is refreshing, as is the relative lack of profanities used in telling this story). In short, The Magic Kingdom feels like it is wholly unique and one-of-a-kind, and needs to be experienced. Saying much more than that may be saying too much — so, to pardon the cliché, the less you know about this book the better as it goes into some unexpected places just when you thought things might be predictable. Without question, this is a book that ranks among the very best novels of 2022. Without spoiling things, it certainly speaks to the loneliness and isolation of our pandemic-era times. Read it and be prepared to weep. A finer work of fiction you might not read in some time, and the tears you might cry are ones of joy from reading a work this powerful and noteworthy.
Russell Banks’ The Magic Kingdom was published by Knopf on November 8, 2022.
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