Hamilton Stark

In Russell Banks' 1978 novel Hamilton Stark, the reader meets the title character, a drunken, brutish New Hampshire pipefitter who has been married and divorced five times, kicked his mother out of her own house, and loves to get into bar fights. Well, we don't exactly meet him since he has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind a car with bullet-holes in the windshield and a locked up house, but we hear an awful lot about him from his biggest fan: our narrator.

Hoping to convince us of the philosophical purity of Stark's life, the narrator twists together interviews with Stark's ex-wives, his own experiences with Stark, long sections from a novel by Stark's daughter (with whom the narrator had a brief affair) based on her father's life, and his own lengthy discussions about Stark with his lonely neighbor. And of course the novel as a whole isn't even about Stark (which is a pseudonym the narrator uses for his novel), it is actually about A., the "real" man who the narrator worships for his uncompromising rejection of society and natural inclinations. And really, in the end, the book isn't even about A. Instead it is about our narrator.

This is Banks' first novel and he uses an experimental style that goes well with the story. Although the constant switching of tactics and retracing of steps is distancing, as a reader I didn't mind being held at arms length from this confused and untrustworthy narrator and his misogynistic hero. And although experimental, the novel is overall very engaging and follows a pretty straight narrative once you dig down into it.

Banks wrote the novels on which the movies Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter were based, and I'd be more than happy to check out some of his other work...