"Affliction" by Russell Banks

"This is the story of my older brother's strange criminal behavior and his disappearance." Thus begins this 1989 novel by Russell Banks. Rolfe Whitehouse tells the story of his brother Wade's fall from small-town part-time cop into criminality. Rolfe reconstitutes the story years later after having interviewed everyone who knew Wade and with whom Wade came into contact during the month in question. However, he goes further than just presenting the facts. He also tells the "story" of Wade's emotional state and fills in events that no one, besides Wade himself, witnessed. Rolfe claims legitimacy as the teller of this tale based on his personal knowledge of his brother and their family, and on his professional knowledge, as a historian, of human nature in general. Wade is an all too familiar historical character: a small-town specimen of masculinity caught in a cycle of violence going back for generations.

The structure of Banks' novel is particularly innovative. He combines direct narration, reported speech, direct speech taken directly from the narrator's interviews, and passages of reconstructed imagined conversations. One often forgets that the story is being filtered through an outside party. Certain descriptive passages of the New Hamphsire countryside and weather, and certain reflections about human nature and sexual relations seem a bit contrived. But then again, I don't come from a small economically destitute town in New Hampshire, so what do I know about the mentalities! The cover indicates the novel has been made into a movie. I would like to watch it to see how Paul Schrader chose to adapt it. I'm usually disappointed with screen adaptations. But who knows? There's a first time for everything!