If there can be said to be a prototypical "man's writer" firing from the front lines of American fiction today, Russell Banks is the one with the highest kill ratio. His writing is consummately self-assured, well built, as filling as meatloaf. His descriptions of the sounds and workings of machinery--boat engines, car exteriors, airplanes, even, memorably, a grader reluctantly used as a snowplow--are applied as lovingly as oil to a favorite gun stock. The women in his fiction are long-suffering, and their author has abundant sympathy for them, as he does for all those who are circumstantially helpless or downtrodden, but they are colored with chalk pastels. His men are pure Fauve.

Banks is also a man's writer because he is so frighteningly adept at what amounts to neurological cross-sections of the male psyche, particularly the patrilineal dimensions of a working-class variety of emotional brutality. His men, often caught in dead-end lives in forlorn dead-end New England mill towns, want desperately to go somewhere but lack the means or a suitable vehicle, and while spinning their wheels, end up only flinging mud in every direction. The writer knows how to draw a bead on tragedy.

In Affliction (1989), he constructs a Molotov cocktail of a novel centered on a doomed loser named Wade Whitehouse, and for more than 300 careful pages he fills the bottle with gas and rags and then anoints it with a lit match. Whitehouse is the kind of man we are not predisposed to understand, as he is constitutionally resistant to understanding himself. But Banks nonetheless fits him out with a full-blooded humanity, and finally we understand too much--about how an ability to love, if not installed during childhood, is like a motor with no belt drive.

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