Brief note: Hamilton Stark

On the back cover of Outer Banks, an anthology of three early novels by Russell Banks, is this blurb for Hamilton Stark: "This tale of a solitary, boorish, misanthropic New Hampshire pipe fitter--the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother--is at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England."  The innocent reader, thus prepared, may turn to Hamilton Stark expecting a realist novel (in this instance, a precise delineation of a particular character in a particular place) tinted with dark comedy (because how else does a novel about a man who evicts his mom become "thoroughly engaging"?).  The innocent reader will indeed find dark comedy; what s/he will not find, however, is a realist novel.  In fact, this blurb constitutes a fine example of literary false advertising, because Hamilton Stark is not primarily about Hamilton Stark; instead, it consists of the narrator's multiple fragmentary and failed attempts to create a realist text that would somehow represent Hamilton Stark.  Who is not, as it happens, really Hamilton Stark, but somebody else, here named Hamilton Stark for the narrator's convenience (and future health).

The narrator seems, at first, to think only kind thoughts of realism: he praises "Hamilton's" daughter Rochelle for revising  her own novel (which is incorporated into this novel) so as to eliminate "all references to demons and possession," thereby "seeing him more clearly, more realistically, one might say" (261).  Later, during a fantasized night of sexual abandon with Rochelle, he enthuses that her novel is "so...so...realistic!" (315).   And yet, in a footnote, he confesses of himself that "[h]e did not enjoy reading realistic fiction; still less did he enjoy writing it" (368).   It is not immediately clear that the narrator knows what "realistic" means, or even that he'll know it when he sees it.  The novel trots out one weapon after another from the realist arsenal, only for all of them to fail, completely, utterly, and quite comically.  There's the detailed historical and anthropological account of the region, complete with an imaginary monologue by one of Hamilton's ancestors, all of which is supposed to contextualize Hamilton's thoroughly obnoxious behavior.  It doesn't.  There are Rochelle's three stories about Hamilton's childhood, which supposedly root Hamilton's later behavior in these rather offbeat but relatively minor traumas (early sexual curiosity, the accidental deaths of farm animals).  Except...there's no obvious connection between late Hamilton and early Hamilton.  There are transcripts from interviews with Hamilton's ex-wives, transcripts of postcards, images of Rochelle's handwriting, plagiarized documents--the narrator makes off with Rochelle's manuscript, despite claiming that he sends it all back to her and doesn't use it (footnote, 366-68)--and events reconstructed from multiple points of view.  But none of these illusions of external reference produce the narrator's would-be embodiment of "true wisdom" (311).  There's even a list of "100 Selected, Uninteresting Things Done and Said by Hamilton Stark" (chapter 8), offered up in the hopes of capturing the "real" Hamilton by reducing him to the quotidian.  Alas, no dice.  To nobody's great surprise, perhaps, Hamilton exits the novel by simply vanishing altogether.  And why not? The character, after all, is just a fiction.