For the title of this review, I also considered "Wuthering Lows." Indeed, Affliction seems like it could be a companion piece to that novel in many ways. One is English, and the other American. One was written by a woman, and the other by a man. Both tackle thorny subjects, in particular intergenerational abuse that is bottled up and stored to ferment until it explodes, cascading downwards. And they are both rather chilly, though Affliction affords less counterpoint to that chilliness than Wuthering Heights does.

I was first introduced to this novel through Paul Schrader's film adaptation, which is both a faithful rendition of the story and strong in its own right. Schrader has said that he feels the film is a collaboration between him and Banks - it's worth nothing that Schrader also adapted Banks' novel Foregone into a film titled Oh, Canada a few years ago - and one's sensibilities fit right into the other's. The novel's narration is adapted into a voiceover by Willem Dafoe that sounds like quintessential Schrader; the unremitting bleakness and psychological torment read the same way. Also, Nick Nolte is god-tier and in a just world would have earned an Oscar instead of fucking ROBERTO BENIGNI. It's one of my favorite screen performances of all time.

The film is so faithful, in fact, that you can probably get away with just watching that instead of reading the novel. I've only felt this way about an adaptation a handful of times in my life, the Coens' True Grit and Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk being two other other notable examples. Yet I admired the novel in its own right and found it worthwhile, though I was frustrated with Banks' slow pacing and sadistic tendency to halt the narrative for a five-page description of a mountain. (Both qualities were also inherent to the other Banks novel I've read, Cloudsplitter, which I almost wholly disliked.) Reading it may not have been a revelatory experience, but it brought me deeper appreciation for the story.

Said story is not a terribly complex one. The sins of the father result in the disintegration of the son. How many times have we heard that one before? Their commonness only makes them more important. What Banks brings to this story, I think, is that he makes it as much about the narrator as about the subject.

Yes, this element also resembles Wuthering Heights and American Pastoral. I won't measure Affliction against a classic of English literature that's also one of my favorite novels (though I think it could put up a pretty good showing), but it sure beats the hell out of Roth's insipid tome. Reading a review of American Pastoral by Harold Bloom, I was struck by his assertion that every line of the novel has a hidden meaning; I was struck most of all by its wrongness. However, I found myself thinking of that assertion while reading Affliction, and I think it applies here pretty well. There's a great exchange between the protagonist, Wade Whitehouse, and his brother, Rolfe, who also happens to be our narrator. It goes something like this:

Rolfe: "I'm just happy I wasn't afflicted by our father's violence."

Wade (laughing): "That's what you think!"

Rolfe fails to see how his cynical worldview, which casts his hometown as a pitiless and irredeemable place, has been tainted by his difficult upbringing. When I began to read the novel, I was immediately annoyed with his tone - by his seeming classism and elitism. It didn't occur to me until much later that those qualities are Rolfe's shield against his own pain. Wrestling with his love for his brother, he deprives Wade of agency and reduces him to a pure victim of every circumstance, including his family, choice of romantic partner, and place of birth. In doing so, he inadvertently reveals that his own life is lonely, so much so that the loneliness would be unbearable if it weren't purposeful. He has thrown up walls and deprived himself of relationships so he risk destroying those relationships himself. Even as Rolfe attempts to dissect the disaster of Wade's life, we witness the disaster of his own.

It's difficult to not love these two men by the time the novel ends, because Banks is wise enough to redeem its bleakness with Rolfe's tenderness and love for Wade, who might otherwise be alien and detestable. It's clear, by the time the end rolls around, that there is a decent man under Wade's skin. Every time that man shows his face, however, he's smashed back down by the world, by the rich, by the past. Even as his poor decisions pile up into criminality and cruelty, I found myself loving him more and more, until, at his lowest and meanest point, my heart broke for him.

Anyone who has ever been, or loved, a father's son, would probably feel the same way. The moves are familiar to us, like a dance we keep repeating. An old man dies. A young man gets old and starts to resemble him. More and more, looking in the mirror, I see my father staring back at me. I see my life coming to take the shape of his own in ways I could never have anticipated. He's gone, of course. But, like Rolfe at the end of Affliction, I continue.

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Affliction (1989)

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