THE MAGIC KINGDOM

An old man records key moments in his early life, centered on the betrayal that defined his later years.

Banks’ previous novel, Foregone (2021), had a dying filmmaker trying to set his life’s record straight as former students videotape him for a tribute. In the new work, his main character, 81-year-old Harley Mann, is recalling his adolescence, when he made a life-changing choice. His is the voice behind a box of audiotapes found in a library basement and here being "edited and shaped...into a more or less coherent narrative" by Russell Banks, according to the foreword. Early in the narrative, Harley’s recently widowed mother moves her four boys in 1902 to the New Bethany Shaker community on 7,000 acres in Florida. It’s a small, close-knit group defined by hard work, honesty, equal rights for women, and celibacy. Harley finds a mentor in the group’s male leader, Elder John, and falls in love with Sadie Pratt, a consumptive young woman who comes to live in the community when her nearby sanitarium closes. While New Bethany seems like an idyllic, even magical, place, there’s also discord and envy, natural calamities, and foreshadowing of a “national scandal” for the community. After a long buildup, the scandal itself fills some 70 pages of solid crime and courtroom drama. Harley went on to work in Florida real estate, including buying the 7,000 acres of New Bethany, which he eventually sold, in possibly questionable deals, to Walt Disney. Behind any latter-day Eden or utopia or Magic Kingdom lurks some unoriginal sins. That’s one of several themes at work here, but the core is the emotional mirror of memory, a construct of events and their recall, or, for a writer wondering how he will be remembered, a construct of his books and readers, for whom Banks may well be a prized piece of gray matter.

A multilayered tale of innocence and guilt from a gifted storyteller.