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Rating: It feels like watching a television with the volume very low. He senses something, just a word or two, but the real problem is that he's not listening to it. He observes her beautiful face: a series of fine wrinkles from her now-gone youth that join deeper ones born from growing anger. Money? Probably, but maybe he also forgot to do something important. He thinks about it and realizes that it might be. They made love just a few hours ago. Once, when fire and the wheel had not yet been invented, this was the height of his aspiration! She raises her voice in irritation but he doesn’t hear her and wonders, while moving her away to search for the beer can, where the hell those days have gone.
He was following their rhythm, the one they had learned to find and ride over the years, and instead of fully enjoying that panting body, he found himself thinking about the pending mortgage installments, work, looming deadlines, and all that growing heap of worries and routine. That gray lump that is increasingly drying out his life since a ring took possession of his finger. Days that look terribly like those just passed, like faded photocopies of the same page. The toner is almost out, and he must bring the paper close to his nose to decipher the meaning of his existence.
You wake up and see a good number of hairs on the bed; you curse for all those pains that make you get out of bed with the movements of a worm, only to assume with indescribable effort the position of Homo Erectus. She brushes her teeth and it’s not exactly a sight, on the other hand, neither are you, looking at her disgusted. Dark circles from a horror movie, a flabby belly, a shabby and severe look: you’re thankful that today is not Monday and that you didn’t fight too much the night before. You realize on the toilet, while pushing out a turd, that the best is gone and you’ve been screwed by the illusion that everything could last. And so, you no longer settle for the misery that you’ve managed to build with so much effort and try to cling to the hope of starting everything over. Having a second chance because you were treated unfairly, because you are worth much more than average, because you were unlucky, and other such crap. Often these are just a couple of shouted phrases without foundation: mere verbal frustration that lingers in the air, bouncing off the walls of a room and dissipating into nothing without consequences.
Only occasionally do those elusive intents take shape.
Life is composed of a multitude of small actions, seemingly harmless and imperceptible, whose sum inevitably leads to a breaking point. Daily life makes us believe we are firmly in the same comfortable spot, yet we slip without realizing it and suddenly find ourselves crashing without airbags. Without having the time to adequately protect ourselves. Continents, tectonic plates, in a similar manner, glide silently over the mantle consistently and progressively. Silent decades pass until a devastation like the one a few days ago reminds us that those devastating shocks are the result of a myriad of smaller pushes perpetrated over time. Perhaps our lives are truly adrift, driven by chance and the motion of an infinite army of variables, only partially controllable, causing us to wander over the mantle like continents. Until the next bang!
Russell Banks, in this book of his from thirty years ago, with juicy and rich chapters, tells us about the breaking points in the lives of two entirely different protagonists. Bob Dubois is an American from the cold and colorless New Hampshire who has just passed thirty; he is overwhelmed by a midlife crisis, disillusioned by work, dissatisfied with his marital life, and increasingly struggling to support three daughters towards whom he feels lukewarm sentiments. Vanise Dorsinville is instead a young Haitian escaping with her son and nephew in an attempt to reach the U.S. illegally.
After a substantial number of personal misadventures, these two very different characters will meet for a finale of granitic harshness. Both are searching for their personal "America". For Bob, the sunny Florida represents, as already mentioned, the possibility of a new life; a favorable climate in symbiosis with the cascade of easy money he was supposed to gather effortlessly with his brother from filigree orchards. But it's a bastard sun, the excessive light is deceitful because it attracts and at the same time dazzles and blinds. For Vanise, the United States represents the end of a life of fear, hardship, suffering, and abuse; a necessity that unconsciously drives her to slip toward her terrible destiny.
Continental Drift is a powerful novel, fluid in prose, capable of exposing with its realism and pervasive pessimism the darkest and most Machiavellian sides of the contemporary world. In Banks' intentions, reading this book should make us grow, somewhere in the guts, a feeling of disgust and a desire for change. Delusional! We, aside from words of circumstance, will continue to drift.
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