Keith Banner
Auteur van The Life I Lead
Werken van Keith Banner
Winners Never Sleep! 1 exemplaar
Next to Nothing [story] 1 exemplaar
Just Let Me Have This 1 exemplaar
From Me to You 1 exemplaar
The Doll the Fire Made {short story} 1 exemplaar
Happy That They Hate Us 1 exemplaar
Lowest of the Low 1 exemplaar
I Don't Know and I Don't Care 1 exemplaar
Don't Be a Stranger 1 exemplaar
God Knows Where 1 exemplaar
How to Get from This to This 1 exemplaar
Princess Is Sleeping 1 exemplaar
Queers Can't Hear 1 exemplaar
Gerelateerde werken
Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More-or-Less Gay Life (2005) — Medewerker — 84 exemplaren
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- 78
- Populariteit
- #229,022
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- 3.5
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“Quirky” barely scratches the surface.
It comes as no surprise that Banner’s new book is graced with an epigraph from Flannery O'Connor. After all, his stunning first novel, THE LIFE I LEAD, was widely compared to O’Connor’s work. But when I read the quotation he chose for the opening of NEXT TO NOTHING, I had to ponder: “It is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”
It sounds as though we are always-already displaced with no belonging anywhere, and “the freak” is a mere instrument of displacement. This is the condition Banner’s characters face. Their own freakishness, or that of their loved ones’, is so ingrained in their sense of being that it becomes a matter of moral or genetic determinism. I find no questioning of social mores, no laying of blame at the feet of criminal parents or oppressive belief systems. This world acknowledges neither easy explanations nor extenuating circumstances: the characters may be likeable or not, but their eating disorders, sexual orientation, survival of abuse, or other issues appear to render them permanent misfits. Even a case of cancer can leave a person blighted and pitiful and in his own eyes.
This is not to say that Banner belittles or judges his people. He portrays their intractable problems as they feel from the inside: inherent features of life that keep happening to us regardless of what we do or what we promise to do. Flannery O’Connor might well agree. None of us asked to be born into white trash families or to become raving lunatics, but God loves us no matter how freakish he makes us appear to our fellow human beings. Just don’t expect Him to prove that love in a way we might prefer.… (meer)