Love, madness, mystery

AS John Fowles did in "The French Lieutenant's Woman," Russell Banks arrests his reader's attention in "The Reserve" straight off with the image of a mysterious young woman staring out at open water, though it's not Fowles' briny Atlantic but the considerably smaller expanse of an Adirondacks lake -- which is nonetheless large enough for Jordan Groves to land his pontoon airplane. Jordan is an artist and adventurer whose subsequent meeting with a beautiful heiress puts flame to the fuse that sizzles through several hundred pages on its way to a high-combustion mix of eros and thanatos.

Set mainly in 1930s America (there are a few short sections in European locales), the novel plays out themes of erotic obsession, madness and duty -- and weaves in specific elements (and figures) of the times: politics, the Spanish Civil War, the Hindenburg's transatlantic flights, the emerging practice of psychoanalysis.

Banks has written a short note about the novel in which he reflects on its origins as well as the fascinating convergence of his sources and influences. Aside from wishing to work on a narrative that would bring him closer to the era of his parents' youth and the attractions of the Adirondacks as a locale (so near his own home of 20 years), he confides his abiding fascination with the life and work of illustrator Rockwell Kent, whose career merged artistic aspiration with intense leftist political convictions. Further, Banks has read an unedited manuscript of Ernest Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not" and concluded that the female character was based on a real-life mistress of Hemingway's, who by all accounts was "mind-numbingly beautiful" but also emotionally unstable. (She apparently also was the model for the vengeful wife in Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.")

All these elements and others, Banks admits, combined in his imagination (in ways that can, of course, never be accounted) to produce this riveting narrative, featuring an almost pot-boiling love story set against a backdrop of global unrest and clearly demarcated class tensions.

The story opens with Jordan's arrival on the Fourth of July at the privileged rural enclave known as "The Reserve," to look at Dr. Carter Cole's collection of the paintings of his colleague James Heldon. Jordan leaves a few hours later with Cole's adopted daughter, Vanessa, beside him in the plane. They are sneaking away to watch a local fireworks display, though it would not be a stretch to say, in the pointed and innuendo-laced style of that period (at least as we have it from the films of Howard Hawks and others), that they are the fireworks. After the inevitable parrying, after Vanessa has had her turn at the controls, they land in a secluded spot for the viewing.