The year is 1971. The place is Florida, south of Orlando, and 81-year-old Harley Mann sits on the porch of the house he has lived alone in for half a century speaking into a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Mann has never been married or fathered any children. His siblings are long gone. He has no close friends. He’s as alone as he has been for decades.
A solitary man but not necessarily a lonely one, Mann has a story he needs to tell of a particular place and time that exists now only in his memory — and in an obsessively rendered plaster of Paris diorama that sits on sawhorses in his dining room. Like an archeologist on a dig, he’s unearthing memories he’s avoided thinking about for most of his long life. At its essence, Mann recounts a tragic tale of lost innocence and forbidden love set in a utopia carved from the swamps, creeks, and sawgrass of the Everglades. Mann doesn’t know what will become of the tapes he’s making, if they will be found and discarded or transcribed and possibly donated to a local historical society.
I can’t remember when I discovered Russell Banks (who sadly died of cancer on January 7, 2023), or which of his books I read first. But over the past 20 years, I’ve read Continental Drift, Trailerpark, Affliction, Rule of the Bone, and Lost Memory of Skin. Banks is one of my favorite authors and his books have a special place on my shelves, not only because the tales are compelling, but also because they bear re-reading. America is Banks’s primary canvas and many of his characters come from the working class or the shabby margins of society, and are often misfits and outcasts. I was eager to read The Magic Kingdom and wasn’t disappointed — it never takes Banks long to hook me and pull me into his fictional world.