SOURCE: A review of Success Stories, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 22, 1986, pp. 3, 10.

In the following review, Eder provides a positive assessment of Success Stories.

Quite steadily, and often powerfully, Russell Banks has been devising fictional varieties of the “this is poison” labels on cigarette advertisements.

Our society's promise of an affable world of clean microdots and expanding consumption—the equivalent of the pool-side set blithely puffing away—has lethal side effects, he tells us. Unlike cigarette ads, this easygoing social gospel comes without warnings; so here is Banks.

He is not much concerned with the sensibility class, those who can afford cocaine, condos and foreign cars with domestic exhaust. He writes about people a notch or two down: blue-collar workers looking for something better, the young unprivileged trying to make it, migrants and emigrants; in short, all those who seek to acquire the kind of...