SOURCE: “More than Zero,” in the Nation, Vol. 243, No. 7, September 13, 1986, pp. 226–28.

In the following mixed assessment of Success Stories, Pfeil asserts that Banks “has put in enough time in working-class America to have an exact sense of what its dreams and betrayals feel like and how they work.”

No one … will ever accuse Russell Banks of gorgeous writing: his prose has the precise force of a steady, measured outrage. Which is not to say he is not skilled—only that the craft he was honing through the 1970s in Searching for Survivors and Hamilton Stark has now been placed at the service of a terrible probity.

In his last book, Continental Drift, Banks crosscut the story of Bob DuBois, a working-class white man trying to hustle up some luck in Florida, with the tale of Vanise Dorsinville, a Haitian woman trying to get to the United States with...