"The Darling" by Russell Banks is his latest novel, a combination of contemporary historical fiction and highly evocative literary prose. I've only read one other Russell Banks novel, "Rule of the Bone", and seen the two movies adapted from his novels, "Affliction" and "The Sweet Hereafter", so don't have a lot of comparisons to his other work, though there are some common themes in main characters who are avoiding their identity, but unable to accept an other.

One test I have for mainstream novels in a bookstore where I don't know much about them is to read the first paragraph. If it makes me want to keep reading, that's a good sign.

After many years of believing that I never dream of anything, I dreamed of Africa. It happened on a late-August night here at the farm in Keene Valley, about as far from Africa as I have been able to situate myself. I couldn't recall the dream's story, although I knew that it was in Africa, the country of Liberia, and my home in Monrovia, and that somehow the chimps had played a role, for there were round, brown, mask-like faces still afloat in my mind when I awoke, safe in my bed in this old house in the middle of the Adirondack Mountains, and found myself overflowing with the knowledge that I would soon return there.

The narrator is Hannah Musgrave, though she spends most of the book going by many other names, Scout, Dawn (Don) Carrington, Mrs. Woodrow Sundiata, Mammi Watta, as she recounts her life story from her farm in the Adirondacks in New York State, a story which took her to the Weather Underground, then to the West Coast of Africa to Liberia and back to the States.

Liberia was the first outpost in the American empire, founded in the 1820s to send free blacks and former slaves back to Africa. For the past 10 years it has been the focal point of a bloody, chaotic epidemic of war. "The Darling" is a historical novel in the Graham Greene tradition, with Hannah, as the wife of a Liberian government official, an observer of the process and events of coups and civil war between the likes of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor, and their cynical manipulation by the US government and corporations, until the country wasn't needed anymore.

"The Darling" is a really compelling book, not so much for the story, but how it is told. If you are a fan of Russell Banks, you already know this, and for those who don't know his writing, this is a good place to start.

And as for the title, it is from the last sentence in the book:
"In the new history of America, mine was merely the story of an American darling, and had been from the beginning."