wade Whitehouse Is An Improbable Protagonist For A Tragedy. A Well-digger And Policeman In A Bleak New Hampshire Town, He Is A Former High-school Star Gone To Beer Fat, A Loner With A Mean Streak. It Is A Mark Of Russell Banks' Artistry And Understanding That Wade Comes To Loom In One's Mind As A Blue-collar American Everyman Afflicted By The Dark Secret Of The Macho Tradition. Told By His Articulate, Equally Scarred Younger Brother, Wade's Story Becomes As Spellbinding And Inexorable As A Fuse Burning Its Way To The Dynamite.

(The Atom Egoyan adaptation of Banks's brilliant novel The Sweet Hereafter perfectly captures its brooding beauty, and Affliction may be Paul Schrader's finest film since he wrote Taxi Driver.)

Affliction transmutes Banks's painful past into fiction. His divorced protagonist, Wade Whitehouse, 41, is imprisoned by fate in Lawford, New Hampshire, a hell frozen over. He digs wells for chump change, lives in a trailer, drinks, and alienates his daughter by dragging her to a miserable Halloween costume party. In two weeks' time, Wade demolishes his pitiable hopes of family happiness, drawn into a rigorously plausible series of disastrous deaths. In flashbacks to his Dad-abused youth, we see how Wade wound up such a Dostoyevskian clown.

Banks has a mind of winter: when Wade sees his dead parent, the scene unfolds with the cold logic of ice-crystal formation. The story is narrated by Wade's kid brother, the family's sole escapee to college, in a cool, distanced way. Both brothers contain aspects of Banks, but each breaks free of autobiography. This is one haunting novel.