Hamilton Stark

Name: Hamilton Stark
Brand: Harper Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Russell Banks
ISBN: 9780062311030

Author: Russell Banks

Narrator: Sean Runnette

Unabridged: 9 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Published: 11/12/2013

Categories: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Women, Psychological

Synopsis

Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom. At the same time that he tells Hamilton Stark's story, he describes the process of writing the novel and the complicated connections between truth and fiction. As Stark slips in and out of focus, maddeningly elusive and fascinatingly complex, this beguiling novel becomes at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.

About Russell Banks

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and he received numerous prizes and awards, including the Common Wealth Award for Literature. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-two.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Tim

A young Russell Banks (this is his second novel) plays narrator and point of view games and gets a bit precocious to the book's detriment in "Hamilton Stark." While this portrait of a cantankerous New Englander has Banks' already outstanding way with words going for it, the author is trying too hard......more

Goodreads review by Sarah

I am slogging through this on principle, it is a Russell Banks novel and I paid for it. Beyond that, no other reason. It is my least favorite of his novels I have read so far. Story has not grabbed me, did not care for the format cared nothing one way or the other about any of the characters in the......more

Goodreads review by Brandt

Now THIS is what I come to expect when reading Russell Banks. Banks, when he is at his best, tells stories of the relationships between incredibly flawed humans. While the "hero" of the work is the irascible miscreant, Hamilton Stark, the story is actually about those who would dare to love or admir......more

Goodreads review by Jessica

Usually I really like formal innovation, in particular in prose since it is so unusual in that genre. So I admired this book, but I didn't actually like it at all. And it's not because the main character(s) are so unappealing; I don't think that's a particularly useful reason for liking or disliking......more