The Magic Kingdom

June 1, 2022

In 1971, property speculator Harley Mann records his life story, starting with his father's unexpected death, which drove his family down to Florida to join a Shaker community. The community saved the struggling family, but Harley's love for a consumptive patient there had consequences that forced him to reassess the conservative Shaker worldview. From two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Banks.

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Starred review from August 15, 2022
Banks’s heartbreaking latest (after Foregone) delves into the history of a Shaker community in Florida through one man’s tragic story. In a metafictional frame, Banks describes finding in a public library a trove of reel-to-reel tapes, on which Harley Mann recounts his years as a teenager growing up in the remote New Bethany Shaker colony. What follows are Banks’s transcriptions of the recordings, which Harley made in 1971 when he was 81. After Harley’s father dies, Harley and his family move from their faltering utopian socialist community to New Bethany, and though he doesn’t immediately buy into the Shaker beliefs, he accepts the mentorship of John Bennett, the Shaker elder who sponsored them. However, when Harley develops an obsession with Sadie Pratt, whom he believes is playing him romantically against John, the stage is set for a devastating reckoning that undermines the colony’s survival. Looking back, Harley reflects bitterly on the acquisition of the community’s land by Walt Disney and the theme park’s discriminatory labor policies, which ran counter to the Shakers’ philosophy of inclusiveness. Though Harley’s tale is deeply personal, Banks artfully presents it on a larger scale, showing how it fits in a centuries-long pattern of settlers who came to Florida seeking a better life only to find, in Harley’s words, “It’s where you go when your prospects elsewhere have ended, and you’ve not yet settled into despair.” Banks’s penetrating dissection of the American dream and its frequently unfulfilled promises is consistently profound. This is his best work in some time.

October 1, 2022
In 1971, octogenarian Harley Mann reflects on his childhood and first love in a Shaker community in the early part of the century in central Florida, future home of Disney World. When his widowed mother accepts an offer from Shaker elder John Bennett to join the community, she lifts Harley and his four siblings out of poverty and indentured servitude and settles them in a stable environment. Twelve-year-old Harley soon meets Sadie Pratt, seven years his senior and dying of tuberculosis. Over the next several years, their relationship intensifies, and soon heartbreak and jealousy lead to a devastating act of betrayal, destroying the only family Harley ever knew. Banks' prose is languid and melodic, the work of a seasoned raconteur. The characters are nuanced and three-dimensional, simultaneously full of pride and doubt. The story is loosely based on actual events, with the narrative conceit that Banks salvaged Harley's audio recordings from a flooded library basement. An elegiac and introspective portrait of a young man and how his fear of loneliness manifests that of which he is most afraid.

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November 1, 2022

Loosely based on real events, this new work from Banks (Foregone) purports to be an oral history about a small Shaker sect that operated in Central Florida in the early 20th century, on land that is now part of Walt Disney World. The account is narrated by Harley Mann, who joined the community with his family as an adolescent and spends his teen years there. The central thrust of the story involves Harley's obsessive love for Sadie Pratt, a consumptive young woman who receives support and care from the community. As Harley's friendship with Sadie grows into something more, his attitude toward Elder John, whom he once idolized, shifts into rivalry and contempt, leading to tragedy. By design, the narrative emerges from a limited point of view, from someone who was very young during the events depicted and is recalling them decades later. Judgment of Harley's actions as well as the perspectives and motivations of Sadie and Elder John are left open to the reader. VERDICT The narrative moves slowly, but copious detail of Shaker life and the philosophy of utopian communities that have largely disappeared from the American landscape, are well depicted. Well-researched historical fiction from a skilled novelist.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2022
An old man records key moments in his early life, centered on the betrayal that defined his later years. Banks' previous novel, Foregone (2021), had a dying filmmaker trying to set his life's record straight as former students videotape him for a tribute. In the new work, his main character, 81-year-old Harley Mann, is recalling his adolescence, when he made a life-changing choice. His is the voice behind a box of audiotapes found in a library basement and here being "edited and shaped...into a more or less coherent narrative" by Russell Banks, according to the foreword. Early in the narrative, Harley's recently widowed mother moves her four boys in 1902 to the New Bethany Shaker community on 7,000 acres in Florida. It's a small, close-knit group defined by hard work, honesty, equal rights for women, and celibacy. Harley finds a mentor in the group's male leader, Elder John, and falls in love with Sadie Pratt, a consumptive young woman who comes to live in the community when her nearby sanitarium closes. While New Bethany seems like an idyllic, even magical, place, there's also discord and envy, natural calamities, and foreshadowing of a "national scandal" for the community. After a long buildup, the scandal itself fills some 70 pages of solid crime and courtroom drama. Harley went on to work in Florida real estate, including buying the 7,000 acres of New Bethany, which he eventually sold, in possibly questionable deals, to Walt Disney. Behind any latter-day Eden or utopia or Magic Kingdom lurks some unoriginal sins. That's one of several themes at work here, but the core is the emotional mirror of memory, a construct of events and their recall, or, for a writer wondering how he will be remembered, a construct of his books and readers, for whom Banks may well be a prized piece of gray matter. A multilayered tale of innocence and guilt from a gifted storyteller.

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