Foregone

I read all of  Russell Banks' novels over the years and was delighted to hear that he had published his first novel in a decade. Foregone is the story of Leo Fife, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker at the end of his life, who is receiving palliative care in the Montreal apartment he shares with his third wife, Ellen. With the couple is a film crew which includes Fife's former students and acolytes, Malcolm and Julia and two others. Also present in the room is his Haitian nurse, Renée. Malcolm is hoping to film a retrospective of Fife's illustrious career beginning when he crossed the border to Canada from the US to dodge the military draft but Fife wants to tell a much different story and he wants to address it to his wife. Ellen and Renée, concerned that he is too ill to participate, try to stop the crew from filming but Fife insists that they remain.

The story Fife wants to tell begins much earlier.  Over the course of the day the tension between the crew and Fife's wife and carer surfaces between Fife's addled rambling retelling of his betrayals of those closest to him. At the age of sixteen, hoping to escape his depressed, detached parents, he and a buddy steal a car and head west. At nineteen he flees again, this time to Florida, with vague plans to hook up with Castro's revolutionaries in Cuba. He meets and marries a teenage girl he meets in a bar. They have a baby and move back to Massachusetts but he soon sends his wife and child back to her parents in Florida. Next he marries a girl from a wealthy southern family, has a second child and, as the couple are about to begin a new life in Vermont his second wife miscarries their second child. It's all too much for Leo and, in yet another impulsive act, he crosses the border at Derby Line to begin a new life. We learn that, contrary to the myth that he perpetuated, he did not move to Canada to dodge the draft. He was running away from his own personal demons. 

In the last moments of his life Leo decides to dismantle the foundation of lies on which his life was built. The story we read is told in Leo's voice. Is the voice in his head the same story that those in the room with him are hearing? We are told that Fife "can't quite hear himself when he speaks so he doesn't really know what they've heard." Have drugs and illness blurred the line between reality and dreams? Foregone is a compelling novel that explores the selectivity of memory as well as guilt, betrayal and abandonment.