Foregone by Russell Banks

Publsihed by Ecco on March 2, 2021

Foregone might be read as a thought exercise, an exploration of the nature and meaning of change as it applies to a human life. Can people change in a fundamental way? They can try to change. They can pretend to be a different person, as actors do when they take the stage. They can alter their behavior and perhaps their personalities. But can they change their character? Leonard Fife struggles with that question as he approaches death, tries to make a new life with a better character, but perhaps he only succeeds in his imagination.

Fife was a celebrated documentarian in Canada, although his work is unknown outside of his country. He first gained fame with a documentary about American draft resisters who came to Canada. Malcolm MacLeod, one of Fife’s proteges, has agreed to make a documentary for the CBC (to be titled Oh, Canada) about Fife’s life and death. He doesn’t have much time to shoot the film because cancer is eating Fife’s body and perhaps his mind. Using Fife’s signature technique by interviewing Fife under a spotlight in a darkened room, Malcolm wants Fife to talk about his experience as a draft resister, how his escape to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War informed his work, and why he made certain choices while filming various documentaries. Fife has other ideas.

Fife begins the interview by explaining that his story of coming to Canada as a draft resister was an invention. He says he wants to tell the true story because his beloved wife, Emma Flynn, deserves to know the truth about the man she loves. Fife then embarks on a long, detailed story about two marriages in America that he has never discussed, one to a woman of unsound mind, the second to the daughter of a wealthy Virginia family. He had a chance to take over his father-in-law’s family business, but instead went to Vermont and had a brief dalliance with the wife of a friend. The details become progressively foggy as he tells the story, so it is never perfectly clear how or why he ended up in Canada. He was apparently running away, but from his life rather than the war.

As he speaks, Emma becomes increasingly concerned that the process of filming is harmful to Fife and that the finished product will harm his reputation. His Haitian nurse also objects to a process that she sees as cruel and unduly taxing — she thinks Fife should die in peace — but Fife insists that Malcolm press ahead with the interview.

As Fife tells his meandering story, refusing to answer Malcolm’s questions about his work so that he can discuss what he believes to be important, it becomes clear that Fife’s attempt to tell the truth is impaired by Fife’s inability to discern it. Fife is heavily sedated and in extreme pain. As he speaks, details change, times and places become jumbled and distorted. Perhaps he knew Bob Dylan and Joan Baez but did he meet them in Canada or Boston? After a bit, Fife even begins to question whether the words he is speaking reflect the clarity of the story he is trying to tell. He is sure that he has been speaking from early morning to mid-afternoon when Malcolm tells him that the interview has lasted only a couple of hours, and that Fife must have misunderstood remarks that he believes suggest otherwise. It seems unlikely that Fife could have related the entire story, replete with cultural analysis of topics that include Kerouac and cars, in just half a morning. Fife thus becomes the epitome of the unreliable narrator, although not by intention.

On the other hand, it isn’t clear that Fife ever intended to tell the historical truth. He may intend his story to express the deeper truth of how he feels about himself, how his character is flawed in ways that Emma has never understood.

At times, Foregone is a frustrating novel. It seems like a slow walk to an elusive destination that moves farther away with each step taken in its direction. Initially, the destination seems to be the truth that Fife promised, the actual and shocking reason he moved to Canada. But by the novel’s end, the destination has become less important than the journey, a trip that exists only in Fife’s failing and jumbled memory. Perhaps the journey’s true destination is Fife’s end-of-life fear that he hasn’t been the person he should have been, and that his love of Emma, which should have been primary at all times, is all that matters. Emma echoes that belief in her recognition that nothing Fife says in the interview is important. She knows what’s important: he loved her, and she loved him.

When the cameraman asks Malcolm whether he thinks Fife’s story was true, Malcolm shrugs off the question because the truth doesn’t matter. What matters is that he got his film. What matters to the Haitian nurse is something more personal. What matters, Foregone seems to say, is a question of perspective. Perhaps it is only at the end of life that we gain the perspective to understand what is truly important.

Fife’s story, unreliable and frustrating though it might be, is always interesting. Nothing ever seems settled, and if some of the story is true, it seems awfully unfinished, leaving more questions than answers. Those very qualities — faults, I would have called them, before reading to the end — capture the larger truth that so much of life remains unsettled at the end of life. I wouldn’t say that the truths Fife has embraced at the novel’s end are profound — yes, love is a good thing to have; yes, we should prioritize the things that matter — but the story illustrates the profound changes that accompany aging and death, whether expressed as regret or as a last desperate attempt to reshape character, to leave the world as a better person, as if wishing it were true might be enough to make it true.

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