Aside from William Faulkner it is difficult to think of a white twentieth-century American writer who has negotiated the issue of race in as sustained, unflinching and intelligent a fashion as Russell Banks. Whilst the impulse to produce novels on the grand scale shows little sign of diminishing, authors opting to place race at the very centre of their great American fictions remain relatively rare. With a couple of notable exceptions, most of the major works produced by white American authors over the past decade – whether by elder statesmen such as Updike, DeLillo or Pynchon or younger writers such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace – appear to quarantine the topic.