In Banks We Trust
Page, Joseph A.
psychological disabilities, manifest chiefly in their complacent entrapment in a futile present and their desperate and doomed efforts to forget the past. Into this damaged, centripetal...
...Leda's perception is, of course, a mirage, and her flattery pernicious...
...What especially disturbed this reviewer was that in the three pages of the book touching upon a subject with which he is intimately familiar -- Argentina's late President...
...The CIA has never hesitated to use them, and they move easily back and forth between the continuing war against the Castro regime and nonpolitical racketeering...
...Unfortunately, the novel reaches its psychological climax relatively early...
...Indeed, she nowhere mentions the fascinating career of David Graiver, the young Argentine suspected of acting as banker for leftist revolutionaries who accumulated huge sums of money in a series of spectacular kidnappings in Argentina in the early 1970s...
...FATHER ERNEST BARTELL, C.S.C., is executive director of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at Notre Dame...
...she sees Durraghglass and its inhabitants not as they are, but as they once were, in the golden past o f lavish Sunday luncheons, fox-hunts, and country balls...
...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM, professor of religion at Florida State University, is the author of The Catholic Heritage...
...An anecdote illustrates some difficulties: At Communist party dances, black men would dance with white women, but black women were left on the sidelines by self-conscious white males fearing their inadequacy as dancers...
...Her vision proves as infectious as it is distorted, restoring to each of the Swifts, for a while, the illusion of innocence untainted by the corruption of time: "Their youth was present to them, a mit age trembling in her flattery as air trembles close to the surface of summer roads...
...In familiar places," she says at one point in the novel, "memories are never absolved...
...April's recollection of her mother's advice on "the loving obligations of marriage" - - " I t ' s a thing men do...
...Their record of extortion and kidnapping, according to Lernoux, "far surpasses the terrorist acts of Italy's Red Brigades or Libya's assassin squads...
...In Banks We Trust has moments of high fascination, but its flaws -- and especially its tendency to run off in too many directions -- ultimately mark the book as a disappointment...
...In brief COMMUNISTS IN HARLEM DURING THE DEPRESSION, Mark Naison...
...diverse motivations which made the Latin nations plunge themselves deeper and deeper into debt (the Brazilians wanted to invest in grandiose hydroelectric and mining projects, while the Argentines skirted bankruptcy in order to fight an ill-advised war against Great Britain), and the impact of external forces -- higher interest rates and lower commodity prices, for example -- which have made repayment tremendously difficult...
...Most problematic, then as now, was the relation of the popular communal cultural forms (like jazz) and the" high" culture...
...But Keane's most obvious Anglo-Irish predecessor is Elizabeth Bowen, whose stories of the 1930s and 1940s used the fragile and isolated status of her class to describe the sense of alienation that is so much a part of the modern sensibility...
...In Banks "" Trust overwhelms the reader with an avalanche of detail...
...Willing to share apartment -- or simply find a place for July and August while seeking permanent arrangement...
...The book closes with an Appendix on black-Jewish relations which suggests some of the implications of the Communist dream of integration...
...But the darkness of the novel is offset in part by Keane's equally considerable gift for comedy...
...Persecution in Germany made it particularly easy for Jews to identify with blacks as an oppressed minority, and both groups to imagine integration in .terms of universalism...
...But in her haste to pin all blame on the bankers, she oversimplifies and slights or overlooks factors such as the A. ROOM OF HER OWN Young woman, joining Commonweal staff, needs inexpensive living quarters in the New York area, starting in July...
...DICK HOWARD teaches in the philosophy department at the State University of New York, Stony Brook...
...Integration in the outside world was more difficult, although the party role in the struggles to integrate sports, for example, met ultimate success...
...The economy of the region has flourished from infusions of capital generated by this illegal commerce, and the violence it inevitably spawns has given Miami the nickname "Dodge City South...
...Jos6 L6pez Rega became social-welfare minister long before Isabel Per6n assumed the presidency...
...But the book neither hangs together as a coherent whole nor makes a convincing case against what it dimly suggests is a conspiracy involving banks, the Mafia, the C.I.A., the Vatican, and various fightwing terrorists and dictators...
...In Keane's version, Leda is the aggressor, trying to violate the jealously guarded security of the present...
...In Time After Time, Molly Keane has created such an island and, in the process, a world that explores with conviction and power the ways in which we are all shaped and controlled by the past...
...The Communists' dream of integration was incorporated in political practice which alternated between the radically militant and the banally traditional...
...As this passage suggests, Keane enjoys a considerable gift for evoking psychological suspense, for bringing to the surface the buried ambitions of a mind twisted by an obsessive clinging to the past...
...Swifts renewed and strengthened by Leda's invasion from the past...
...Shortly after he was presumed to have died in a mysterious plane crash in Mexico, his banking operations collapsed in the wake of investigations into their irregularity...
...Her book The Siege: The First Eight Years of an Autistic Child (Atlantic-Little, Brown) was republished with an epilogue in 1982...
...the massacre at the Ezeiza airport in Argentina occurred in 1973, not 1972...
...Lernoux's grand climax, a chapter dealing with the debt crisis in Latin America, epitomizes the strengths and weaknesses of her endeavor...
...Lernoux's ideological preferences detract from the effectivenesS of the book...
...Commonweal: 318...
...Law-enforcement agencies have been unwilling or unable to crack down on these operations...
...Joseph A. Puge p ENNY LERNOUX, Latin American correspondent for The Nation, has produced an engrossing yet exasperating account of financial and related evils perpetrated by the international brotherhood of bankers and other assorted villains...
...Ever pragmatic, the party instituted dance courses for these comrades...
...But much more important, the book stems from Naison's own experience, which many of us shared, of the New Left as it emerged from the civil rights movement...
...Now an old woman, Leda brings to Durraghglass her own disability - - she is blind - - and her own family skeleton: a brief but disastrous adolescent affair with the Swift children's father that took place during her previous visit, when she was seventeen, and that ended in Leda's being summarily sent home and in the father's apparent suicide...
...I don't know how she kept it up so long" - - bite humorously into the limitations and pettiness of this enclosed, upper-class world...
...Utilizing an episodic approach, Lernoux confronts the reader with a series of examples of banking misfeasance several of which would be likely candidates for book-length treatment...
...You won't like it" -- and a neighbor's comment on May's relentless lectures to the local garden club - - "Her lecture was bliss...
...Banks have contributed mightily to the blood-spattered boom...
...The most glaring example is her fixation upon the sinister dealings between banks and right-wing terrorists and her failure even to acknowledge that left-wing terrorists have nourished similar links...
...But success demanded that gains be institutionalized, which entailed playing the traditional politics of pacts and spoils...
...The huge profits to be earned from the "laundering" of drug money (which is pumped in and out of financial institutions in disregard of cash-reporting regulations) have created a demand for small banks known as "Coin-O-Washers...
...Easily the most riveting of her chapters are those chronicling the emergence of Commonweal: 316 Miami as the narcotics capital of the United States...
...Fidel Castro's revolution forced the drug dealers to relocate in Miami, and the "latinization" of the city as a result of an influx of Cuban exiles triggered a transformation which saw Latin Americans (mainly Cubans and Colombians) rise to prominence in the burgeoning drug trade...
...Naison's historical reconstruction is guided by an implicit question: how can the dream of integration be translated into political practice and social reality...
...Time After "r;,ne is markedly selfconscious of the Anglo-Irish tradition to which it belongs...
...One major obstacle in the struggle against the drugs is the involvement of many anti-Castro Cubans who fought at the Bay of Pigs and then drifted into narcotics trafficking...
...After 1938, when Congress began to reduce the social programs seriously, difREVIEWERS HOWARD H. RICHTER, an English professor at Queens College, CUNY, is the author of Fable's End, and Forms of the Novella...
...JOSEPH A. PAGE is the author of Peron: A Biography (Random House...
...Juan D. Pertn -- the narrative con18 May 1984:317 tained a number of factual errors suggesting sloppiness: Isabel was Per6n's third wife, not his second...
...She has returned to Durraghglass partly out of an irrational longing to recover the past of her first love, which she finds embodied in the ageless music of Jasper's voice, so like his father's, and partly by a desire for revenge on the family that once turned her out...
...Some she might diminish (destroy was a word she forgot) when her power at Durraghglass reached its supremacy, when she would live and make love with the voice that belonged to someone else...
...At times, this meant abandoning struggles nearly won, particularly concerning workplace integration...
...After "warming up" with descriptions of financial fiascoes perpetrated by Chase Manhattan and Citibank, she details the role of banks in the CIA's shadowy promotion of heroin traffic in Southeast Asia, in the Miami-centered drug trade, and in the strange links among the Vatican, a Masonic lodge called P-2, and neofascist assassins...
...There are, for example, enough references to swans to bring to mind another Leda, the woman raped by a god-like swan in Yeats's famous poem...
...University of Illinois Press, $22.95, 355 pp...
...KENNETH E. BOULDING is Distinguished Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the University of Colorado...
...Mark Naison's book could be read in the context of recent, and not always reassuring, attempts by the American left to reappropriate/he Communist experience as a "usable past...
...Naison's st ,htl'~ political discussion is supplemented oy a provocative account of the social integration of races the party sought, within its ranks and outside...
...If you know of a possibility, please call Anne Robertson at (212) 683-2042...
...Lernoux traces the sordid saga of organized crime's infiltration of Cuba and southern Florida in the decades following the Depression, when Havana became the point of entry for heroin enroute to the western hemisphere...
...It meant, also, that Moscow was not pulling the strings, at least in Harlem party politics...
...In Banks We Trust is as topical as today's headlines about pending defaults by Latin American countries unable or unwilling to pay the billions of dollars of interest they owe on colossal debts to banks in the developed world...
...With calculated charm, Leda manipulates the family until she has the three sisters in her power and Jasper within reach: "They were hers - - three bridges back to her innocence...
...These lapses cast a pall over one's confidence in the accuracy of the rest of the book...
...She is effective in describing the dimensions of the problem, the shortsightedness of the bankers who made the decisions to lend, and the economic and social disasters which would occur if the debtor nations applied the anti-inflationary prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund in order to obtain loans from that institution...
...CLARA CLAIBORNE PARK teaches English at Williams College...
...Moreover, she fails to explore fully the serious implications of default...
...Into this damaged, centripetal world comes a figure from that past, a halfJewish Austrian cousin named Leda, whose visit to Durraghglass fifty years before dazzled the Swift children with their first (and last) glimpse of the romantic, and left a provocative memory burned into the mind of each of them...
...Bowen once said that every Irish country house that has remained in the same family "is an island - - and, like an island, a world...
...Finally, the ties between the debt crisis and the CIA, the drug traffickers, and the Vatican are tenuous at best...
...The protective shield of "national security" has often blocked efforts to bring them to justice, a delicious irony in view of the current administration's professed commitment to eradicate Florida's narcotics trade...
...The debt dilemma facing Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and other Latin borrower-nations, as well as the entire international monetary system, receives adequate, if uninspired coverage, and the final chapter, a historical overview of dubious banking practices, is more in the nature of an introduction than a conclusion...
...Time's a joke," Leda says soon after her arrival, and her physical blindness makes possible a more dangerous one...
...To distinguish themselves from AfroAmerican nationalist tendencies, Harlem's Communists had to invent new militant tactics which often succeeded...
...Her allusion to "evidence" (never cited) that Per6n knew in advance that the Peronist right would attack the left on the occasion of his arrival at Ezeiza is without foundation, her reference to a rumor that the head of the Italian P-2 lodge helped Per6n recover the body of his late wife Eva overlooks the known fact that it ~ was the Argentine military government which arranged for the return of the corpse (Per6n had nothing to do with it), and her linkage of Per6n to a so-called "strategy of tension," whereby the right (or the left) foments unrest in order to provoke a military coup is both woefully confused and wide of the mark...
...GREGORY A. SCHIRMER is assistant professor of English at Notre Dame...
...Graiver allegedly used these funds to purchase banks in New York, Israel, and Belgium...
...Once Leda makes her move, unveiling all the secrets that she has so cunningly extracted from each of the Swifts - - April's fondness for alcohol and marijuana, May's cleptomania, June's fascination with the young Catholic boy who helps her run the farm, and Jasper's interest in an apparently homosexual monk from a neighboring monastery - - the novel moves rather weakly to an unconvincing conclusion that finds the Banking on trouble IN BARKS WE TRUST Penny Lernoux Anchor/Doubleday, $16.95, 310 pp...
Vol. 111 • May 1984 • No. 10
