Anyone who has followed the estimable career of Russell Banks can be forgiven a certain degree of surprise at the apparent detour represented by his new novel, THE RESERVE. In books like CONTINENTAL DRIFT and THE SWEET HEREAFTER, and the short stories collected in THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF, he has unsparingly chronicled the hardscrabble lives of the working poor. Now, he has shifted his focus dramatically to offer a tale of slowly building suspense and power that dwells on the casually destructive lives of the wealthy in Depression-era America.

Set in an upper class resort in the Adirondack Mountains known as the Tamarack Wilderness Reserve, THE RESERVE begins in 1936 on the quintessential American holiday: the Fourth of July. A beautiful and mysterious young woman by the name of Vanessa Cole has joined her father Carter, an eminent neurosurgeon, her mother Evelyn and a group of longtime friends at “Rangeview,” the family “camp” that in fact is a handsome estate on the shore of the gorgeous Second Tamarack Lake. Her father’s death of a sudden heart attack that day serves to unhinge Vanessa’s tenuous connection with reality, unleashing the terrible events that follow in short order.

The other principal character is Jordan Groves, “a famous artist…a legendary adventurer and sportsman, a roistering world traveler with a loving family, leftist politics, and a lot of money.” He lives in a nearby town with his wife Alicia and their two sons, on the fringes of the world of privilege and wealth symbolized by the Coles and at the same time distant from it. Groves’s politics impel him to despise the faux aristocracy of which Vanessa is a part, yet he seems to be one of those people who loves the proletariat in the abstract but has no sympathy for its real life incarnations. A combat pilot in World War I, he flies his seaplane over the mountains and lakes in which the novel is set, to the point where the plane itself almost becomes a character in the book.

After her father’s death, Vanessa becomes convinced that her mother plans to rob her of her inheritance by bundling her off to a clinic in Switzerland, there to be lobotomized (a procedure developed by her late father) to cure her erratic and self-destructive behavior permanently. For Vanessa, the world is a shape-shifting, almost infinitely malleable place: “It was as if her personal and public past and future were not real, as if her past could be constantly altered and her future indefinitely postponed.” Her impulsive act to forestall her mother’s scheme triggers a cascade of devastating events that eventually spins out of the control of all the characters.

Meanwhile, Alicia, subconsciously weary of her husband’s casual and serial infidelities, slips into an affair with Hubert St. Germain, a stolid native of the area who works as a “guide” for the Coles and other families at the Reserve, doing everything from accompanying them on hunting and fishing trips to chopping wood and performing home repairs. Their affair begins to unravel when Vanessa inadvertently discovers it. And when she, Groves and St. Germain witness a terrible accident involving Evelyn Cole, they’re drawn into a tight circle that mingles varying degrees of mutual need and mutual contempt.

Banks has lived in the Adirondacks for some 20 years, and he puts his intimate knowledge of the territory to fine use here. His description of the lush forests and shimmering lakes, the play of light and shadow, all ring true. There is a cinematic quality to his descriptive writing, and with the emotional complexity at the heart of the novel, it is easy to imagine a Hollywood director eager to turn this book into a film.

At its root, THE RESERVE is high-quality escapist fare that doesn’t stretch as far as it might have to illuminate any profound truths. Still, it’s an engrossing tale of a small group of troubled characters whose ill-conceived choices enmesh them in chaos and, ultimately, catastrophe. To a greater or lesser extent, for all of them, as Banks writes of Vanessa, “the truth was more a coloration of reality than the organizing principle of its underlying structure.”