[In the following interview, Banks discusses the defining characteristics of his fiction, his personal history, and the inspirations behind Cloudsplitter.]

“You cannot understand how a man, a normal man, a man like you and me, could do such a terrible thing.”

So Russell Banks wrote in Affliction (Harper & Row, 1989), anticipating a reader's response to the exploits of his protagonist, Wade Whitehouse. In Wade's case, the behavior in question happened to be the murder of two people, one of them his father. But through a dozen novels and short story collections that have won him Guggenheim and NEA grants and a St. Lawrence Prize for fiction, Banks has made a life's work of charting the causes and effects of the terrible things “normal” men can and will do.

From the unnamed narrator of The Book of Jamaica (Houghton Mifflin, 1980), to Bob Dubois in Continental Drift (Harper & Row, 1985), to Nelson and Earl Painter in Success Stories (Harper & Row, 1986), to Bone in Rule of the Bone (HarperCollins, 1995), Banks's heroes are irresistibly compelled to wreck their own lives, and can't worry too much about who in their immediate vicinity they take with them. And whether they're cheating on wives or girlfriends, abandoning children, expressing frustration with their fists, playing with guns or drugs or drinking too much, Banks's excruciatingly hapless men are endowed with an endless stock of philosophical self-pity. Whatever they may do, these guys are always ready to forgive themselves.

Despite a clear-eyed view of their flaws, it seems as if their creator can't help but forgive them too. Banks writes with an intensely focused empathy and a compassionate sense of humor that help to keep readers, if not his characters, afloat through the misadventures and outright tragedies of his books.

“I do have a very deep personal affection for the people that I write about and I don't want to betray them, I don't want to misrepresent them, condescend to them in any way,” Banks says. “Whenever it turns out that someone like Wade Whitehouse or Bob Dubois or a kid like Bone has read one of my books or a story, it's extremely gratifying. I feel a spark passing between us. It's something more than the kind of pleasure I can take from someone who has a lifetime subscription to The New Yorker.”

Accomplished and articulate, and bearing some resemblance to the late-vintage Hemingway, Banks has clearly not based his desperate, dead-ended characters upon himself. But he comes by his knowledge of them firsthand. “Obviously there are links between my past and the pasts of characters in my books, but a lot of that is because you can shortcut your way to information,” he explains. “I know how it feels to be a young white male in America from the working class because I was one, so I can cut right to the chase if that's what I'm going to write about.”

Russell Banks was born in Barnstead, New Hampshire, in 1940, raised, he says, “by one of those working women with four kids” after his father left the family when he was very young. It was “the emotional chaos, the turbulence, even the violence” of his childhood, he feels, that led him to writing.

“I think that early on, storytelling and structuring experience and emotions through language became some kind of emotional stability and coherence,” he recalls. “It worked. As a kid, if I could tell myself or tell my younger brother what was going on in the family dynamic, or even escape from those conditions by fantasy, somehow it made life tolerable. I think that those patterns set so early that they probably shape the brain in some way and you're stuck with them later on when you no longer are in those conditions. There's nothing else to do with it so you might as well make art out of it.”

Banks began making art by painting and drawing, switching to poetry by the time he was 21 or 22, and publishing two books of verse before finally settling on fiction. Finding a home in prose, he recalls, was the serendipitous result of attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the mid-1960s.

“I was writing both fiction and poetry then, but at that period I became close friends with really good poets among my contemporaries—William Matthews, Charles Simic, and others who were my age and stage of development and were writing poetry that I couldn't write. It was simply better than anything I could do and nobody wants to be a minor poet before they're thirty.”

At the same time, an inclination toward fiction was becoming an internal one. His poems growing longer and increasingly narrative, Banks began to feel that his was a prose writer's esthetic. “One of the things you're doing in these apprentice years is mapping the outlines of your imagination,” he notes. “When you begin, your own imagination is really sort of terra incognita, you don't know what lives there and where the borders are, so you spend an awful lot of time just finding out what you can't do in order to determine what it is you can do.”

Banks has spent the past 30 years finding out and building upon what he can do well. In his first novel, Family Life (Avon, 1975; Sun & Moon Press, 1988), he introduced a sort of comic book version of the characters that would populate later books much more vividly—the unhappy, ineffectual mother, the violent and obtuse father and sons—in a modernist farce that plays out as if its author had been reading too much Beckett.

“I think that the shift in my approach to narrative over the years has been basically an expression of my own evolution as a person,” Banks points out. “When I was younger, I was much more concerned with—even obsessed with—form and structure, perhaps because I was insecure about my ability to control [them].” When his confidence in that area grew, he recalls, his focus shifted crucially toward the psychology of his characters. “Again, maybe that's because I was in my middle thirties and I was insecure about my ability to understand human beings in a deep enough way. In recent years, it's shifted again, more to the historical, social aspect of narrative and that may be because I'm at an age where I'm trying to consciously attain a broader view of material, see it in a wider context.”

One context in which Banks has long tried to understand his mostly blue-collar characters is work: the jobs they hold down, and how far those jobs do—and mostly don't—get them where they want to go. Stuck in the gray, slushy New England towns where they were born, Banks's men repair oil burners or plow roads, piling up debt and disappointment. Or they take off for Florida and the Caribbean, where their career options end up amounting to a choice between pushing a broom or trafficking in drugs and illegal immigrants.

Banks has spent most of his own working life teaching creative writing at places like Columbia and Princeton universities, and says teaching has allowed him to do something he loves while exercising a great measure of control over his time to write as well. Though he hasn't done blue-collar work since his early twenties, Banks never forgets the impact of employment on “what kind of power or sense of powerlessness” an individual has.

“If I'm going to be honest about a character, I've got to describe that person's work and acknowledge the ways in which it has shaped her or his life and body,” he says. “If you do some numbing, repetitive work twenty-five years of your life it's going to shape who you are. It is something that I think has to be attended to and it's not much attended to: how people make a living and what kind of living they make from a given piece of work, and how that impinges on their lives and determines their choices.”

That's a point tragically lost on Ron, the glossy lawyer who narrates the short story “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story,” Banks's brilliant and concise dissection of class misunderstanding in America, which appeared in Success Stories (Harper & Row, 1986). In a key encounter, Ron utterly fails to comprehend what it means for the homely Sarah Cole to spend her days filling cartons with TV Guides, and why her job makes her feel too “different” from Ron to jump into bed with him.

[Ron] picks up a TV Guide from the coffee table and flips through it, stops, runs a finger down the listings, stops, puts down the magazine and changes the channel. He does not once connect the magazine in his hand to the woman who has just left his apartment. … He'll think of the connection some other night, but by then the connection will be merely sentimental. It'll be too late for him to understand what she meant by “different.”

Another element of his characters' milieu that Banks hasn't shied away from depicting is violence. “It's there,” he insists. “Not to represent it would be to misrepresent the world. I might be more sensitized to it than some because I was raised in a violent environment but you know you don't have to look very far to see it everywhere around you.”

When you see it in a Banks novel, violence is tawdry, not titillating, whether it leaves the protagonist essentially unscathed, as in The Book of Jamaica, or destroys him, as in Continental Drift. It's interesting that Banks credits his unromantic take on violence to women: his mother, his four daughters, and close friends he's had as an adult. “I've tended to see the world through women's eyes, and that has made me more alert to how violent our day-to-day world really is. It's easy to ritualize and in that way hide violence, through sports or hunting, or even to estheticize it and in that way not see it. [Violence] doesn't seem to be diminishing even as we become a more aware society.”

Despite his access to a female point of view, women themselves tend to be shadowy figures in Banks's fiction, distant and baffling magnets for male longing and rage. An exception among his books, in this and several other ways, is The Sweet Hereafter (HarperCollins, 1991), Banks's wrenching account of a school bus accident and its devastating aftermath in a tiny upstate New York town.

The novel includes what is probably the sole successful marriage in a Banks novel, albeit one that exists only in retrospect, Vietnam veteran Billy Ansel's remembered romance with his now-dead wife. But more to the point, the story is told by four fully realized voices, two of them female: the middle-aged bus driver, Dolores Driscoll, and the teenaged Nichole Burnell, permanently wheelchair-bound as a result of the accident.

Though he had tried his hand at using multiple, and female, narrators only once before, in the satiric Hamilton Stark (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), Banks says employing them in The Sweet Hereafter wasn't a big stretch for him.

“I saw the story as a parable about the loss of children in our culture at large that I think has occurred over the last half century,” he explains. “I approached the school bus accident with a desire to explore it as a metaphor, so I had to have a kind of chorus of speakers rather than a single narrator and I had to locate the virtues or the failings of a character within a community. Necessarily that would involve my speaking through female characters, or having female characters speak through me.”

Thinking the book over now, Banks says it is the women's voices that ring most true for him. “The voices that have moments of inauthenticity are the male voices, and I think that generally that's true, the characters whose voices are least like my own come to my ear much more clearly and uncluttered.”

Nevertheless, for his next novel, Rule of the Bone, Banks had to struggle to hear the unfamiliar voice of his protagonist, the adolescent, homeless Bone whose story is another sad tale about the loss of children and childhood in 1990s America. Along with building up a collection of alternative rock CDs, and spending time in a tattoo parlor, Banks says getting close to Bone meant listening hard for the cadences of a character whose relationship to language was far more “skeptical, testing, and vernacular” than his own.

His just-published Cloudsplitter took him on further adventures in language. This 800 page historical novel required six years of writing—instead of his usual one or two—and much research to tell the story of John Brown, the abolitionist who led a raid on an arsenal at Harpers Ferry as part of a planned slave uprising, and was hanged for treason in 1859.

“I got intrigued by John Brown initially because he's buried down the road from my house in upstate New York, and so are eleven others who were killed at Harpers Ferry or executed afterwards. That was the initial connection and it gradually became an obsession,” Banks says.

The book is narrated by Owen Brown, John Brown's son, who recounts the events of the story from a distance of 50 years. “I had to move my ear to where I could hear a nineteenth-century elderly man talking, a man born in 1824 with little more than a few years' education who spoke a workingman's English.”

Banks went digging for that English in informal writings from the 1800s, such as diaries and letters, and listened for its echoes in the speech of Adrian Edmonds, a man in his 80s who lives near Banks in Keene, New York. “He went to work at the age of about ten, clearing forests with men who were born somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century,” Banks explains. “His spoken English is wonderful, slightly odd in the contemporary American context, but it has the sound and the inflection and the grammar of mid-nineteenth-century American English. Throughout the writing of the book, I used it almost as a kind of template against which I could try to fit whatever I was putting on the page.”

John Brown's story gave Banks a wealth of personalities and themes to maneuver on the page. “This is a complicated character dealing with really basic issues of race and violence and religion. Brown stands right there where all those fractures in society cross: the racial fracture, class fracture, religious fracture, they all cross right under his feet,” Banks says. Working with so much historical material, he recalls, the hardest thing was deciding what to leave out. “It's difficult first of all to know what of all that mass of material is useful to you as a storyteller and then to privilege yourself to go ahead and take it and leave the rest, to know that your purposes are strictly the purposes of a storyteller and not a historian and to constantly be aware of that. I think that's probably difficult for most people who write using historical materials.”

Cloudsplitter presented Banks with a whole new set of challenges; it also thoroughly exhausted him. He's currently taking some time off from novel writing, working instead on projects like the text for a book of photographs by Arturo Patten that will be published in France, and the libretto for an opera, “things which, when I begin, I can already see the ending. The trouble with a novel is when you begin, you don't know if you're going to be through in a year or you're going to have to march all the way to Russia and back.”

He has also been involved as a consultant in adapting several of his novels for the screen. A film based upon Affliction, directed by Paul Schrader, is currently seeking distribution, while one based on The Sweet Hereafter, directed by Atom Egoyan, opened in theaters last November after winning the Grand and International Critics Prizes at Cannes. A third film, using Banks's own script version of Continental Drift, is to be directed by Agnieszka Holland.

Seeing his books transformed into cinema, Banks is having a rare experience for a writer: he actually likes the movies. “It's very unusual, I know,” he admits. When filmmakers adapt novels. Banks says, what they typically edit out of their screenplays “is the moral center of the work, and that's what makes the work coherent to a reader, makes it meaningful in any way. What both Shrader and Egoyan have done is preserve the moral center of each of these books in the movies.”

Having taught creative writing for decades, Banks says he believes that the best writing teachers are those with the best memories of their own apprenticeships. Based upon his own early days, he concludes that there are three things a student writer needs to find most: “a mentor, peers, and a way to stay out of the economy, for a few years at least. What I try to do as a teacher is help students create those conditions.”

Banks is now in the process of retiring from Princeton, where he has been since 1982. He views the end of his teaching career as a mixed blessing, he says, “because I've taught for so long and I've enjoyed it, I've been very fortunate to have great students and colleagues who are close friends and an inspiration for me. On the other hand, it's liberating too.”

Once free of teaching, Banks and his wife, Chase Twichell, a poet, will spend more time in upstate New York, where Banks works in a renovated sugarhouse about a hundred yards from their home. “It's just a nice big square room with a porch overlooking a brook and I work there every morning until lunchtime and actually usually hang out there in the afternoons as well, doing other kinds of things, letter-writing, working on various projects. That's really my place.”

His own place is something Banks feels is essential for him as a writer: a laptop computer on a train or in a cafe just won't do. “I really have to have a workplace that's constant and routinized in my life so every day I can delude myself into thinking I have a real job and go there and do whatever it is I do,” he says.

It's having this room of his own and the ability to do what he chooses to do in it that more than anything else sets Banks apart from the men he writes about. “What they're striving for is control over their own destinies, and I suppose that to some considerable degree I have obtained that through writing,” he reflects. “When I was a kid and in my twenties, imagining my future such as I could, my fantasy was that I would grow old and be able to spend my time reading and writing. That seemed to me the most desirable middle and old age—or even youth, for that matter—and that's basically what I'm facing now. So in a sense, my dreams have come true. It is exactly what I want to do now.”