T A B L E+T A L K What was the last book you read that made you laugh out loud? Join the discussion in the Books section of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Haruki Murakami By Laura Miller (12/16/97) Allan Gurganus By Dwight Garner (12/08/97) Mark Leyner By Laura Miller (12/08/97) Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) Gus Van Sant By Cynthia Joyce (10/15/97) Edmund White By Daniel Reitz (10/15/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S Animal Husbandry By Laura Zigman When a TV producer named Jane Goodall loses yet another boyfriend, she searches the natural world for lessons about commitment (01/05/98)		T H E_ S A L O N_ I N T E R V I E W_ R U S S E L L_ B A N K S HOLLYWOOD'S HOTTEST NEW PROPERTY IS A WRITER WITH A GIFT FOR PROBING THE DARK TRUTHS OF ORDINARY LIVES. BY CYNTHIA JOYCE | It's more than a mere figure of speech to refer to a Russell Banks novel as his "brainchild." The 57-year-old father of four and author of more than a dozen novels (including "The Sweet Hereafter," recently adapted to film by Canadian director Atom Egoyan) speaks of both his children and his work like a proud parent who has learned the same painful lessons from each. Infusing his novels with a brutal honesty and moral rectitude that his characters struggle to live up to, Banks writes in beautiful and often tragic tones about the drama of daily life. His themes -- of loss, of weakness, of the difficulty of living a decent life -- are frequently bleak, but there's a redeeming wisdom to them, a sense of hopefulness found in the details that he so diligently draws out of his characters' mundane realities. No modern author writes more perceptively about ordinary men's stumbling quest for the American grail of material comfort and self-respect. It's a bit surprising, then, that such anti-epic stories would suddenly turn Banks into a hot Hollywood property. But apparently the Zeitgeist has finally caught up to him. In addition to the successful release of "The Sweet Hereafter," the adaptation of Banks' most autobiographical novel, "Affliction," has finally been delivered from development purgatory with the help of director Paul Schrader, and will be released this spring, starring Nick Nolte. And this winter, he will travel to France to work with Polish director Agnieszka Holland ("Washington Square," "Europa, Europa"), who will direct Banks' screen adaptation of "Continental Drift," his powerful tale of a blue-collar dreamer from New Hampshire and a poor Haitian mother whose visions of a better life lead them to tragic ends in Florida. Bogged down in the historical research for "Cloudsplitter," his ambitious forthcoming novel about abolitionist John Brown (to be published by HarperFlamingo this March), Banks took a year off to write what became one of his most beloved books, "Rule of the Bone," about a working-class teenage boy who manages to keep his integrity intact even in the absence of any worthy role models. The experience of reading "Rule of the Bone" is similar to the experience of adolescence -- you move through it quickly, but afterward, you sense that you are permanently changed. "It was almost out of necessity that I wrote 'Rule of the Bone,'" Banks said during a recent phone conversation from his part-time home in northern New Hampshire. "It was so different from 'Cloudsplitter,' you know, such a different world -- it was as if I was in a dream or something, and I awoke from the dream refreshed." Banks spoke with Salon about being a boy inside a man's body, his Pearl Jam collection and how writing saved his life. Your characters so often struggle with being adults, with acting responsibly and maturely. At what point do you think children become adults? Good question (laughs) -- I've raised four of them, all of them now in their late 20s and early 30s, and it's a question I still ask myself. Well, for instance, with Nicole, the sole survivor of the school bus accident in "The Sweet Hereafter," it's not a sexual thing. So it's not necessarily a loss of innocence. No, not at all. In fact, oftentimes the older characters in my books are more childlike than the adolescents. I would say that Nicole Burnell in "The Sweet Hereafter" and Bone in "Rule of the Bone" are two of my most mature characters, the most adult characters. I love them for that. I'm not sure what makes them that way -- I guess their devotion to the truth. They really love the truth, almost in a Christian sense, above all else. And also, it's their ability to see other people. They really can love other people, despite what they know about them -- Bone in particular. I think that's also true for Nicole, despite her suffering and having been victimized. They both have been victimized, to a great degree -- maybe that's why they both know so much about other people. Nonetheless, they're able to be loving people. You don't feel at the end of the "Sweet Hereafter" that Nicole is incapable of loving anyone. She's not bitter. She's angry, but she's not bitter. Do you believe there's a certain point in the transition to adulthood at which we stop learning? Well, most of us stopped learning very early, and spend the rest of our lives defending that point at which we stopped learning. It's funny, you know, most of the characters I've written about only learn anything as adults as a result of a terrible calamity -- like Wade Whitehouse in "Affliction," or Bob DuBois in "Continental Drift." At the end, yes, they learn something, but it took something terrible for them to learn anything, whereas Bone and Nicole learn early on. You get the feeling at the end of each of those books that those two characters will continue to learn as they go, that it's a process that has begun in adolescence and that will continue as they grow older, even as old people. At least you hope that's true. N E X T+P A G E +| What makes an adult?