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 older, even as old people. At least you hope that's true.

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In "Continental Drift," Bob DuBois comes to the conclusion that "there are no such things as adults after all, only children who try and fail to imitate adults." What, then, do you think are the defining characteristics of being an adult?

I think it's at the point that you are in control of your own economy, and you are able and willing to take care of others who are unable to take care of themselves -- to protect others, I should say. You have a capacity for loving others without deluding yourself about them, about their weaknesses or their failures.

So by that definition, Bone would be an adult. He is in control of his own economy, he has a trade, a skill -- he's a cook. He's taking care of these two kids on the boat in a way that's more realistic, though nonetheless still custodial, than the way he took care of Sister Rose, because he was still deluded then, he was still a boy. He thought that any mother was better than no mother, so he sent her back to her abusive mother. And he's able to say he loves even old Bruce, the homophobic, kind of cracked biker. So when he looks up at the stars, he sees the constellation of these people.

How did you get into the head of a 1990s 14-year-old boy --

When I'm obviously a '50s kid in the body of a 57-year-old man? I am that in some ways, an adolescent boy in the body of a 57-year-old man. I think a good novelist has to be that in a sense, has to go to the emotional life that you had at different points in your life and access that. That's what I did do with Bone -- I didn't go out and try to imitate 14-year-old boys so much as try to re-create for myself, and tap into, my emotional life in that period, even though the time frame was radically different. But my circumstances weren't all that radically different. I came from a broken home, and although it wasn't sexually abusive, it was abusive due to alcohol and violence. And we were poor, lived in a town not unlike the town that Bone lives in. So it wasn't that hard for me to go there and remember what it was like to be in that strait. I think that was probably the key for me.

There was research for it, certainly. I didn't want to write about the '50s. I wanted to write about the '90s, so I did have to go out into the world and hang around tattoo parlors and the shopping malls and the video arcades and so on. I also had to listen to an awful lot of alternative rock music, which I actually thoroughly enjoyed. Now I've got a big collection of CDs.

Is there anything in particular you liked?

Grunge music I ended up really liking a lot. My kids have ended up borrowing -- and not returning -- my CDs. But I've got a complete run of Pearl Jam.

So that part was conscious research. You can get that down easy, but still not get down to where a kid like Bone lives. To do that, you have to tap into your remembered emotional experiences. But I think I probably couldn't do it until I was middle-aged. You have to separate from it. Your memory improves to the degree that you can get somewhat detached from the experiences.

Is it still painful once you've detached from it?

It's painful, but it's clear. You can understand it better, and can have greater affection for it, and be less defensive, maybe. And you can be less neurotic about your approach to it.

You've been very pleased with the screen adaptations of your novels. Have you considered skipping the novel form altogether and writing an original screenplay?

Uh, no, I haven't actually. It's not something that would be entirely out of the question, because I like the form and I'm attracted to it the closer I get to it. The more I work with it and the more time I spend with it, the more interesting it is to me. But I don't think my sensibility really suits that form.

Ultimately, film is frustrating, because I so dearly love language, and the sound of the human voice, and you can hear that in film. But I'm a control freak and I like to be in charge as much as possible, and film is such a collaborative art that I'd have to give up all the roles I can play as a novelist. When you're a novelist, you're the art designer, costumer, as well as the director and the writer. You do everything.

How difficult is it to give up the details in the adaptation? I was thinking specifically of the Ottos, the hippie family in "The Sweet Hereafter" -- in the book, they lived in a dome house, which to me said a lot about who they were --

-- and in the film we put them in an A-frame (laughs). Yes, well, I think you have to steel yourself for that. Sometimes it's just what's available, the exigency -- you're stuck with it. But in this case, it approximated the kind of homemade house that I had in mind. What would have bothered me more would have been if the house had been of a different economic class, if it had been, say, a beautiful modern chalet, or something like that, because that would have violated the class identification that I thought was important to the story. That gave some kind of dimension to the loss, and the experience and the quality and the kind of people that the Ottos were.

Your stories all deal in some way with class, and often where class intersects with race.

I think those things are inescapable, certainly in our culture. So often race is identified with class, and we often talk about one in order not to talk about the other. Or we concede to one so that we don't have to concede to the other.

But, in fact, our "classless" society is riddled with distinctions of that sort -- of gender as well as racial and class distinctions. It would be naive at best, I suppose, to ignore them. I don't write about them out of any commitment to any particular ideology, but out of a simple desire to be accurate. I look out at the world and see them there. I don't feel I have any choice but to put them in the book.

In "The Sweet Hereafter," "The Simpsons" is the only TV show the Burnells can all watch together -- but Nicole hates it because she thinks it's insulting.

Yes, it's insulting to family life, in the same way that "Beavis and Butt-head" is insulting to adolescents.

Do you think there are any truthful representations of American family life in pop culture today?

Gee, that's a good question -- I'm stymied. I can't think of any. I don't watch a whole lot of TV, but I do have pretty easy and ongoing access to pop culture. I used to love "The Honeymooners" when I was a kid. Thinking back, "Life of Riley" was a good corrective to "Ozzie and Harriet." They were working-class stiffs, and they were buffoons in many ways, but they were clearly struggling. The economic realities of their lives were present -- you were aware of them constantly.

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Your characters are always redefining their own American Dream -- trading in what they have to chase it, or realizing those who are living it can just as easily lose it. Do you think the dream has changed at all since you began writing?

I don't think the imagery has changed all that much. There was an interesting piece in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine about the Disney-created village now in central Florida called "Celebration" -- which is an image of the American dream, probably in its most carefully packaged and merchandised form. I think that imagery is incredibly attractive -- you can own a home, you basically can provide food, shelter and education for yourself and your family, and you can be employed gainfully and interestingly all your life -- that's your reward.

But that dream is unreachable for a majority of Americans. Running alongside of that dream are some interesting stats: The average credit card holder in the U.S. has $4,000 in debt that they're paying interest on -- 20 to 21 percent interest. What does that say about the American Dream? That you can have it if you're willing to pay 21 percent interest on it?

So much of the American Dream is used to manipulate people into putting themselves and their families at risk, and bending themselves all out of shape in order to chase that dream.

Bob DuBois, the main character in "Continental Drift," is afraid of blacks -- he doesn't trust them -- but still he's fascinated by them, and in fact falls in love with a black woman. Do you consider him to be racist?

What he is is a passive member of a racist society -- passive in the sense that it's mostly unconscious, and he has no sense of the history of racism. And he therefore has no sense of the role he plays in it.

One of the things I believe is that if you are a member of a society or culture that is racist and sexist -- as ours is -- and you don't offer an ongoing critique of that as part of your daily life, then you're inevitably going to end up participating in it. I mean, I do it -- we all do it -- unless we aggress it. The only way out of it is a kind of constant ongoing cultural critique. And Bob certainly doesn't occasion that, which leads him to disaster -- and heartache and heartbreak -- all along the way.

Is that what you're trying to get at with your forthcoming novel, "Cloudsplitter"?

I'm not consciously trying to write that other side, but certainly the characters in "Cloudsplitter" are very conscious of that. After all, this is John Brown, the abolitionist, and his family, and he surrounded himself, consciously and deliberately, with African-American people. And not just as colleagues in the abolitionist movement, but as members of his household. But that's a different kind of man. Bob DuBois is a much more typical man, of his time and place, than John Brown. John Brown is an exceptional man.

You write with such wisdom about maleness. But you've also written from a female perspective, though not quite as deeply. Is that something you'd like to do more of?

I've certainly considered it. In fact, the novel I'm currently gathering material for is about a woman and is told from a woman's point of view. As someone who was raised pretty much in a single-parent family from the age of 12 -- my mother raised four children -- and someone who has been married several times and has raised four daughters, I'm very much aware of the differences between men and women. Profoundly aware of them.

So do you find it daunting to write from that perspective?

No, I'm eager to do it. I've tried a couple of times, in "The Sweet Hereafter" particularly, where two of the narrators are female, one an adolescent girl and the other a woman. And I found myself extremely comfortable doing it. In fact, I found it more difficult to write the voices of the characters that resembled me more closely -- to get inside the lawyer Mitchell Stephens or Billy Ansel, the Vietnam vet who loses his kids -- their voices were harder for me to hear than it was for me to hear the voices of Nicole or Dolores, because they overlap with my own.

How do you know when you get a character's voice right?

I think it happens when I feel I'm listening, and not speaking. In this most recent novel, "Cloudsplitter," which is a very long one, and narrated from the point of view of an elderly man looking back over his life at the turn of the century -- in 1900 looking back to the 1840s -- it's a man who's extremely different from me, the son of John Brown. His voice and character and circumstances are so different from mine that I could listen and pay attention. I couldn't speak for him. It's easier for me that way. I get confused, or my signal gets weak, when I end up trying to speak for somebody.

Do you have favorites among the books that you've written?

You sort of love the books nobody else loves, the way you love a child that nobody else likes -- you feel a special affection for that child because it has such a struggle in the world. I suppose there are a couple of books of mine that tend to get overlooked, while the other ones get all the attention. One of them is called "The Relationship of My Imprisonment," which is a very short book, almost a novella, that I've remained loyal to and fond of for odd reasons. One of them is that, formally, I think it comes as close as anything I've written to accomplishing what it set out to do. It realizes its own form; it goes as far as it can go.

It's a peculiar book -- it's eccentric and has eccentric language and an interesting publishing history that I'm pleased by. It started very small, and was eventually serialized in a mimeographed magazine on Manhattan's Lower East Side -- perhaps the '70s equivalent of Salon. I'm really kind of pleased that it started out that way.

"Affliction" is considered your most autobiographical novel, although almost all of your novels contain at least some recognizable, and sometimes detestable, biographical elements. Is writing a way of exorcising the painful parts of your past?

I wouldn't put it quite that way. But I do know that storytelling has made it possible for me to make my life coherent to myself. Even though I haven't been telling my own story necessarily, you can't keep your own life story out of it, even if you've gone as far afield as I've gone.

There are certain things that writing has done for me that if I hadn't had them, I probably would have killed myself or somebody else. Some magazine was asking writers what they would have become if they hadn't become a writer, and I said what would have happened to me is that I would have been stabbed to death in the parking lot outside a bar in Florida at 24, or something like that. I really believe that, actually. I think writing saved my life. I was so self-destructive, so angry and turbulent, that I don't think I could have become a useful citizen in any other way. So I don't think it worked as exorcism, or therapy, but I think it saved my life.

Had you always written as a way to vent?

Not really. I didn't write until my late teens, early 20s, and I came to it kind of piecemeal. Originally, I thought I was going to be a visual artist, because I had that talent. As a little boy, people would praise me for it, and it was a way to get special attention from teachers and parents and other adults. But in my late teens, I started to read more seriously then and started falling in love with books. I stared to imitate what I was reading, which was poetry for the most part, but also fiction -- in order to find my way into that. I tapped into impulses I really didn't know I had -- storytelling, and also a deep affection for language, an almost sensual affection for it, that I really wasn't conscious of having had up to that point.

Your stories are often so tragic that the reader can sometimes feel betrayed by them. For instance, with "Continental Drift," I wanted more of the young Haitian boy Claude's story -- I was angry when he died. Does the story write itself to the extent that you can't change a character's fate?

I didn't want to lose Claude, either -- I was also grief-stricken at the time. But I think that yes, when you are telling a story, especially such a long story like that, you open up very many possibilities that you don't know the conclusion of, and you're just following them. But pretty soon, about a third of the way into the telling, those lines and possibilities start to narrow, or curve back in again, and with each turn of the page fewer and fewer things are possible. You end up compelled by the logic of the form and the logic of the characters' inner lives -- the givens that have got much more control over the story than you do. The difficulty for the writer is knowing when to give up that control and let the story control you. Too many times, you can read a book or novel, and you can see the writer trying to wrest control away from the story, or save a much-loved character, or introduce a new character, some kind of savior, to solve the problem. Twain reintroduces Tom Sawyer in the last third of "Huck Finn." You can see it happening ... oh no! Don't do that! Let Huck and Jim go on alone!

Things like that, you can see it happening. And it's very difficult to recognize that point where you have to give up control to the story itself. In "Continental Drift," there was really no way for Claude to survive, it wasn't in the logic of the story. It wasn't his story.

Is that what you meant when you said in one recent interview that you and Atom Egoyan, director of "The Sweet Hereafter," share the same bottom line -- that you both "must love the truth"?

Yes, I think so. You have to see what's the real truth of the conditions that people are living under. You can't idealize it on the one hand or judge it on the other. You can't narrow it down and foreclose it either way. And I think that's where most of us as writers fail. Because we simply cannot stand what we know is true. It's too difficult.