[Conrad] meant literally visualize, not understand. That's the ambition for me as a writer, too--so that my readers can see the world or themselves or other human beings in the world a little differently, a little more clearly."
Banks is a native New Englander who has drawn on his experience in the region's small towns hard hit by economic decline to create fiction that captures the lives of Northeastern people. Even as Banks has continued to add to the body of his novels and moved beyond the narrow regionalism of his early novels, "he has ever more clearly emerged as a writer from the white working class," noted Fred Pfeil in the Voice Literary Supplement, "writing directly about the rage and damage, the capitulations, self-corruptions, and small resistances of subordinated lives." Salon.com's Joyce echoed this assessment: "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." Banks offered his own view of the character of his fiction in an interview in the New York Times Book Review.
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