drunkboy,
Thanks for your recommendation on Russel Banks' 1995 novel Rule of the Bone. If you can find a copy of Poets & Writers Magazine, volume 26, issue 2, March/April 98, there is a great profile on Mr. Banks entitled "Mapping the Imagination." The novelist talks about the evolution of creative expression and the transformation of his literature to film.
I have been meaning to read Banks and now you have perk my interest even more. Have you read any of his other works? The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction, Continental Drift, Cloudsplitter, Success Stories, or The Book of Jamaica?
In the forementioned article, Banks notes how during the creation of Rule of the Bone "he 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 [the character] Bone meant listening hard for the cadences of a character whose relationship to language was far more 'skeptical, testing, and vernacular' than his own."
Raised by a working woman with four kids after his father left the family when he was young, Banks firmly believes that "the emotional chaos, turbulence, and even the violence" of his childhood 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. 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."
Again drunkboy, thanks for taking time to let us know about Rule of the Bone.
[This message has been edited by bear facts (edited May 01, 2001).]
