It is the kind of raw October day that New Englanders call "chilly". Driving north from Massachusetts through Vermont into northern New York state, you feel the temperature dropping through the low 30s. Cresting a hill, you meet winter. Black clouds squat on the jagged peaks of the Adirondack Mountains, hail pummels the slopes and suddenly the radio reception fades. It is snowing ahead, where Russell Banks lives. Good.
"You wake up one morning toward the end of October," the narrator of his short story "The Fisherman" observes, "and when you glance out your window at the lake, you see off to your left, where a low headland protects a shallow cove from the wind, a thin, crackled, pink skin of ice that spreads as far as the point and then suddenly stops." In these valleys, as in Banks's fiction, winter can be an escape route from blighted reality to ice-fishing tranquillity.
Banks's studio, a former sugar house where maple sap was once boiled down into syrup, is warm and orderly. There is coffee and Mozart. The modest house Banks shares with his wife, poet Chase Twichell, is a short walk uphill, a summer place that became a year-round home when Banks stopped teaching at Princeton. "It was really a return to the roots of my life as a writer," he explains, settling into an easy chair with his coffee mug and his cigarettes. "Just in the nick of time, I think. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have written the new stories in the collection. They all originated around here."
The collection is The Angel on the Roof, his first volume of short stories in 15 years. Better known for novels such as Cloudsplitter, Affliction, Continental Drift, Banks has always loved shorter fiction. "It's not just shorter," he observes. "It comes from a different part of the brain. It's closer to lyric poetry and it has the unique ability to dramatise the solitude of modern life, how we become atomised."
He disappears into his secretary's office for a moment, disturbing the six-month-old border collie who just subsided on the rug, and returns with a fragile copy of The Lonely Voice, Frank O'Connor's examination of the short story. Banks persuaded Harper Collins to reissue the slim volume some years ago and wrote the introduction.
"This, along with O'Connor's short stories, really instructed me," Banks recalls. "He and William Trevor are the great masters." And Annie Proulx? He has not read her Wyoming Stories, but agrees that Proulx is "very good". The two writers have covered similar northern ground. But Banks's may be the bleaker vision. "Being alone is the only clear route to his happiness," a destroyed alcoholic in the story "Firewood" realises, "the only way to avoid hurting other people, which in his experience is what gives them power over you."
In The Angel on the Roof the cruel are also the injured, "alone at the centre of their lives." The unlucky - women, sons, animals - are beaten and abandoned, the fortunate ignored. Banks's imagination ranges beyond the domestic, from New England through the American South to the Caribbean and Africa, crossing historical time zones, dramatising themes such as slavery and revolution. But his wintry north-east fiction has the texture of lived truth.
Born in 1940, the eldest of four and the son of an alcoholic father who left when Banks was 12, the boy grew up poor in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. At 18 he headed to Florida - "hitch-hiking, lost and lonely and by no one grieved," he laughs. Following the break-up of his first marriage he drifted to the Caribbean "in a state of emotional disarray". Although he has not written - will not write - a memoir and bridles when his fiction is misread as fact or, worse, as therapy, Banks talks easily about those who shaped him.
"Because my father was such a difficult man - depressed, withdrawn, suspicious - I knew that a great deal of my own emotional turbulence lay there," he recalls. "I knew it was necessary for me to re-encounter him as an adult up close, not just in some big scene in a bar . . . not the Banks way." In his early 20s, Banks worked alongside his father as a plumber in New Hampshire and afterwards visited him regularly. "It wasn't so demanding," Banks says. "Just sad mostly. He drank himself to death at 63."
Years later, on the film set of Affliction (directed by Atom Egoyan) it was the past's turn to re-visit Banks. "When I was writing Affliction, I kept seeing my grandfather's farmhouse and barn in New Hampshire in the 1940s," he explains. On location in rural Quebec, he entered the film crew's reconstruction of that childhood memory. "It was cold, snowing, and I was thinking `God, I've spent some miserable afternoons in this barn'. It was like visiting a dream."
There were even ghosts. "My father looked a lot like Nick Nolte," Banks recalls, "And Nick Nolte looks a lot like James Coburn. So there were moments when Coburn and Nolte would be standing together and it was like looking at my father and grandfather shivering out there on a cold afternoon. It was spooky." He fetches a photograph of himself with the actors and the resemblance is striking. "They're big guys," he says, "Big jaws."
Banks is not that big and - despite being labelled "one of America's literary giants" - not at all self-inflated. When he says, "I realise now how indebted I am to my mother for whatever distinction I've acquired. Whatever gift I have really comes from her," it does not sound like an Academy Awards speech.
Banks sees his 84-year-old mother often. An incorrigible but unreliable storyteller, she reads everything her son writes and inspired his introduction to The Angel on the Roof. "When she read that," he laughs, "she said, `Well, it's very good Russell, but it's not how I remember it'."
Like his mother, Banks is curious, attentive. "A funny thing happened when I quit Princeton," he recalls. "My attention shifted. I immediately forgot opinions I had on things like deconstruction. And I started noticing things like: `Why is the television set on in my neighbour's house at five in the morning? Is that woman really unhappy? Or has the old man got drunk again and passed out?' I sat in on a murder trial in the next town. I read the local paper instead of the TLS."
One evening in a local bar, a "half-drunk" woman told Banks about the cow she and her husband shot and tried to bury in the graveyard, a story that became "CowCow" in this collection. "I asked her what kind of a cow it was, and she said `I don't know, Russell. It was a cow-cow'."
What the reader sees through Banks's eyes is often the waitress in her trailer, the logger in his dismal farmhouse, the kind of people Banks grew up with: "It's one of the reasons I live here, not in Manhattan or Los Angeles. I can see into these people". He can even redeem some of them. "The crux in `Firewood', for example," Banks says, " is when that ruined old man asks his son on the phone, `You're not still mad at me, are you?' Then we see into him as not altogether pathetic."
Joking that if the rich are stereotyped "they can take it", Banks maintains that "working-class people, when they're attended to at all in this country, are usually condescended to". The proletarian label does not irritate him. He just considers it inadequate. "This northern tier of writing has not really been mapped yet by the critics," he observes, "It starts in Eastern Canada and runs all the way to Ray Carver's Washington, Richard Ford's Montana, Jim Harrison's Michigan. We're working the same vein of American history."
In that vein, Banks is currently writing the screenplay for Francis Ford Coppolla's film version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. He has also adapted Continental Drift (Agnieszka Holland to direct) The Book of Jamaica and The Rule of the Bone for the screen, admitting: "What gets lost in the film adaptation is the novel . . . the storytelling voice".
Banks is equally wary of the literary marketplace. "I love writers who exploit the capacity of the novel instead of just hawking their wares," he says, "I used to tell my students `As writers you'll have two things, your work and your career. Forget about the career. Concentrate on the work'."
Currently working on a novel set in Liberia, Banks is reading these days about West Africa and about chimpanzees. Tomorrow he flies to North Carolina to accept an award from his old college, a fact that clearly delights him. He considers Michael Ondaatje "very generous" for saying "I trust Banks's portrait of America more than any other". Approbation is not, however, essential. "It was very important to me that Don de Lillo wrote me a nice letter when Cloudsplitter was published," he concludes, "But in the end I write for myself. That way I'm always writing about what seems mysterious to me." Which brings us back to the weather.
The Angel on the Roof by Russell Banks is published by HarperCollins (£16.99 in UK)