Digging into his stories was a trip into his own forgotten past, diving into the artifacts of the writer he was in his 20s, 30s and 40s. The angel is also the invisible catalyst that lets him inhabit the characters in his fiction, to be inside peering out at the world. The angel is present in a monstrous form, for example, in Djinn ,in the crazed African who leaps on the roof and becomes a fatal target for the local policeman. But the angel is also there in a redemptive mode in the same story, in the global carpetbagger who observes the shooting and later feels compelled to mimic the dead man's frenetic dance on the roof. In doing so, he is transformed into a man capable of expressing and evoking love.
All storytellers are appropriators and liars.
They are a means of reaching out to listeners and readers. Banks, who's been married four times and has four grown daughters, grew up in New Hampshire, the son of a violent and alcoholic father who abandoned the family when Banks was 12. In his 20s, Banks made peace with his father, but it was a hard, conscious slog. His novel Affliction ,dedicated to his late father, is a generational hymn paying homage not to the man, but to his doomed struggle to halt the vicious legacy of abuse he inherited from his own father. Banks has succeeded where his father and grandfather failed.