SOURCE: "John Banville," in Publishers Weekly, November 15, 1993, pp. 55-6.

In the following interview, Banville talks about his career and his approach to literature.

John Banville's narrators despair over the intractable chaos of life. They worry that chance and incongruity weave the patternless patterns of existence. Each of his eight novels tells a story from the point of view of a tormented, agonized soul.

In Nightspawn, Birchwood and Doctor Copernicus, all published here by Norton: in Kepler, The Newton Letter and Mefisto, all published by Godine; and in The Book of Evidence and Ghosts, the new novel just out from Knopf, Banville's characters float in a sea of grandiose shame.

The Irish author of this melancholic philosophizing, however, comes across as comparatively cheerful and unassuming, resembling none of his self-loathing narrators. A compact, graceful man, the 47-year-old Banville has the air of a somber pixie.

Over a leisurely lunch...