Parenting & Family Quote by Russell Banks

There is a quiet provocation in Banks's preference: he isn't praising innocence so much as staking a claim about power. The "weekend" timeframe is the tell. He's not talking about literature as slow cultivation, the tasteful sort that accumulates like cultural capital. He's talking about narrative as an event, a before-and-after that can actually reorder a life. The sentence "life could be completely upended" carries a double edge: upended can mean rescued or destabilized, and Banks seems comfortable with that risk. Real reading, he implies, is not therapy or enrichment; it's disruption.

The subtext is also an indictment of adult readers, especially the comfortable ones. Adults tend to approach books as confirmation: of identity, of politics, of prior education. Kids, especially those on the cusp of defining themselves, can be more permeable. Banks is drawn to that permeability because it makes literature feel consequential again, less like commentary and more like weather. When a child returns "a changed person", the author gets evidence that words still have traction in the world.

Context matters: Banks built a career on American lives shaped by class, neglect, and moral luck. His line about kids isn't sentimental outreach; it's consistent with his larger interest in people who are still being formed by forces bigger than themselves. Working with them offers him something many literary writers secretly hunger for: proof that a book can still throw a switch, not just win a prize.