When John Banville was a teen-ager, he wanted to be a painter. Banville was born and raised in Wexford, Ireland, and on weekends his mother would take him into Dublin to go to Combridges, a bookstore that doubled as an art-supplies shop. Along with an easel and paints and brushes, he insisted on making her buy him large tubes of zinc white, a type of white pigment. Back home, he would stand for hours at his easel trying to paint “mythological scenes of great meaning.” But painting never quite clicked, and Banville, still a teen-ager, traded paintbrushes for pens. Five decades later, he still thinks about what his life would have been like had he become a painter.

“I loved the notion of being a painter,” Banville said on the phone from his home, in Dublin. “I loved all the paint, that whole world, all that beautiful equipment one uses. That’s one thing I hate about being a novelist: I have a nice fountain pen and nice big books to write in, but it’s nothing compared to being a painter and all the wonderful brushes and all that paint and all that turpentine and those wonderful smells, all that muckiness—it’s like being a child again.”

His new novel, “The Blue Guitar,” concerns a failed painter turned petty thief named Oliver Orme, who, unlike Banville, never found another outlet for his painterly ambitions. There is not much to the book’s plot; the reader is carried along by Oliver’s wonderfully narcissistic voice. “A thief’s heart is an impetuous organ,” Oliver says, describing himself, “and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can’t keep from bragging.”

One of the primary challenges of the novel, Banville said, was making Oliver’s self-obsession more palatable for readers. “In the early twenty, thirty pages, he was so awful and pompous that I had to tone him down a bit,” Banville explained. “He’s pretty bad as he is, but he was much worse in the earlier version. But he’s a failure, and, you know, there’s nothing more bitter and more dangerous than failed artists.”

Oliver’s failure is not necessarily a matter of skill; rather, he believes that whatever he paints will eventually have no meaning, and thus there is no point to painting at all. “You see my predicament?” he asks at one point. “The world without, the world within, and betwixt them the unbridgeable, the unleapable chasm. And so I gave up.”

Banville, like Oliver, believes that there is an unbridgeable chasm between surface and meaning—but he believes the surface is all we need. It’s why he quit painting mythological scenes of great meaning and began writing ordinary scenes of great beauty. “I loved the idea of working on the surface, because I think, on the surface, that’s where the real depth is,” he said. “I regard my books as more superficial—they’re dealing with surfaces. I’m not interested in psychology. As a citizen, I’m interested in psychology; as an artist, I’m only interested in getting a work of art made.”

“I work by the sentence,” he added. “When I’ve got a sentence as close to being right as I can get, it generates the next sentence, and I let the big stuff take care of itself. When I was younger, I used to plan out my books, and I would know what the last sentence was before I did the first one, and so on. But, as the years go on and I get older, I realize that age doesn’t bring wisdom but confusion, and I allow my instincts to work. I allow them free rein. That seems to work.”

Oliver’s manner of speaking in “The Blue Guitar” is ornate and pretentious; it is tempting to compare him to Humbert Humbert, who says, in “Lolita,” “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Banville concedes the similarity, but maintains that there is a fundamental distinction between himself and Nabokov. “Nabokov and I differ very much in the sense that I have a very Irish approach to language,” he said. “Irish writers are very aware of the wind, of the musicality of language. Nabokov was tone-deaf, and all his work is pictorial. He said himself he should have been a painter. His work is very painterly. The rhythm doesn’t matter too much. I’m not saying he writes ugly sentences; he just doesn’t write musically.”

“I don’t know how to translate what I see in paintings into words,” Banville added. “It’s a sensual experience rather than a linguistic experience.” But he has not entirely let go of his painterly past: he told me that he has two tubes of zinc white at his desk right now, the very same stuff his mother bought him years ago. “The past fascinates me obsessively, I suppose, because it’s such a strange phenomenon,” he said. “The past was the present at some point, and it was just as boring as the present. What makes it so important? What gives it that luminous, exalted quality where it becomes the past? When does the past become ‘the past’? Is yesterday ‘the past’? Is last week ‘the past’? How far do you have to go until the past becomes ‘the past’? These are things I’ve never found an answer to, and that’s why they fascinate me.”

Writing fiction also remains an enigma to Banville. He said that he knows what to write by instinct alone, and that he only knows his novels are finished when he becomes nauseated reading through them again. (“The Blue Guitar” took him two days short of three years to write.) “Writing,” he said, “is a mysterious process that I don’t pretend to understand.”