By the Book (31 page)

What's the best thing about writing a book?

The meaning it temporarily lends to my existence.

The hardest or least enjoyable part?

The years of doubting whether I actually have another story to tell.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

I wouldn't presume to require our current president to read anything, but the Vargas Llosa novel wouldn't have been a bad choice for our previous president, who I suspect could have used some help in imagining the human costs of righteous wars. Nor would
The Flamethrowers
—which, among other things, gives a subtly damning view of a powerful man through the eyes of the ambitious but pliable young woman he sleeps with—have been a bad choice for the president before that.

Did you grow up with a lot of books? What are your memories of being read to as a child?

I grew up going to the public library every week and coming home with stacks of books—my parents weren't readers, didn't have time to be. But my father read books to me every weeknight evening he was home. My mother never read to me, even when he was away on business. I wonder if she recognized that reading was the primary private thing that he and I had together.

Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?

As with a lot of writers of my generation, it's Harriet the Spy. My recollection is that her creator, Louise Fitzhugh, died in her forties. Did she have any idea how many young people decided to be writers after reading her two books about Harriet? I hope she had at least an inkling.

What books are on your coffee table?

I admit that I have a coffee table and that there are books on the lower tier of it. Books of bird photographs, catalogs of painters I like (Anne Neely, Lisa Sanditz), a book of photographs of exurban sprawl. I wish I could say that I'd ever seen a guest reach down and pick one up.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

Most books I pick up I put down without finishing, either because the writing is weak or feels false, or because I sense an absence of skin in the game. I picked up
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
more or less to make sure that it was as overrated as I suspected. I'd always hated the title, and I was sore with Kundera for his public rejection of Dostoyevsky, many years ago. Kundera is a committed rationalist, which is generally a big handicap for a novelist, and it's true that even the dreams in
Unbearable
are given rational readings. But they're still great dreams, and the character who has them, Tereza, is rendered with gorgeous sympathy. I wouldn't have guessed that a love story so well analyzed philosophically could be so moving in the end.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

I wish I could have been present when Kafka read
The Metamorphosis
aloud to his friends, who couldn't stop laughing. The humor is still there in the text, but I would love to know what he did with his voice.

If you could meet any character from literature, who would it be?

One of Shakespeare's comic heroines, probably Rosalind, although trying to talk to her in iambic pentameter would be a strain.

What are you planning to read next?

For the past twenty years or so I've been planning to read the final four volumes of
In Search of Lost Time
next.

Jonathan Franzen
is the author of
Freedom
and
The Corrections
, among other books.

Hilary Mantel

What's the best book you read in the last year?

The term “best” would have to stretch. There's reading that's important to me, in a personal way: I've been working my way through the books of the psychologist Alice Miller, which are short and very easy to read but disturbing in implication: so, two hours reading, a lifetime of thinking over the content. “Best” as simply enjoyable would be Kate Atkinson's new novel,
Life After Life
, ingenious and furiously energetic: it's exhilarating to see a novelist at the top of her game. There's rereading, very important to me now. Last year I was commissioned to write an introduction to Keith Thomas's
Religion and the Decline of Magic
, and it gave me a reason to sit down with it again. It's a monumental book, yet with a living treasure on every page, and probably the book that, in my whole life, I've pressed on other people most energetically. (Selected people, of course. They have to care for history, and they need a sense of wonder and a sense of fun.)

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

I'd like to be at home, in my apartment by the sea in Devon, just a few yards from the waves, sitting in the sunshine by a window, smiling, and picking up some vast immersive novel, like Sarah Waters's
Fingersmith
: a book which, when it was new, I read as if I were a child, utterly thrilled and beguiled by it. In my ideal reading day there would be no time limit, no e-mails stacking up, and dinner would appear on a floating tablecloth, as if brought by spirit hands. In practice, this never happens. I read in snatched hours on trains, or late at night, or purposively and on a schedule, with pen in hand and a frown of concentration. But when I think harder … my ideal reading experience would involve time travel. I'd be fourteen, and in my hand would be the orange tickets that admitted to the adult section of the public library. Everything would be before me, and I would be ignorant of the shabby little compromises that novelists make, and I would be unaware that many nonfiction books are just rehashes of previous books by other writers. My eyes would be fresh. I would be chasing glory.

In addition to your novels, you've also written a memoir. What makes a good memoir? Any recent memoirs you would recommend?

It's not recent, but I would recommend
Bad Blood
, by Lorna Sage. It's a memoir of childhood and private life that has an almost eerie immediacy. When I was reading it, I felt as if the author were talking to me: and I talked back (at least, in my head). Memoir's not an easy form. It's not for beginners, which is unfortunate, as it is where many people do begin. It's hard for beginners to accept that unmediated truth often sounds unlikely and unconvincing. If other people are to care about your life, art must intervene. The writer has to negotiate with her memories, and with her reader, and find a way, without interrupting the flow, to caution that this cannot be a true record: this is a version, seen from a single viewpoint. But she has to make it as true as she can. Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself, so you must do it when you are ready.

Are there particular kinds of stories you're drawn to? Any you steer clear of?

Sad to say, I do like a bit of action. I get impatient with love; I want fighting. I don't like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities. (Though I love Jane Austen because she's so shrewdly practical: you can hear the chink of cash in every paragraph.) I can take the marginally magical, but I find realism more fascinating and challenging; it is a challenge for me to pay attention to surfaces, not depths. I like novels about the past, not about the future. For light reading I like novels about the present, but consider them to be an extension of newspapers.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

Stacks of books on cricket. I am fascinated by its history. It's a story told in match statistics, but it's also bred some stylish prose. My head is full of the ghosts of men in white playing games that were over before the Great War.

Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

I'm a self-help queen, dedicated to continuous improvement. I read books about problems I don't have, just in case I develop obsessive-compulsive disorder or crippling phobias. Of course there's nothing I recommend. If I ever found anything useful, I'd keep it to myself, to steal a mean advantage.

What's the best book you've ever received as a gift?

When I was nine, I was given a set of slightly abridged classics for Christmas, and the same again when I was ten. My mother got them from a mail-order catalog. We weren't a household that owned many books so it was a novelty to fill a whole shelf. There were plain cloth bindings and no pictures. (That's just the way I like it; I make my own pictures, thanks.) That's when I became enthralled by Robert Louis Stevenson, and failed to like Dickens, and met the Brontës. They were clever abridgments, too, as I came to realize when I read the full texts later. (Imagine,
Jane Eyre
without the embarrassing bits.)

What book has had the greatest impact on you?

I'm sorry if it sounds pious, unoriginal, and smug, but no book has mattered to me as much as the dirt-cheap
Complete Works of Shakespeare
I laid my hands on when I was ten. Previously I'd only read one scene from
Julius Caesar
that I found in an ancient schoolbook. It definitely qualified as the best thing I'd ever read, and I almost exploded with joy when I found there was a whole fat book of plays. I was a strange child.

What's the best thing about writing a book?

The moment, at about the three-quarter point, where you see your way right through to the end: as if lights had flooded an unlit road. But the pleasure is double-edged, because from this point you're going to work inhuman hours, not caring about your health or your human relationships; you're just going to head down that road like a charging bull.

The hardest or least enjoyable part?

I have to take a deep breath before I start the first full revision. I used to hate myself for procrastinating, but now I see it might be wise. You need to pause in holy fear at what you've done, and make sure you don't wreck it in panic.

What are your memories of being read to as a child?

My family had scant formal education, but I was lucky enough to be the only child in a three-generation household, with aunts and grown-up cousins next door. So lots of people were willing to read to me. I had the capacity to remember by heart what I heard, as if I were a throwback to a preliterate age, and so I was lazy about learning for myself because I had slaves to read for me, and I could say the passages over when I pleased. They had to read me tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I didn't really like anything else. It meant that by the time I went to school I had a bizarre vocabulary and a limited but martial outlook.

Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?

Once I'd banished King Arthur, and I was nine or ten, the characters I lived through were the two leading men in
Kidnapped
, the strait-laced young David Balfour and the weathered desperado Alan Breck. The lessons I learned through David were that you had to leave home, go out into the world, and become your own man; and you must not despise any unlikely role models you might meet. I didn't find any similar story to teach me about being a woman.

What books are on your coffee table?

There's never anything on my table except the newspapers. I am addicted to them and read the fat Sunday supplements all through the week. I just like the stories, I don't mind if they're stale. I admire the indefatigable columnists, and yet I take a malicious pleasure in watching them struggle to get eight hundred words out of two bald facts and one unoriginal opinion.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I have a block about Dickens. I know I'm missing something great; everybody says so. But I didn't take to him as a child, and I can't stand his moralizing and his crass sentimentality, and the galumping humor that's sentimental too. I'm not so fond of George Eliot as I might be, perhaps because in Africa I had to teach
Silas Marner
to a class of teenagers with basic English; I kept wanting to apologize for it. And I'm still working on Henry James; at the moment I prefer William and Alice, but I think I'll like Henry by and by. I believe it's fine to give up books even after a page; there's so much to read in the world that will delight you, so why should you work against the grain? With a widely admired author you should persist, and you should always return to authors who puzzle you; maybe time needs to pass. I tried Ivy Compton-Burnett when I was twenty, and it didn't take. I thought, “She can't actually write.” I came back six years later, and couldn't stop reading her; no twentieth-century novelist is closer to my heart.