By the Book (39 page)

Care to call out your nominees for most overlooked or underappreciated writer?

Every writer I'm reading and loving seems underappreciated to me—then you mention the name and people say either, “Everyone reads them!” (Charles Portis, Dawn Powell) or, “You're being willfully obscure!” (Ronald Hugh Morrieson, Anna Kavan). That said, this is a major sport for me—I bore my friends with this all the time—so let's go: Laurie Colwin. Iain Sinclair. James Tiptree Jr., Stanley Elkin, and Stanley Ellin. And … But I'll stop. I'd also champion the familiar-but-taken-for-granted: the greatness of Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Bowen, Brian Moore, Thomas Berger. The stories of Bruce Jay Friedman.

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

I notice other people are surprised to see so much of a certain kind of postwar British novelist: Anita Brookner, Penelope Fitzgerald, L. P. Hartley et al. They're not surprising to me. I think people who haven't read them imagine they're cozy books, but they're not—despite their relatively traditional form, they're often unsettling.

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

As a kid I used to compulsively reread Alan Watts's
Wisdom of Insecurity
. I didn't think of that as self-help at the time, but I think of it that way now. It's still the help I need.

What are your favorite Brooklyn stories? And now that you're at Pomona College, your favorite books about California?

Two merciless little novels—Paula Fox's
Desperate Characters
and L. J. Davis's
A Meaningful Life
—bring to life the South Brooklyn I knew as a child in the early '70s. Apart from that, however, I don't much seek out books about Brooklyn; I'm more turned on by what Brooklyn grain I detect (or imagine I detect) in the voices of certain Brooklyn-born writers who leave the place largely unexplored as a subject: Robert Stone, Gilbert Sorrentino, Maurice Sendak.

As for California, I read Raymond Chandler long before I'd been here. I breathed in the atmosphere of those books before I even understood Chandler was writing about real places rather than conjuring a zone where his stories could be enacted. Now that I'm here, I see his books—and Ross Macdonald's—as making a deep stratological survey of the place, in the manner of John McPhee.

Did you identify with any literary characters growing up? Who were your literary heroes?

Starting at about eleven, with
Alice in Wonderland
and Lewis Carroll, I began identifying with the writer—or what I've learned now to call “the implicit author”—of a given fiction, rather than with the characters directly. Possibly some would say this explains a deficit of heroes in my stories.

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?

An invitation to air one's limitations? Sure, I'll bite. Based on other things I like, people keep insisting I read Bulgakov's
Master and Margarita
. Each time I try, I discover an allegory of Russian politics, both labored and coy, starring Lucifer and a black cat—just about what I'd least wish to read in the world.

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

I know I should use my time machine to go deep-canonical, but the prospect of trying to navigate a dinner party with Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, and Honoré de Balzac—figuring out what I could say to them, or what they could say to each other—is beyond my capacities as a bon vivant. Instead, I think I'd want to hang out with three guys I just missed out on knowing, a group more “relatable” to twentieth-century me—Don Carpenter, Philip K. Dick, and Malcolm Braly. They're all, as it happens, semi-outlaw types with Marin County connections, so they'd probably have a good time if thrown together. And I could flatter myself and claim I've been implicated in the revival of each of their posthumous careers, so we'd have something to raise a glass or spark a joint to. I'd be thrilled to let them know they're in print.

What book have you always meant to read and haven't gotten around to yet? Anything you feel embarrassed never to have read?

In the matter of putting things down unfinished, I'm too old now not to do it all the time, when something's not working. No harm, no foul, just mutual détente. As for the classics unread, in that too I try to leave shame out of my game. The existence of vastly more great books than I can ever hope to read is a primary locus of joy in this life, and weight on the scale in favor of human civilization. What's weird is that I've already doubled back on myself—rereading those classics to which I gave giddy short shrift in my teenage years, I find them as mysterious as if they were new. What good does it do a fifty-year-old to go around feeling as if he's read
The Red and the Black
or
Malone Dies
when he did it as a high school freshman? I often bear false confidence—I'll reference these things in conversation, or with students—then open the book and wonder who it was that actually read it. Not me.

What do you plan to read next?

I've got a beautiful stack right here: Hilton Als's
White Girls
, Tao Lin's
Taipei
, Jamie Quatro's
I Want to Show You More
, the new compendiums of William Gaddis's and Italo Calvino's letters. And
Daniel Deronda
, which, you know, I always meant to read and never got around to. I hear it's good.

Jonathan Lethem
is the author of
Motherless Brooklyn
,
The Fortress of Solitude
,
Dissident Gardens
, and
Chronic City
, among other books.

Jhumpa Lahiri

What are you reading at the moment? Are you a one-book-at-a-time person?

I'm reading the poems of Patrizia Cavalli, whom I've had the great pleasure of meeting in Rome. I adore her personally and I love her poems. She describes desire like no one else. I'm thrilled that a bilingual edition of her poetry, in Italian and English, will be published this fall in the United States. I'm also reading the letters of Cesare Pavese and Pasolini's
Teorema
, which was conceived both as a novel and a film. The combination of poetry, fiction and either letters or the diary of a writer I admire is ideal.

What's the best book you've read so far this year?

Lovers
, a novel by a French writer named Daniel Arsand. I read it first in the English translation, then in Italian. It's a harrowing love story with rich historical context. But it's free of bulk, of weight, of all the predictable connective narrative tissue. I found it incantatory, transcendent. It inspires me to tell a story in a different way.

If you had to name a favorite novelist, who would it be?

Thomas Hardy. Ever since I first read him, in high school, I've felt a kinship with his characters, his sense of place, his pitiless vision of humanity. I continue to reread him as often as I can. The architecture of his novels is magnificent, and the way his characters move through time and space is remarkably controlled. The world he creates is absolutely specific, as is the psychological terrain. In spite of the great scope of his work, its breadth and complexity, the prose is clean, straightforward, economical. No scene, no detail, no sentence is wasted.

And your favorite short story writers?

William Trevor, Mavis Gallant, Gina Berriault, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, Andre Dubus. Also Joyce, Chekhov, Cheever, Malamud, Moravia. I recently discovered the work of Giorgio Manganelli, who wrote a collection called
Centuria
, which contains one hundred stories, each of them about a page long. They're somewhat surreal and extremely dense, at once fierce and purifying, the equivalent of a shot of grappa. I find it helpful to read one before sitting down to write.

What immigrant fiction has been the most important to you, both personally and as an inspiration for your own writing?

I don't know what to make of the term “immigrant fiction.” Writers have always tended to write about the worlds they come from. And it just so happens that many writers originate from different parts of the world than the ones they end up living in, either by choice or by necessity or by circumstance, and therefore, write about those experiences. If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn't agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction. Hawthorne writes about immigrants. So does Willa Cather. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?

I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.

Any books we would be surprised to find on your shelves?

Almost all the books I have on my shelves now are in Italian. I have been reading predominantly in Italian for over a year. I read more slowly as a result. But also more carefully, less passively.

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

Literature has always been and will forever be my only form of self-help.

Did you identify with any literary characters growing up? Who were your literary heroes?

I identified with orphans, like Anne of Green Gables, or pioneers, like the characters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or children who slipped in and out of different worlds and dimensions, like the siblings in
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
. And of course there was the writer, Jo, in
Little Women
. I loved the brother and sister in
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
, who run away from home and survive among works of beauty. I never go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art without thinking of them.

What books have you enjoyed reading with your own children? Any you're especially looking forward to reading together with them?

My husband and I have been reading to our children every night for the past ten years (our eldest is now eleven). We take turns, alternating nights. I love rereading and sharing the books I read and loved as a child, such as the Pippi Longstocking series by Astrid Lindgren and everything by Roald Dahl. And I've loved discovering new books with them. Last summer we read a great series together called
The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place
, by Maryrose Wood. These days I also like to read to my children in Italian, which they can now follow. We just read some beautiful fables adapted by Italo Calvino, and another collection of very brief and amusing stories by Gianni Rodari, called
Le Favolette di Alice
. They're about a tiny little girl who keeps finding herself temporarily trapped inside of things, like pockets, ink bottles, birthday cakes, and soap bubbles.

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

The idea of meeting writers of the books I've read doesn't interest me. That is to say, I wouldn't go out of my way. If the book is alive to me, if the sentences speak to me, that's enough. A reader's relationship is with the book, with the words, not with the person who created it. I don't want the author to explain anything to me or to interfere. Still, I wish I'd met Edward Gorey before he died, if only to salute his brilliance.

If you could be any character from literature who would you be?

I'd like to be Sebastian Flyte from
Brideshead Revisited
, but only during the early chapters, before things start to go downhill. I've always wanted to dress for dinner.

What do you plan to read next?

I'm planning to read the travel essays of Antonio Tabucchi.

Jhumpa Lahiri
is the author of
Interpreter of Maladies
,
The Namesake
,
Unaccustomed Earth
, and
The Lowland.

 

On Rereading

I tend to think of the reading of any book as preparation for the next reading of it. There are always intervening books or facts or realizations that put a book in another light and make it different and richer the second or the third time.

—
Marilynne Robinson

There is so much to read, and time is so short! I am seventy, but I have not yet reached the age when rereading gives more pleasure than the surprise of a new story or a new writer.