By the Book (50 page)

—
Joyce Carol Oates

My worst book. I wish someone would write that one so I won't have to.

—
Jeffrey Eugenides

Chang-rae Lee

What's the best book you've read recently? And your vote for best book of the last year?

Two first fictions dazzled me in the last couple of years, the novel
Mr. Peanut
, by Adam Ross, and
Battleborn
, a story collection by Claire Vaye Watkins.
Mr. Peanut
is a hybrid wonder, being at once a detective story, an arch gloss on that genre, and a bravura romance, totally upended, that employs the possible murder of one's wife as a means of revealing the manifold facets of truest, desperate love. All this is driven by the edgy sparkle of the prose, which acts not only as a mirror or lens but as an accelerant, lighting up every layer of his characters' consciousnesses to a degree that feels almost dangerous. Watkins's
Battleborn
is equally potent even though the stories range widely in setting, time, and voice, the modalities coming at you with a ferocity and intelligence that seems like a magic trick. But there's nothing artificial about these stories, for as you read them an indelible picture begins to emerge of a certain sensibility, maybe borne from the desert West—toughened, resourceful, both hellbent and eternally hopeful.

When and where do you like to read?

I'll read pretty much anywhere and anytime, but for a while now I've really enjoyed reading on flights, especially the longer hauls, when I'm unplugged from everything and can completely immerse myself in the world of a book and submit happily to its rhythms, perspectives, ideas. Turns out that a good book has an analgesic effect, too, momentarily relieving the special torture of flying (unfortunately, I'm most often in coach).

Are you a rereader? What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

Lately I've been rereading books that I hadn't read since high school and college, novels like
Lord Jim
and
The Brothers Karamazov
and
Women in Love
, big, complex works which I found arresting and difficult then and find arresting and difficult now, though perhaps for different reasons. Reading Lawrence, for example, is sometimes cringe-inducing, for a certain gaseousness and the interminable-feeling meditations on morality and desire that I ate up as a profundity-seeking undergraduate. And yet there's an irrepressible life force and iconoclastic urge that's artistically inspiring.

Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today?

Naming a “favorite” is always impossible—how can I choose from writers as great and varied in their approaches as Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Borges (who didn't write novels)? Still, I've always had a love for American novelists, particularly Hemingway and Bellow and Styron and Updike. I'll also decline to name a living favorite, though I'll say Don DeLillo is probably one of a handful of living writers I try to read from the moment he publishes anything. Like any DeLillo fan, I have my favorites from his oeuvre, but his approach in all of his works is so very particular and uncommon, and always carries the mark of his hard-stamped language. I admire fearless writers.

What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And how would you describe the kinds of books you steer clear of?

I suppose people might consider me a “loose” reader, as I seem willing to read anything of quality thinking and prose. I'm not doctrinaire. I see the field of writing as filled with these wondrously rich phenomena of language and form. In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A. M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature.

What kinds of characters draw you in as a reader? And as a writer?

Like most people, I'm fascinated by characters who are completely flawed personalities, riven by anguish and doubt, and are psychologically suspect. Wait a minute—basically that's everybody, isn't it, in life and on the page? As a writer, I'm drawn to characters who, for one reason or another, seem to find themselves desperately out of joint, alienated but not wanting to be, and ever yearning to understand the rules of the game.

On Such a Full Sea
is your first dystopian novel. Are you a fan of dystopian fiction? Do any books in particular inspire you?

I'm not automatically drawn to tales because they're dystopian. The classics from Orwell and Huxley, and contemporary works by McCarthy, Atwood, and Ishiguro are excellent because they expose our condition, certain possibilities of human expression and conduct, and not just because they're set in some imagined or futuristic realm. The altered context of these realms should surely be diverting, but it's how the context forms and deforms the characters that compels me as a reader. Otherwise it's just fancy scenery and essentially repetitive episodes.

Though
On Such a Full Sea
is set in the United States, you began your research in China. What led you to change the setting?

Glimpsing, for the umpteenth time, an abandoned residential area of Baltimore from my seat on the Amtrak train. I intended to write a social-realist novel about the factory towns of the Pearl River Delta, but on seeing that neighborhood yet again I was struck by an odd, idle notion: why not have the people of a small city in China, say, one that was environmentally fouled, come over and resettle this forlorn place? Of course such a thing could never happen now, but the idea seemed less implausible when I considered it in the context of a very different future, a future when America was in significant decline. That was the moment that I began musing about a different novel, thinking of the details of that future society. And so those details evolved from there, Baltimore becoming “B-Mor,” a specialized labor settlement/facility that produces pristine fish and vegetables for an elite “Charter” class, and a whole set of characters emerged.

What might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves?

Lots of cookbooks. My friends would tell you that I like to cook and eat. But I rarely use the recipes, and if I do I seem to have a pathological urge to revise them until they're altered profoundly. I hope not disfigured. I suppose this comes from equal parts egomania and laziness (for not wanting to go out and forage for the ingredients, or follow the prescribed manner of cooking). I simply like to look at the pictures, to be honest, which spur my appetite and make me imagine what might soon appear on the table.

What were your favorite books as a child?

I didn't read the canon of classic children's books, at least not until I became a father and read to my own children. No doubt this was because my parents were new to the country and not comfortable speaking English and didn't read to me at night. I didn't speak English myself until the first grade. I read lots of books in elementary school—I remember winning a prize for reading the most books one year—but I can't recall a single title. What I do remember finding enduringly fascinating were some of my father's books—he was a psychiatrist who also hoped to be an analyst—and he had all the works of Sigmund Freud.
The Interpretation of Dreams
,
Civilization and Its Discontents
,
Totem and Taboo
, etc. I couldn't understand any of it. But I could glean something from
Three Case Histories
and
Studies on Hysteria
, which featured patients like the Rat Man and the famous Anna O., whom I considered to be story characters. I loved reading about these very anxious people with all kinds of fascinating ailments and tics, even if I didn't really understand why they were fascinating. I suppose someone might say this was my literary “primal scene.”

Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?

In high school, when I was just beginning to realize how much I loved literature and was earnestly writing my first poems and stories, I adored
Dubliners
and
A Farewell to Arms
as well as
Leaves of Grass
and
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
. But I was perhaps most taken and inspired by Kerouac's
On the Road
. I loved the ecstatic riffs of that novel, the sense of wild possibility and bohemian grittiness, which for a buttoned-up good immigrant boy secretly yearning for something different was deeply seductive stuff. It wasn't just the depicted lifestyle that captivated me, but the revelatory passion displayed by this cast of dreamers, who to me were desperate to connect with something bigger and more beautiful, who wanted to be great artists of this life.

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

Shouldn't every leader read Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
, for its studies in the dangers of tyranny and betrayal and hubristic ambition, as well as the power and limits of rhetoric? Of course it's also a pleasure to read, chock-full of great speeches and sweet turns of phrase that seem to comment on every facet of human existence. In fact, the title of my new novel is taken from a famous speech by Brutus, which is a marvel of metaphoric vitality and persuasion.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

Being both a long-lapsed Confucian and Christian, the
I Ching
and the Bible. I've attempted to read both at different times in my life but have yet to succeed in getting very far through either. But I will keep trying, I think.

What book are you most eagerly anticipating reading in 2014?

No doubt the memoir of my good friend and former student Gary Shteyngart, which I'm sure will be painfully hilarious and very smart. Plus, I hear I get a nice shout-out.

Chang-rae Lee
is the author of
Native Speaker
,
A Gesture Life
,
Aloft
,
The Surrendered
, and
On Such a Full Sea
.

 

I'd Love to Meet (Continued)

I'm horrible at meeting people I admire, but if I could go back in time, I'd love to collect kindling or iron a few shirts for Flannery O'Connor. After I'd finished, she'd offer to pay me and I'd say, awestruck, my voice high and quivering, that it was on me.

—
David Sedaris

Emily Dickinson. I would be her nursemaid, her quiet companion on walks in the woods. I imagine that anything she spotted—feathers, tea leaves, a hole in a fence—would lead her to utter something profound about human emotions in a lifetime of expectation.

—
Amy Tan

Chekhov. I don't want to know anything in particular—I'd just like to carve up a pheasant with him, served with new potatoes and green beans from the garden. Then we could polish off some dodgy Crimean wine and play a few rounds of Anglo-Russian Scrabble and lose track of time and the score. If Isaac Bashevis Singer could be there, too, I think they'd get on well. And if Dorothy Parker could drop by at some point, and maybe Katherine Mansfield, and Sylvia Townsend-Warner … And suddenly it's a party.

—
David Mitchell

Rumi or Virginia Woolf—I love them both beyond all others. I would not be able to speak or communicate in any way while in their presence. I would sit before them, rocking autistically. There is nothing I would need to know beyond what they have written.

—
Anne Lamott

I'll have to go with the elephant in the room—William Shakespeare. I'd ask him: Dude, did you know how great you were? Were you aware at the time of the sheer incandescent beauty of, say,
Romeo and Juliet
? Or were you just scuffling along like the rest of us, trying to make a living?

—
Lee Child

The poet Jack Gilbert. (No relation, sadly.) He's the poet laureate of my marriage: my husband and I have read him aloud to each other for years, and he exerts a subtle influence over the way we understand ourselves in love. I would like to thank him for that, but I've always been too shy to write him a letter.

—
Elizabeth Gilbert

I'd love to have met Ford Madox Ford (no relation, alas). Such a big, messy, compelling, brilliant character. My kind of guy (though, of course, it would probably have turned out disastrously, as many things in his life did).

—
Richard Ford

Winston Churchill. He is one of my heroes, and when I look at all of the books he somehow had time to write, it just blows my mind. To be such a vital figure in modern history and at the same time write incredible history … I would love to talk to him about how he had time to be great as a leader and as a writer.