Influenced by

A Survey of Writers on Contemporary Writers

Listening to writers read and discuss their work at Newtonville Books, the bookstore my wife and I own outside Boston, I began to wonder which living, contemporary writers held the most influence over their work. This survey is not meant to be comprehensive, but is the result of my posing the question to as many writers as I could ask.

—Jaime Clarke

JAMES SALTER

© Ulf Andersen

SARAH BRAUNSTEIN: In my early twenties,I found James Salter. I read Light Years holding my breath, read lateinto the night, immersed in the glamour and sorrow of the story. How did hemanage to marry such cutting intensity with languid, delicate prose? I wasstunned by his precision. By that mercilessly roving point of view. My copy is
waterlogged and dog-eared and stained with coffee and spaghetti sauce. Opening
to a random page, I see a sentence I’ve underlined:

“His
uncombed hair was splitting at the end. It was also thinning, which pleased her
somehow, as if he had been ill and she would see him regain his strength.”

And this one:

“Kate shrugged. She had the languor of a
delivery boy, of someone who could not be hurt. She had lived through unheated
bedrooms, unpaid bills, her father’s abandoning them, his returns, beautiful
birds he had carved out of applewood and painted and placed on her bed.”

The whole book feels strangely throwaway, casual… light
on the page, even when its subject is death, the failures of love, the
disintegration of family. There’s an ease to the prose, an ease I feel even in
the most far-reaching metaphors. This was something I wanted—I want—to
reproduce. I wanted—want—to write like this. To see like he does. And so
I tried to be looser on the page. I willed myself to take risks with metaphor.

Take this passage, circled and starred:

“The book was in her lap; she had read no
further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark.
The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river
water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength.
The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at
just the right time. How can we image what our lives should be without the
illumination of the lives of others?”

Exactly.

NIC BROWN: For many years I worked as a musician. As a teenager,
one of my favorite places to see a band was a place called the Cat’s Cradle, a
storied rock club on the edge of Chapel Hill, North Carolina....