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

JHUMPA LAHIRI

 © Dan Callister

ALETHEA BLACK: When I first read Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, I’d been writing for eight years, and was still about eight years away from publishing my first book. Her elegant prose,and what it taught me about precision, power, and restraint, was a turningpoint, and is still a touchstone I return to. What I love most is the way sheis simultaneously insightful and entertaining, fluid and masterful. Her workmakes me feel as if I’ve dropped down into the hidden undercurrent of truelife, and never fails to remind me of why I became a writer in the first place.

KAREN THOMPSON WALKER: As a graduate student, I studiedJhumpa Lahiri’s stories the way someone else might study a car’s engine, bydismantling them and studying the parts. Gradually, I got better at sensing thearchitecture of those elegant stories, the way the later sections rise directly
but imperceptibly from the earlier events. I probably learned more about
storytelling from her story “A Temporary Matter,” the ending of which is simultaneously surprising and inevitable, a
subtle sleight of hand, than any
other single work I’ve ever read.

CHANG-RAE LEE

© David Levenson

RACHEL DEWOSKIN: The last
lines of Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life
read, “I will circle round and arrive again. Come almost home.” The first time
I landed on “Come almost home,” I flipped straight back to the beginning and
read the book again. Slowly the second time, because I had blazed through it so
fast the first. I subsequently read every one of his books, ravenously once and
then carefully again, circling back. His novels have changed my writing, teaching,
and thinking. My own books are about people on the periphery, and no one writes
outsiders’ stories quite like Chang-rae Lee. His protagonists have still
surfaces; they are constructed as finely as phrases of detached, perfect
diction. And yet underneath their cleanly assimilated, English-language
exteriors are histories of turmoil powerful enough to drive whole (often epic)
novels. Theirs are stories of love in the time of comfort women, of war, and of
perpetual circling, trying to find some balance between interior and exterior
lives. History alternately creeps up slowly and accelerates, slamming into the
present tense.

I always
assign Chang-rae Lee’s novels to my undergraduate and graduate...