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

CORMAC MCCARTHY

© The author

BROCK CLARKE: Cormac McCarthy was a big influence on my early writing, although maybe not in the way one usually thinks of “influence.” In the mid 1990s I was reading a lot of McCarthy: I’d begun with All the Pretty Horses, and then gone back and read all his books leading up to All the Pretty Horses, a book Itaught, and a book I loved, and a book that I think that gets short shrift byMcCarthy nuts because it sold a lot of copies and is relatively accessible andbecause it’s a western and not a southern and because there’s no necrophilia orincest in it. But it still is written the way those earlier McCarthy novelswere written—that is, in language that is purposefully antique, a rhetoric
that’s a holy cross between Melville, Faulkner, and the Old Testament. I was
crazy for it, and set out trying to do something similar in my work. When I say
“my work,” there really wasn’t much of it. I’d published a story, but
it was a story that, while ending up in my first collection, didn’t really have
much in common with the other stories in that collection. And those other
stories in that collection didn’t even exist yet. I was still struggling to
figure out what kind of stories I wanted to write, where they might be set,
what they might be about. With everything, in other words.

But I
did have an idea for a story: a friend of mine had told me a story about how,
during some family trip, his father had parked their car underneath an exhaust
fan outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken and when they came out the car was covered
with chicken fat. I loved everything about this story. So I set about stealing
it. But the problem was that I set about stealing it by way of McCarthy: the
story’s language was ornate, the mood was gloomy and full of portent, and the
story as a whole was absolutely humorless (unlike McCarthy, who can be very
funny). The story was awful. I couldn’t bring myself to finish it, let alone to
show it to anyone. And yet, after I realized how totally I had failed,...