A Survey of Writers on Contemporary Writers
Listening to writers read and discuss their work atNewtonville 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.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
© Nicolas Guerin
DAN CHAON: There are several living writers who have been deeply influential, but I would say that the most important of these is Joyce Carol Oates. I share her interest in extreme psychological states and the grotesque, and I appreciate her concerns with issues of social class in the United States.Her work is formally daring in a way that I admire, and I am particularly drawnto the way her prose can range from an incantatory intensity to a chillydeadpan within the same work. Her work also helped me to find ways to resolvethe tension between the more realistic, “Carver” side of my work and
the more fantastical “Bradbury” side—many of her novels and stories
walk a beautifully delicate line between the “literary” and
“genre” worlds. Books that I am particularly fond of include Haunted:
Tales of the Grotesque; Heat; Black Water; I Lock My Door Upon Myself;
The Rise of Life on Earth; and Wonderland.
TIM O’BRIEN
© Darren Carroll
BRUCE MACHART: To my way of thinking…and this is wildly subjective,
of course…there are only two perfect books: Anna
Karenina and The Things They Carried. The latter is, all at once, a masterwork of
realism and the only fully successful work of metafiction. The title story is, on its own, a gem, but it
makes me a bit batty to teach that story without the context of the greater
work from which it comes. From the
dedication page (where the book is dedicated to the fictional characters), to
the fictional alter-ego Tim O’Brien who becomes our narrator, to the fine and
ever-developing notions about the difference between historical truth and
“story truth,” the work entices us to believe even as it reminds us that
fiction is made up, that “art” is the root of “artifice,” that the human
condition can be made “more real” to us through the insinuations of the
imagination. This is perhaps the only
book that uses a first-person narrator who teaches us how and why he has the
power to act, at times, as a third-person narrator, complete with the ability
to access the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of other characters. It’s a rare thing of beauty…the incarnation
of what a writer strives endlessly to be:
A human being whose empathies are boundless.
HANNAH PITTARD: Tim O’Brien is a writer I turn to for stylistic and
narrative pointers. His novel, In the
Lake of the Woods, totally informed what I was able to do with The Fates Will Find Their Way. There
were so many strange and wonderful strategies I’d not known were possible or
permissible before reading that book. Plus, he’s an author who knows how to
balance sentiment with sentimentality. He knows how to balance detail and
character. O’Brien is one of those writers who seems like he’s crawled inside
the human heart, seen its sloppy and sad and big machinery, and is somehow able
to bring that experience to life on the page.
JAMES SCOTT; I read Tim O’Brien during my junior year of high
school. The teacher gave us a list of authors and we had to choose one, read at
least three of their books and then write a paper discussing his or her themes
and style. I ended up with O’Brien, and read The Nuclear Age, Going After
Cacciato, and The Things They Carried.
The latter, especially, made me aware of the process of writing for the first
time. I’d only ever thought of writing as stories put down in a logical order,
but O’Brien had pulled the curtains aside and exposed the machinery of a story
by messing with it: images and events got jumbled up and spun around and spit
out as something new each time they reappeared.
The Things They Carried is the book I’ve read most often, which I
can say with near-certainty because I can’t even think of what might be second.
His precise details and his bare emotion left a huge impression, but the
greatest quality that he instilled in me is the love of a story, and the idea
that the creation of that story is equally if not more important than the story
itself.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
© Murdo McLeod
STEPHEN DAU: The book that changed my life was given to me by my
fiancé a few months before we traveled to Sri Lanka to be married. I’m
uncertain, looking back, whether it was the book, Michael Ondaatje’s Running
in the Family, the import of our trip, or some alchemical combination of
the two that proved so potent, but when I stepped off the plane I stepped into
a world that had already been conjured in my mind. I had never before lived a
book so vividly, and have only rarely done so since.
Here, for example, was the house in
the jungle where my father-in-law grew up, its red, polished cement floor cool
to his perpetually bare feet, just as Ondaatje had described other Sri Lankan
floors. And here were the thin iron bars over every window, and the egg-shell
columns of the Mount Lavinia hotel, and the trees full of peacocks weeping into
the night, and the heat, everywhere the heat, “a heat that embarrasses
foreigners,” a stifling heat that could be cut only temporarily by gin and
tonics and rain.
I had never before been to Asia,
yet I had flown kites on the Galle Face Green, and eaten crab curry with my
hands, and washed myself in the monsoon rain, and ridden the train from Colombo
to Jaffna, where I sat in the Governor’s house as the tilted blades of a
ceiling fan caught the air and folded it across the room.
The trip and the book rekindled in
me a long-held desire—if not entirely dormant, then at least neglected and
inaccessible—to write, which I had known since I was eight years old, but to
which I had not yet committed myself. I had been hearing a chorus of “get on
with it, then” from my fiancé and family when Ondaatje whispered in my ear.
Perhaps the timing was simply right. “What are you waiting for?” he seemed to
be saying, “this is what can be done with words.”
As I write this, I am traveling by
train across Pennsylvania, where I am from. It is a landscape of winter-bare
trees and industrial ruins and pale, overcast skies and rivers like brown glass
and red brick chimneys smoking into a cold wind. It is in so many ways the
complete opposite of Michael Ondaatje’s Sri Lanka. Yet here he is again,
stealing up quietly behind me, whispering in my ear: “Look!” he says, “This too
can be done with words.”
–
Dan Chaon is the author
of Stay Awake: Stories, Await Your Reply: A Novel, You Remind Me of Me: A Novel, and Among the Missing: Stories
Bruce Machart is the
author of the short story collection Men
in the Making and the novel The Wake
of Forgiveness
Hannah Pittard is the
author of the novels Reunion and The Fates Will Find Their Way
James Scott is the author
of the novel The Kept
Stephen Dau is the author
of the novel The Book of Jonas
Lettering by Caleb Misclevitz
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