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.
MARILYNNE ROBINSON
© Ulf Andersen
JAMES SCOTT: In my MFA program, I remember one teacher had us go around the table and name our favorite authors, and one of the first few people said Marilynne Robinson andthe collective gasp made me scribble her name down and read Housekeeping right away. I’ve re-read itevery year since.
The first fifteen pages or so—the summary of her
grandparents and the train accident—could teach one everything he or she needs
to know about the art of writing. From the perspective to the voice to the
pacing to the vividness of the scenes, it’s as close to a perfect section as I
have ever read. It thematically sets up everything to follow, though that’s not
totally apparent until much later, which it’s why it’s critical that those
pages are memorable: they need to instantly make their mark and become the lore
of the family and the town.
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER: I read
Marilynne Robinson for her wisdom and her eye. Her writing has a way of
reminding me how extraordinary all the ordinary things of this world really
are. As the narrator of Gilead says, “This is an interesting planet. It
deserves all the attention you can give it.”
PHILIP ROTH
© Elizabeth Donnelly
T. COOPER: I guess
the world just sort of split a seam when I read my first Roth book, which I’m
pretty sure was Operation Shylock. Though Portnoy’s
Complaint was really the one that cracked the world open and completely
floored me. It wasn’t even that Roth was a conscious influence on my
development either. In an eerie way, I was seeing his influence on my
development in ways I hadn’t even realized until well after it happened. Both
figuratively, and literally—like not even having read a certain book of his
until after I was doing something that somehow came out as a distant relative
of it (for example, Portnoy, Plot Against America).
STUART NADLER: If I were to guess, I’ve read more
of Roth than I have of any other writer, which says something either about my
reading habits, or about how prolific a writer he’s been. I’m writing this two
weeks or so after his announced retirement, which, perhaps foolishly, I believe
to be genuine, even though I suspect his compulsion to work, and his dedication
to that compulsion is maybe unmatched in modern writing. I’ve read Roth in many
different ways. First to understand what it meant to be a Jew then. Then meaning
when my parents were young, or when my grandparents were as old as I am now.
And Jew to mean a certain kind of urban, secular, assimilated, cultural Jew.
I’ve certainly read the later, bigger Zuckerman books to see how Roth has
disemboweled the structure of the novel to his advantage. I have no doubt that
he would cringe to hear something like this. But who cares: that in itself is
one of the aspects of his writing I love, and that I carry with me, or try to,
in my own work. His fearlessness. It’s a fearlessness of subject-matter
certainly. A willingness to slay the old verities, to put himself wholly onto
the page, to investigate so deeply all the darkness that attends being human:
the shame, the embarrassment, the constant failure, the vulgarities and thrills
of desire and lust and temptation. Now I’m in the middle of writing a book
where my primary goal has been to loosen myself from own tics and my own
peculiar idioms. At a certain point in the revision process for my first two
books, I became exhausted by my writing voice, and in the, say, two or three
dozen ways I knew to structure a sentence. My goal for the new book was, and
is, to break out of that. To put new rhythms to the page, to find new ways of
structuring my thoughts. To find a new energy to put to paper. All of it makes
me think of Roth, whose better books inhabit disparate voices so astonishingly.
That Mickey Sabbath, with all his rage and venom and snark and cruelty, was
written by the same man whose Nathan Zuckerman narrates with such subtlety The Ghost Writer, or whose Swede Lvov is
so kind and big-hearted and decent, is as incredible to me as it is
intimidating.
CHARLES YU: I’ve read more books by Roth than probably any other
contemporary writer, tried to absorb what I can from his prose, his characters,
his voices. In terms of development, though, I think what I learned most was
structural – how does he organize his books around the major ideas or concepts
in each one. Reading eight or ten or a dozen books by one novelist, you start
to see what changes from novel to novel, and what stays the same, and that was
highly instructive. I wasn’t even writing fiction when I read most of their
books, but I was tacitly learning, I think.
RICHARD RUSSO
© Ulf Andersen
WHITNEY TERRELL: Russo’s novels
about small town life on the eastern seaboard seemed immediately familiar to
me. My own town, Kansas City,
is larger but in its own way equally insular. Russo is excellent on the
influence of money (or the lack thereof) in his characters’ lives and he writes
extremely well about work. In Russo, jobs matter. His characters run diners,
paint houses, teach, pastor churches, tend bars, and operate textile factories.
Their spiritual flaws and aspirations are expressed largely through the way
they approach their work, and there’s an incredible amount of detail in his
writing about how their jobs are done. He’s also very funny. Faulkner and his
descendants are certainly capable of humor. But, to make a broad
generalization, I found that their style worked best when it involved physical
comedy, preferably in a rural or natural setting, so that the characters could
interact with their environment in a direct, physical way. (Think Faulkner’s
novel The Hamlet, or the river scenes
in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.) It
didn’t work so well when confronted with the smaller, pettier slights and
schemes of the business world. Russo, however, was perfect for that.
–
James Scott is the author
of the novel The Kept
Karen Thompson Walker is
the author of the novel The Age of
Miracles
T. Cooper is the author
of the novels The Beaufort Diaries,
and Lipshitz Six: or Two Angry Blondes
Stuart Nadler is the
author of the novel Wise Men, as well
as the short story collection The Book of
Life
Charles Yu is the author
of the short story collection Sorry
Please Thank You, as well as the novel How
to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Whitney Terrell is the
author of The King of Kings County,
and The Huntsman
Lettering by Caleb Misclevitz
–