By the Book (13 page)

Our Kind of People
, by Uzodinma Iweala, and
Mountains of the Moon
, by I. J. Kay. I loved Iweala's first book, so I'm eager for this nonfiction follow-up, and I've heard strong things about Kay's debut.

Junot Díaz
is the author of
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
,
This Is How You Lose Her
, and
Drown
.

 

I'd Love to Meet

The J writer, or Yahwist, of the Torah. I'd want to ask him what he intended to be literal and what he intended to be figurative. And I'd point out that confusion around this question has had a toxic effect on the rest of history.

—
Andrew Solomon

Shakespeare's wife, of course. So I could settle this whole thing once and for all.

—
Malcolm Gladwell

The
Wizard of Oz
novelist, L. Frank Baum … If he really was a racist as is rumored. And if so, how could he write such a heartfelt story? Were the Munchkins a metaphor? Did he have the Wicked Witch of the West killed off because he hated green people?

—
Bryan Cranston

I'd like to ask Raymond Chandler about chapter thirteen of
The Little Sister
. It describes a drive around 1940s Los Angeles, and it still holds up as a description of the city right now. Beautiful. I'd ask him how he pulled that off. And I'd tell him that that short chapter of his was what made me want to become a writer. I'd also ask him whether it takes a tortured life to produce something like that. I'd say, Ray, can a writer be happy and still be good at it?

—
Michael Connelly

I'm fascinated by the idea of James Joyce, but I doubt we would have much to talk about. I'd like to have a lunch with Bill Clinton. Maybe a drink with Hunter Thompson. Just one—or two. Dinner with Angelina Jolie would be nice. Does she write?

—
James Patterson

Oscar Wilde. Anyone who could pen the phrase “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars” gets a seat at my dinner table.

—
Neil deGrasse Tyson

Claude Debussy was distant and brilliant, a compulsive smoker, a letter-writing genius. I'd like to know what his voice sounded like.

—
Nicholson Baker

Isaac Bashevis Singer said something like, “If Tolstoy lived across the street, I wouldn't go meet him.” I know what he meant about Tolstoy, but I'd like to live across the street from Jane Bowles, Robert Walser, Gogol, Kafka, or Heinrich von Kleist. Or maybe at the Spanish campground where Roberto Bolaño worked as a watchman.

—
Francine Prose

Emily Dickinson. She is such a puzzle. Her startling genius seems to have come from nowhere. She lived her life as a recluse; her work remained essentially unpublished and undiscovered until well after her death. Yet she turned language and poetry on end.

—
Drew Gilpin Faust

I wish I could have been present when Kafka read
The Metamorphosis
aloud to his friends, who couldn't stop laughing. The humor is still there in the text, but I would love to know what he did with his voice.

—
Jonathan Franzen

Henry James is my idea of the perfect friend. He was a brilliant talker, journalist, traveler, gardener, decorator, correspondent, as well as my favorite writer. He is not primarily an intellectual like Proust or Tolstoy, deeply interested in abstract ideas, but he is much warmer, sensitive, and compassionate.

—
Sylvia Nasar

Gore Vidal. I admire his range, his passion, and the rate at which he cranked out work. Novels, essays, plays. My process is very, very slow, and I am in awe of writers like Vidal. I'm in awe of writers who write like it's what they, you know, actually do for a damn living.

—
Dan Savage

Joyce Carol Oates

What book is on your night stand now?

The Priceless Gift: The Love Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson Wilson
, edited by Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, and
Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters
, volumes one and two, by Ray Stannard Baker. (Research for my next novel.)

When and where do you like to read?

Anywhere! If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room, or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been “put on hold.” Reading material has to be at hand for such desperate emergencies.

Do you listen to audiobooks? What makes a book worth listening to?

Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks—but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating. Even for the author, there is the sense of not knowing what will come next, and being drawn along by the actor's captivating voice.

What's the last truly great book you read?

James Joyce's
Ulysses
. In June of this year I reread this ever-astonishing classic with my neuroscientist husband, who had not read it before, in preparation for a trip to Dublin, which overlapped, just barely, with the annual Bloomsday celebration. (And my favorite chapter? “Ithaca.”)

Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What's your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

What engages me is the mysterious, indefinable music of a writer's voice. I first read Henry David Thoreau's
Walden
when I was fifteen years old, and if I'd been told that it was a young man's autobiographical novel, I would not have been surprised. Proust's great novel might well be memoir, like virtually all of the first-person fiction of my friend Edmund White, who blurs the line, as it's said, between “fiction” and “nonfiction.” The sparely, scrupulously crafted early short stories of Ernest Hemingway about the young Nick Adams might well be “nonfiction”—of surpassing beauty. If the reader wants information primarily, of course nonfiction is preferred. But what is executed by way of “information” makes literature, whether fiction, nonfiction, or poetry.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered “nonfiction.” My favorite literary genre is, in fact, the “literary novel” (unfortunate term roughly translated as the Kiss of Death). I also enjoy anything noir (often, though not inevitably, set in Los Angeles).

What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
, which my grandmother gave me when I was nine years old and very impressionable. These were surely the books that inspired me to write, and Alice is the protagonist with whom I've most identified over the years. Her motto is, like my own, “Curiouser and curiouser!”

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Our great American tragic-epic, Melville's
Moby-Dick
. This truly contains multitudes of meanings: the Pequod is the ship of state, the radiantly mad Captain Ahab a dangerous “leader,” the ethnically diverse crew our American citizenry. And to balance this all-male adventure,
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
.

What are your reading habits? Paper or electronic? Do you take notes?

Obviously I prefer “paper” books—they are aesthetic objects, usually quite distinct from one another with striking covers and page designs, while electronic books are more or less interchangeable, their words as alike as ants floating in water. As a frequent reviewer, I rely upon bound galleys, in which I take notes. But I do read online, constantly, and on a Kindle if I'm traveling.

Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?

Why either/or? Most good books evoke a variety of responses, not just one. I've tried to secret a certain slant of humor (if dark) in virtually all of my writing, but few readers notice—it's in the mode of Aubrey Beardsley “secreting the obscene” in his drawings. I love being “taught” something worthwhile—but I don't love being “distracted” to no purpose.

What were your favorite books as a child?

Since I grew up on a not-very-prosperous small farm in western New York, north of Buffalo, there were few books in our household, and those that came into my hands were precious—like the Alice books. Probably at too young an age I was reading
The Gold-Bug and Other Stories
, by Edgar Allan Poe.

Your most recent book,
Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You
, is for young adults. Tell us about some of your favorite young adult novels.

By today's standards, by which I mean our radically extended sense of what “young adult literature” can be, such classics as
Huckleberry Finn
,
The Call of the Wild
,
The Member of the Wedding
,
To Kill a Mockingbird
,
The Catcher in the Rye
,
Lord of the Flies
are all great YA novels.

What makes a great YA novel versus a great novel for adults?

I don't think that the two are distinct. Literary-minded young people can read virtually anything and understand it to a degree. And it's said that YA fiction today, given its mature subject matter and relatively uncomplicated language, is often read by adults.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn't? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I was trained to consider “disappointment” of this sort a character flaw of my own, a failure to comprehend, to appreciate what others have clearly appreciated. My first attempt at reading, for instance, D. H. Lawrence was a disappointment—I wasn't old enough, or mature enough, quite yet; now, Lawrence is one of my favorite writers, whom I've taught in my university courses many times. Another initial disappointment was Walt Whitman, whom I'd also read too young (I know, it's unbelievable, how could anyone admit to have been “disappointed” in Walt Whitman? Please don't send contemptuous e-mails).

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be “disappointing” I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own. (I don't think that opinions are very important, in fact. Does it matter that a reader doesn't “like,” in the trivial way in which one might not “like” Chinese food, a classic like
Beowulf
?)

What is your favorite book to use as a teacher to students of writing? What book do you think all writers should read?

No single text or anthology is a favorite. By this time—since I've been teaching at Princeton since 1978—I've assembled my favorite short stories and prose pieces into several anthologies, which I often teach in my fiction workshops. These include
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories
,
The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction
, and
Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers
.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? Have you ever written to an author?

We would probably all want to meet Shakespeare—or so we think. (We could ask the man if he'd really written all those plays, or if, somehow, he'd acquired them from—who?—Sir Philip Sidney's sister, perhaps? Wonder what W. S. would say to that.) Some of us have fantasized meeting Emily Dickinson. (The problem is, would either W. S. or E. D. want to meet us? Why?)

I'm afraid that I squander as much as 90 percent of my time writing letters—e-mails—to authors, my writer-friends. The problem is that they write back, and so do I. And suddenly the morning has vanished irretrievably, or ineluctably (as Stephen Dedalus would say).

And I certainly receive many letters, a goodly proportion of them beginning bluntly: “Our teacher has assigned us to write about an American writer and I have chosen you, but I can't find much information about you. Why do you write? What are your favorite books? Where do you get your ideas? I hope you can answer by Monday because my deadline is…”

Of the writers you've met, who most impressed you?

I've met 1,449 writers so far, and many more await meeting. I'm sure that I've been enormously impressed by all of them, especially my dazzlingly talented writer-friends, but the greatest surprises are yet to come, I believe.