By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, but didn’t?

  Everything by Ernest Hemingway.

  What don’t you like about Hemingway?

  Everything, except for a few of the short stories. His write-what-you-know dictum has no place in imaginative literature; it’s advice for a journalist, not for a novelist or a playwright. Imagine if Sophocles or Shakespeare or Dickens had heeded that advice! And Hemingway’s sentences are short and simplistic enough for advertising copy. There is also the offensive tough-guy posturing—all those stiff-upper-lip, don’t-say-much men! I like Melville’s advice: “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.” I love Melville. Can you love Melville and also like Hemingway? Maybe some readers can, but I can’t.

  If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

  There’s nothing I need or want to know from the writers I admire that isn’t in their books. It’s better to read a good writer than meet one.

  Have you ever written to an author?

  I’ve written to many authors; I love writing to writers.

  And do they usually write back? What’s the best letter you’ve received from another writer?

  Yes, they write back. Gail Godwin writes exquisite letters. James Salter, too—and Salter uses an old typewriter and rewrites by hand. His handwriting is very good. He uses hotel stationery, some of it very exotic. Kurt Vonnegut was a very good letter writer, too. As you might imagine, he was very funny. Grass writes me in German and in English, which is how I write to him, but his English is much better than my German.

  What book made you want to become a writer?

  Great Expectations.

  Which of the books you’ve written is your favorite? Your favorite character?

  There are a lot of outsiders in my novels, sexual misfits among them. The first-person narrator of A Prayer for Owen Meany is called (behind his back) a “non-practicing homosexual”; he doesn’t just love Owen Meany, he’s probably in love with Owen, but he’ll never come out of the closet and say so. He never has sex with anyone—man or woman. Dr. Larch, the saintly abortionist in The Cider House Rules, and Jenny Fields, Garp’s mother in The World According to Garp, have sex only once and stop for life. The narrator of The Hotel New Hampshire is in love with his sister. The two most heroic characters in my new novel, In One Person, are transgender women—not the first time I’ve written about transgender characters. I love sexual outsiders; the world is harder for them.

  What’s your favorite movie adaptation of one of your books?

  Lasse Hallstrom’s The Cider House Rules. I loved working with Lasse. I wrote the screenplay, but it is Lasse’s film; he is why it works. I also think Tod Williams’s The Door in the Floor is an excellent adaptation of A Widow for One Year; he smartly adapted just the first third of that novel, when the character of Ruth (the eponymous widow) is still a little girl. He did a great job; he was the writer and director, but I enjoyed working with him—just giving him notes on his script, and then notes on the rough cut.

  If somebody walked into the space where you do your writing, what would they see?

  There are two big tables joined in an L-shaped fashion, so that I can move from one to the other in a chair on casters. There is a large dictionary stand with an unabridged dictionary. There are windows on two sides of my office—lots of books and papers around. My laptop is at a small desk in a far-off corner of the room, removed from the work tables—strictly for correspondence. There’s a couch, and—usually—my dog, a chocolate Lab, is somewhere in my office.

  What do you plan to read next?

  I plan what I write, not what I read.

  John Irving is the author of The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, In One Person, and A Prayer for Owen Meany, among other books.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  What book is on your night stand now?

  Rome, by Robert Hughes. Though I’m finding it challenging to read about Rome without immediately wanting to run away to Rome.

  When and where do you like to read?

  When I am awake, and wherever I happen to be. If I could read while I was driving, showering, socializing, or sleeping, I would do it.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which blew the top of my head straight off. I’ve read it three times, and I’m still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together. Now I’m on to its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, which is nicely satisfying my need for more Thomas Cromwell.

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

  I enjoy both, although I unfairly hold fiction to a far higher standard. With nonfiction, I figure I can glean something educational or interesting out of the book even if the writing is weak. But if the first chapter of a novel doesn’t feel perfect and accurate to me, I simply can’t read on; it’s too painful. Meanwhile, my (very) guilty pleasure is tabloid journalism. I hate to say it, but I know the names of all the celebrities’ babies.

  What was the best book you read as a student? What books over the years have most influenced your thinking?

  It was a big deal for me in high school to be introduced to Hemingway. I already knew that I wanted to be a writer, but the deceptive simplicity of his voice made writing seem realistically attainable to me—as though all you had to do was get out of the way and let the story tell itself. Of course, Hemingway isn’t simple, and writing isn’t simple, and I certainly didn’t end up thinking like him in any way. But he did open up for me a marvelous expanse of possibility and permission, and just at the right moment.

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

  My Life, by Bill Clinton—purely as a study guide for how to win a second term.

  What is your ideal reading experience? Do you prefer a book that makes you laugh or makes you cry? One that teaches you something or one that distracts you?

  Oh, I just want what we all want: a comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions, and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence, and alter my thinking forever. Either that, or the latest photos of celebrities’ babies.

  What were your favorite books as a child? Did you have a favorite character or hero?

  The complete Wizard of Oz series, by L. Frank Baum. Over the course of those fourteen books, stalwart Dorothy Gale triumphs, step-by-step, through precisely what Joseph Campbell would later call “the hero’s journey.” I think Dorothy may be the only little Midwestern girl you could ever put in the same archetypal category as Odysseus or Siddhartha. She was absolutely totemic for me.

  Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?

  Every few years, I think, “Maybe now I’m finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand Ulysses.” So I pick it up and try it again. And by page ten, as always, I’m like, “What the HELL…?”

  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?

  The poet Jack Gilbert. (No relation, sadly.) He’s the poet laureate of my marriage: my husband and I have read him aloud to each other for years, and he exerts a subtle influence over the way we understand ourselves in love. I would like to thank him for that, but I’ve always been too shy to write him a letter.

  What are your reading habits? Do you take notes? Electronic or paper?

  If I’m reading for pleasure, I scrawl giant enthusiastic circles and exclamation points over particularly magical paragraphs. If I’m reading for research, it all goes neatly onto index cards and packed away into tidy shoeboxes.

  What book made you want to become a writer?

  Probably Curious George. Or one of the other first books I ever saw. I never r
ecollect wanting to be anything else, is what I mean.

  Read any good memoirs recently?

  I lately discovered A Three Dog Life, by Abigail Thomas, and it’s stunning.

  What’s the best movie based on a book you’ve seen recently?

  Oh, come on, now—that’s a setup! But since you asked, back in 2010 there was this nice movie with Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem that really meant a lot to me.…

  What do you plan to read next?

  Ulysses.

  Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Her other books include The Last American Man, Committed, and The Signature of All Things.

  * * *

  Fan Letters

  Gail Godwin writes exquisite letters. James Salter, too—and Salter uses an old typewriter and rewrites by hand. His handwriting is very good. He uses hotel stationery, some of it very exotic. Kurt Vonnegut was a very good letter writer, too. As you might imagine, he was very funny. Grass writes me in German and in English, which is how I write to him, but his English is much better than my German.

  —John Irving

  I’ve written to lots of authors—fan letters. From the heart.

  —Richard Ford

  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…”

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  I wrote to René Goscinny when I was seven or eight, a fan letter about Asterix. He wrote back, saying that he was very proud to have made a little English girl laugh.

  —Emma Thompson

  I’ve written to lots of writers. Laurie Colwin, after reading and foisting Happy All the Time many times. I saved her note for twenty years. Alice Adams wrote a sweet note to me after my first novel came out when I was twenty-six, and I was so blown away that I sent her a bunch of stamps by return mail. I have no idea what I was thinking. It was a star-struck impulse.

  —Anne Lamott

  I get hundreds of very sweet, heartfelt letters from parents thanking me for getting their kids reading. Each one absolutely makes my day—make that my week. Many, many women thank me for getting their husbands reading, or reading again. Occasionally, a husband thanks me for getting his wife reading, but that’s rare.

  —James Patterson

  As a teenager I wrote to R. A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R. A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones. Not a lot of people have read him, and even fewer like what he wrote, but those of us who like him like him all the way. We never met.

  —Neil Gaiman

  An Italian reader wrote to describe how he met his wife. She was on a bus, reading one of my books, one that he himself had just finished. They started talking, they started meeting. They now have three children. I wonder how many people owe their existence to their parents’ love of books.

  —Ian McEwan

  * * *

  Richard Ford

  What book is on your night stand now?

  A Good Man in Africa, by William Boyd.

  When and where do you like to read?

  Not in bed. Long airplane rides are good. Early mornings before things get going.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  A Writer at War, by Vasily Grossman. Grossman’s diaries and journalism from the Eastern Front. Riveting and immensely humane.

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

  I’m an equal opportunity reader—although I don’t much read plays. And since I was raised a Presbyterian, pretty much all pleasures are guilty.

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

  Probably Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner’s masterpiece. I read it when I was nineteen. It embossed into my life the experience of literature’s great saving virtue. Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

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

  A book of mine. What else? What am I, an altruist? He can choose which one.

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

  I read “book” books—the ones between covers. And I mark ’em all up. They’re mine, after all. Though I’m not opposed to e-books. It’s not a moral issue for me.

  Do you keep the books you read? Collect, store, shelve—or throw away, lend out, donate?

  I mostly keep my books. I go back often to ones I’ve read, and so want them around. I’ve spent thousands of dollars just moving books here and there. Although … many books that come to me unasked-for I give to the library. I never sell books.

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

  I’m not a tough cry under any circumstances. And like the saying goes, “stand-up’s hard.” I like to be taught things. Plus, I’ve got enough distracting me without my reading only doing that.

  What was the last book that made you cry?

  My own book Canada made me cry the last time I read it. If it was any good, it should’ve. Beyond that, the very last book that made me cry was more than one poem in James Wright’s collected poems, Above the River.

  What were your favorite books as a child? Is there one book you wish all children would read?

  Rick Brant science mysteries. That said, being dyslexic, I wasn’t a great reader when I was a kid. And since I don’t have children, I don’t know what they should read. Probably something their parents would disapprove of.

  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?

  Overrated … Joyce’s Ulysses. Hands down. A professor’s book. Though I guess if you’re Irish it all makes sense. I put down most books, unfinished. Most books aren’t very good, and there’s no reason they should be. Whatever “talent” may be, it isn’t apportioned democratically. Happily, I don’t remember the last not-very-good book I didn’t finish. Although (which is why I don’t review books) sometimes I return to a book I’ve left unfinished and discover—pleasurably—that it was I, not the book, that was unsatisfactory.

  What is your favorite story collection? Do you tend to read more short fiction or novels?

  I read both, undifferentiated. Probably high on my list (though I don’t generally think of favorites) would be Cheever’s Collected and Isaac Babel’s Collected. Eudora Welty, too. If you asked me tomorrow, I might answer differently. William Trevor. Pritchett. Dubliners. Alice Munro. Deborah Eisenberg. Ann Beattie. Donald Barthelme. Mavis Gallant. Chekhov. There are some awfully good story collections around.

  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?

  I’ve written to lots of authors—fan letters. From the heart. And I suppose I’d love to have met Ford Madox Ford (no relation, alas). Such a big, messy, compelling, brilliant character. My kind of guy (though, of course, it would probably have turned out disastrously, as many things in his life did).

  Which of the books you’ve written is your favorite? Your favorite character?

  With all due respect, I wrote them all as hard as I could, did my best. That question is best left for readers—if I have any.

  Any chance you’ll return to Frank Bascombe?

  I make notes for Frank all the time, carrying them (and “him”) a
round with me daily. As of now, that seems like enough to do.

  What’s the best book about sports ever written?

  Gee, I’ve read pretty few. A Fan’s Notes, by Frederick Exley. The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence S. Ritter. Pretty much any of Roger Angell’s collections.

  Do you think of yourself as a regional writer? Your books tend to be very much about place—whether it’s New Jersey, the South, or the West. And do you enjoy reading regional literature?

  Maybe I’m a serial regional writer. First here, then there, across the map. When I stopped thinking of setting books in the South—where I was born—I did it both because I didn’t think I had anything new to tell about the South (Faulkner and Welty and Percy and Hannah and twenty other wonderful writers had already done it better than I could) and because I wanted to find a wider audience and take on different concerns from those the South seemed to invite—that is, invite me. And I don’t really think about books as being “regional” or not. I just think of them as being either good or not good.

  What do you plan to read next?

  Bird Alone, by Sean O’Faolain.

  Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Canada, and The Lay of the Land, among other novels.

  * * *

  Childhood Reading

  When I was a kid, I drew a lot, so I gravitated to oversized books with a lot of artwork—books about giants, gnomes, Norse myths, and space travel. There was one called 21st Century Foss, full of incredible imaginings of spaceships and future cities, all with radical and organic shapes. I hadn’t seen it in thirty years and recently bought it on eBay. Looking at those pictures again was like reliving dreams I had when I was eight years old.