By the Book

by Pamela Paul

  Oh, and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and “Down at the Dinghy,” with the great Boo Boo Glass. And “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut”—don’t even get me started.…

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

  I guess I like Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, and Traveling Mercies the most, because they have helped people the most.

  What’s the best memoir you’ve ever read?

  I loved The Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is pretty great.

  What do you plan to read next?

  Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. I am about to head out on book tour, and this book seems like an ideal blend of highly intelligent and readable. The only problem is going to be all those snakes. Maybe there is a redacted snake-free edition.

  Anne Lamott is the author of many books, including Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies, Some Assembly Required, and Help, Thanks, Wow.

  Ian McEwan

  What’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?

  Stephen Sedley’s Ashes and Sparks. Sedley was a senior judge in our court of appeal until last year and in this collection of essays he writes on a range of issues that concern the individual and the state. He belongs, as one commentator noted, to the English tradition of radical nonconformism—the title is taken from a seventeenth-century Leveller pamphlet. But you could have no interest in the law and read his book for pure intellectual delight, for the exquisite, finely balanced prose, the prickly humor, the knack of artful quotation, and an astonishing historical grasp. A novelist could be jealous.

  And what was the last truly great book you read?

  Epithet inflation has diminished “great” somewhat so we have to be careful. Last year I reread Hamlet. I believe the play really did represent a world historical moment—when there leapt into being a sustained depiction of a fully realized and doubting human being whose inner life is turned outward for our consideration. Even then, I blasphemously wondered whether the last two acts were as great as the first three. Is some vital tension lost when Hamlet returns from England? Another recent encounter has been Joyce’s “The Dead,” which I’ve read many times. It needs to be considered as a novella, the perfect novella, entirely separate from the rest of Dubliners. An annual winter party; afterwards, a scene of marital misunderstanding and revelation in a hotel room; a closing reflection on mortality as sleep closes in and snow begins to fall—I’d swap the last dozen pages of “The Dead” for any dozen in Ulysses. As a form, the novel sprawls and can never be perfect. It doesn’t need to be, it doesn’t want to be. A poem can achieve perfection—not a word you’d want to change—and in rare instances a novella can too.

  Do you have a favorite literary genre?

  The novella. See above.

  Do you read poetry?

  We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you—and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. I last felt that in relation to a poem while in the sitting room of Elizabeth Bishop’s old home in rural Brazil. I stood in a corner, apart from the general conversation, and read “Under the Window: Ouro Preto.” The street outside was once an obscure thoroughfare for donkeys and peasants. Bishop reports overheard lines as people pass by her window, including the beautifully noted “When my mother combs my hair it hurts.” That same street now is filled with thunderous traffic—it fairly shakes the house. When I finished the poem I found that my friends and our hosts had left the room. What is it precisely, that feeling of “returning” from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger—then it fades, but never completely.

  Do you remember the first book that made you cry?

  It was The Gauntlet, by Ronald Welch. I was ten years old and in hospital, so I had time to read this wonderful historical novel for children in a day. Its hero, Peter, is transported in a dreamlike state back six hundred years to a late medieval Welsh castle. Many adventures and battles and much falconry ensue. When at last Peter returns to the present, the castle is the awesome ruin it was in the opening pages, and all the scenes and the dear friends he has made have vanished. “Their bones must have crumbled into dust in the quiet churchyard of Llanferon.” It was a new idea to me then, time obliterating loved ones and turning them to dust—and I was stricken for a while. But no other novel on the children’s book trolley would do. The next day I read The Gauntlet again.

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

  I wouldn’t trouble the president with advice, or with one more transient treatise on America’s supposed terminal decline. For the sake of the general good, I’d have him absorbed in poetry. What would suit him well, I believe, is the work of James Fenton. His Selected would be fine. The range of subject matter and tone is immense. The long, wise reflections on conflict (“Those whom geography condemns to war”) would be instructive to a commander in chief, and the imaginative frenzy of “The Ballad of the Shrieking Man” would give him the best available measure of the irrational human heart. There are poems of mischief and wild misrule. A lovely consolatory poem about death is there, “For Andrew Wood.” (“And there might be a pact between / Dead friends and living friends.”) And there are the love poems—love songs really, filled with a sweet, teasing, wistful lyricism that could even (but probably won’t) melt the heart of a Republican contender. “Am I embarrassing you?” one such poem asks in its penultimate line.

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

  I apologize for being obvious, but every time I watch the curtain come down on even a halfway decent production of a Shakespeare play I feel a little sorrowful that I’ll never know the man, or any man of such warm intelligence. What would I want to know? His gossip, his lovers, his religion (if any), the Silver Street days, his thoughts on England and power in the seventeenth century—as young then as the twenty-first is for us. And why he’s retiring to Stratford. The biographies keep coming, and there’s a great deal we know about Shakespeare’s interactions with institutions of various kinds. England was already a protomodern state that kept diligent records. But the private man eludes us and always will until some rotting trunk in an ancient attic yields a Pepys-like journal. But that’s historically impossible. He’s gone.

  Have you ever written a fan letter to an author? Did he or she write back?

  In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot. (More than a review. I’ve stopped reading reviews.) So of course I write them occasionally. I owe Zadie Smith one for NW. The last I wrote was to Claire Tomalin about her biography of Dickens.

  Do you remember the best fan letter you ever received? What made it special?

  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.

  Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite?

  At the moment I put my latest, Sweet Tooth, just ahead of Atonement.

  If you could be any character from literature, who would it be?

  I don’t much like airports, long flights, and lines for passport control and immigration, so I’d like to take on the form of Shakespeare’s Puck, who boasts of being able to “put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.” That would put London to New York at around five minutes.

  What do you plan to read next?

  I’m well into a book in typescript about Iran and nuclear weapons, Mullahs Without Mercy, by Geoffrey Robertson, a well-known human rights lawyer here in England. It gives a history of the murderous revolutionary theocracy, including an account of the rarel
y discussed mass execution of imprisoned communists and atheists in 1988. We do not want a country so careless of life to have the bomb, nor do we want the forty or so other countries waiting in the wings to have it.

  But bombing Iran is not a solution. Robertson wants to bring international human rights law to bear on the problem. It should be a violation of rights to design or procure, let alone use, a nuclear weapon. The big five need to stand by their treaty obligations and set about the process of steady disarmament. Out of a dire situation, Robertson argues a case for optimism. If we can outlaw the dum-dum bullet, if we can put tyrants on trial for genocide, we can get serious about a nuclear weapon–free world.

  Ian McEwan is the author of the novels Amsterdam, Atonement, Saturday, Solar, and On Chesil Beach, among other books.

  Lee Child

  What book is on your night stand now?

  Pedantically, none, because I don’t have a night stand. My décor is maximally minimalist, and my bedroom has a bed and nothing else. But even if I had a night stand, there wouldn’t be a book on it, because I can’t read in bed. I don’t drift off. I’m too eager to follow the story or the argument. The few times I’ve tried it I have read all night and haven’t slept a wink.

  So my version of the question would be: What book is on your kitchen counter now, waiting to be picked up in the morning while the first pot of coffee brews? And today’s answer is: Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane. I always read for an hour or two in the morning, before I do anything else. And Lehane was in my graduating class, so to speak, in that we came up together, and in some ways he’s the best of us.

  What was the last truly great book you read?

  The words “truly great book” set a very high bar, don’t they, in the context of the last couple of centuries. Therefore I’d have to pick The Lost, by Daniel Mendelsohn. Nonfiction, but only incidentally. It’s a memoir, a Holocaust story, a detective story, both a rumination on and an analysis of narrative technique, a work of Old Testament and ancient Greek historiography, and a work of awful, heartbreaking, tragic suspense. A book of the decade, easily, and likely a book of the century.

  Who are your favorite mystery writers?

  I have many, many reliable favorites. But true admiration depends on them doing things not too close to what I can do myself. So, from way back, the Brit Dorothy L. Sayers, perhaps. From slightly more recently, and unsurprisingly, Raymond Chandler. From the middle distance, the Swedes Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. From the current day, Joseph Kanon.

  Is there a particular author or genre you enjoy that might surprise your readers?

  I read anything and everything, so there’s bound to be many things. I just read a book about geometric patterns in medieval English brickwork. But, notably, I’m a sucker for long, multigenerational sagas, especially “wronged girl grows up and gets rich and gets revenge” stories, like Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance. I even enjoyed Jeffrey Archer’s Kane and Abel.

  You’ve lived in the United States since 1998. Any significant differences you’ve noticed in the way British and American readers view your books?

  No real differences, and I think we can see that, with rare and random exceptions, the same books tend to do well or badly in both countries, in a kind of cultural lockstep. With my books, the difference seems to be between Britain and America on one hand, and Western Europe and Scandinavia on the other. The English Channel is the threshold, not the Atlantic. Europeans and Scandinavians seem to see my books as super-guilty pleasures, possibly because they’re appalled by the kind of lawless vigilantism that we see as in some way metaphoric.

  You spent many years working in TV. In what way did that experience influence the way you approach your novels?

  In very few obvious ways, but in one very fundamental way. The two media are very different, and the skill set of one doesn’t really translate to the other. But in television you learn very quickly that this isn’t about you. It’s about the audience. It’s not about being a cool guy, impressing your friends, buying a black turtleneck and a black leather jacket. It’s about satisfying the audience, first, second, and third. That’s your only responsibility. That’s the lesson I learned.

  The first Jack Reacher movie is coming out this week. How does it feel to see a man you’ve written seventeen books about reenvisioned on film? Does Tom Cruise seem like Reacher to you?

  In that aforementioned TV career, as well as my day job, I was the union organizer for the last couple of years. It was a time of huge change and upheaval, and management strategy depended on what they thought I was going to think. One time I found (OK, stole) a psychological profile of me they had commissioned. It was absolutely fascinating—someone else’s detailed opinion of me. The movie is like that—someone else’s detailed opinion of Reacher. Someone else’s view. In this case, the someone is a bunch of smart, savvy film people who are also genuine fans of the books. I’m well aware of the alchemy that has to take place, and my observation of the process was obviously intensely personal and self-interested, but also academic in a surprisingly detached way. I found myself agreeing with their choices 99 percent of the time. I would have done it no differently. Cruise instinctively understood Reacher’s vibe and attitude, and his talent gets it all on the screen. When I read that psychological profile all those years ago, I found myself nodding along, ruefully. They nailed it, I thought. Same with the movie. Which is more than just a cute metaphor. There’s always a little autobiography in fictional characters, and actors try to inhabit the character, so to an extent I was watching Cruise play a version of me, and yes, I recognized myself.

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

  I think writers generally might agree that no book comes out quite as well as they hoped. So while I’m fairly satisfied with some of them, my favorite is always the next one. The potential is still there. I haven’t screwed it up yet. But if forced to choose (and “you’ve written” is past tense, after all, not future) I might pick Gone Tomorrow, which starts well and then continues with the kind of audacity that presses hard against the line without, I hope, ever quite falling over the edge.

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

  Probably The Gathering Storm, the first volume in Winston Churchill’s World War II memoir, for its sense of helpless spectatorhood as the world stumbled toward utter catastrophe. There were several opportunities to forestall disaster, but all of them were blocked by apparently implacable opposition. Perhaps the rise of a Nazi state won’t happen again (or perhaps it will), or perhaps the potential disaster might be financial or meteorological, but I would hope the book might show a president that any and all efforts are worth it, come what may, that success is absolutely mandatory, and that prevention is always, always better than cure.

  Regrets: Is there a book you wish you’d never read?

  Not really. I’ve read plenty of subpar stuff, but bad can be as illuminating as good. What I regret is that perhaps because of the time and place I grew up, and the way I was raised and educated, I was far too deferential for far too long: if I didn’t enjoy a book, I assumed it was my fault. Later I realized it could be the book’s fault. I wish that had happened earlier.

  What were your favorite books as a child?

  Too many to list individually, but they all fell into one of two categories: either straightforward wish fulfillment, or explorations of exotic foreign places. The wish-fulfillment books were, looking back, simple psychological triggers: kids roaming free, having fun, with parents and authority figures notably absent. I remember wishing I was an orphan, which was unkind, I suppose. The Famous Five books, by Enid Blyton, would be typical examples.

  The exotic foreign adventures were obvious antidotes to late-’50s, early-’60s provincial Britain, which was a pinched, narrow, dull, gray place from a child’s perspective. In my mind I was always in jungles or on tropical islands. I remember very well The White Rajah, by Nicholas Monsarrat, which h
ad the added advantage of being a good-brother, bad-brother story (I was the bad, obviously), and it had the first real “wow moment” I can remember in terms of plotting.

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

  I’ll have to go with the elephant in the room—William Shakespeare. I’d ask him: Dude, did you know how great you were? Were you aware at the time of the sheer incandescent beauty of, say, Romeo and Juliet? Or were you just scuffling along like the rest of us, trying to make a living?

  And possibly as a supplementary: Why did you make Richard III so damn long? Were you getting paid by the word, or what?

  And if you could meet a fictional character?

  Sherlock Holmes, probably. I’d say, Teach me something.

  If somebody walked in on you writing one of your books, what would they see? What does your work space look like?

  I live on the twenty-fifth floor of my building (without a night stand) and work in an identical apartment line on the seventh floor. So my commute to the office is seventeen floors in the elevator. (Not eighteen, because of the building’s apparent triskaidekaphobia.) The office is a 950-square-foot loft-style space. I simplified the kitchen—no stove, just a sink and two coffee machines. The main room has a fifteen-foot run of desking, backed by file cabinets, with bookcases on the end walls. My productivity breakthrough was to keep my writing computer off-line. If I want to surf or check e-mail, I have to move six feet to another computer. Not far, but enough of a physical disincentive to mostly keep my nose to the grindstone. What would be the bedroom is a library, with an Eames lounge chair and ottoman, for the essential lying-down-staring-into-space component of writing, and on the shelves I try to collect my foreign editions, one of every title in every language.