By the Book (52 page)

Who is your favorite novelist of all time?

For all time, two: Marcel Proust and Marguerite Duras.

Sell us on your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer.

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence. Her race politics (outlined in her memoir,
Dust Tracks on a Road
) are a bit over my head, a bit strange, but fascinating. Alejo Carpentier is so important to me that I don't know if he's famous or not, he's huge in my own private world of greats.
The Lost Steps
,
The Chase
(Sartre's favorite),
Reasons of State
—his prose is spare and baroque at the same time, brutal and comic and full of historical rage and intricate human achievement.
Kingdom of This World
, about the Haitian Revolution, is a singular work of art. Famous in the hipper poetry circles but perhaps not the wider world, Ariana Reines is something special, and her book
Mercury
is a shining achievement. I revere it.

What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And how would you describe the kinds of books you steer clear of?

I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as “sweeping,” “tender,” or “universal.” But to the real question of what's inside: I avoid books that seem to conservatively follow stale formulas. I don't read for plot, a story “about” this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening. I am often drawn to works that are significant to either the modernist project or to France in the nineteenth century or twentieth century and contemporary Latin America, and lately I read about race in America, because it's an enormous unanswered question. But I'll read about any world if it's rendered with originality, in a good-ugly or severe way. Or in a beautiful way, but free of sentimentality and predictability. And if a book is humorless, I want it to be as good as José Saramago. That about sums it up!

What kinds of characters draw you in as a reader? And as a writer?

I tend to like the complicated antihero: Charlus, from Proust. Balzac's Vautrin. Bolaño's Hans Reiter/Archimboldi, in
2666
. Shrike, from
Miss Lonelyhearts
. The Judge from
Blood Meridian
. Recktall Brown from
The Recognitions
. If I could write a character like one of those? Well. I should be so lucky.

Which books might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves?

Maybe those in my country and western section—the Larry McMurtry novels, an amazing picture book of the Grand Ole Opry, and a history of frontier prostitution lamentably titled
Soiled Doves
. Also, I have always collected books on cars and racing. I have a book that's just a glossary of terms from the world of gas dragsters, and another on the Czech-built Tatra, the most beautiful make of car the world has ever seen. And I am a completist about the photo books of the “porn auteur” Elmer Batters. If only I collected books on marijuana I could have a shelf called “Ass, Gas, or Grass: Nobody Reads for Free.”

What kind of reader were you as a child?

Supposedly I went into my room with
Alice in Wonderland
, which was given to me when I was five, and didn't come out until I was done. I was an early reader but I don't think that says much. Having a child and being around them, it's apparent to me that there's some kind of clock that goes off at different times for different kids. Mine went off early, and I didn't like to sleep. So my mother let me stay up as late as I wanted looking at books, and she says I stayed up all night doing that starting at age three. My best years are way behind me.

What were your favorite childhood books? Do you have a favorite literary character?

I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from
Mad
magazine. But all other comic books literally gave me a headache. I loved
Island of the Blue Dolphins
,
Julie of the Wolves
, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I still think of that moment at the end of
Island of the Blue Dolphins
when Karana is rescued and the seaman gives her a coarse dress made of denim coveralls to make her “decent.” Later, fourth or fifth grade, I remember being obsessed with
My Ántonia
, by Willa Cather; devastated by the brave demise of McMurphy in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
; and crushed out on Pappadopoulis, the bohemian Odysseus of
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
, by Richard Fariña.

What children's books have you enjoyed discovering (or rediscovering) through your six-year-old son?

We read a lot of books that were mine when I was little, saved all these years:
Higglety Pigglety Pop!
, by Maurice Sendak.
The Wedding Procession of the Rag Doll and Broom Handle
, by Carl Sandburg, illustrated by Harriet Pincus.
The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine
, by Donald Barthelme. Tolstoy's
Fables and Folktales for Children
—so simple, and wonderful, if slightly dark. They remind me that a children's story doesn't need to pander in order to entertain. (The problem with so much recent children's literature: it panders, and yet is often inappropriate for children.) Two new discoveries that are profound works of children's literature:
Paddle-to-the-Sea
, by Holling C. Holling, and
The Animal Family
, by Randall Jarrell.

Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer?

I studied the novels of Joan Didion and Don DeLillo, who seemed deft and worldly in a way I hoped to someday be. More recently, I have grown deeply impressed by the verve and erudition of
The Recognitions
, by William Gaddis. It is a work that, to me, fulfills the ambition to apprehend the writer's own moment as history—that is the goal, to my mind. I don't care to read about present-day America unless the writer truly has something to say about these times—uses the contemporary, rather than gets used by it. The whole idea of “offering up a mirror” is not enough. I want more.

Is there a particular book that made you want to write?

Cormac McCarthy's
Blood Meridian
is without question the book that made me want to try to be a fiction writer as an actual serious undertaking.

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

Given who our president is, this is like a trick question. I have serious problems with Obama. But Obama is not poorly read; that is not his problem. He's extremely well read. He's still got a drone program. He lets bankers run our economy. Allows Guantánamo to remain open. It would be foolish to pretend I could recommend some enlightening text and he'd scratch his chin and then go for a policy makeover.

What does your personal book collection look like? Do you organize your books in any particular way?

Subject areas for nonfiction. Literature is alphabetical, except I keep poetry on its own set of shelves, but some poets go with fiction for reasons that remain mysterious to me, such as Anne Carson, Francis Ponge, Rimbaud. And I have a “hot” bookcase where I keep what I'm looking at for a novel I'm writing. On the fiction shelves, in front of more dormant areas, I place images of girls and women reading, maybe that's precious, it's just a habit that got started at some point: postcards of paintings by, for instance, Tamara de Lempicka, Gerhard Richter, Lucian Freud, and Cindy Sherman as ingénue-librarian, reaching up.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I set aside books without finishing them all the time, but that doesn't mean I didn't like them. Take, recently,
Living Currency
, by Pierre Klossowski, or the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
, or Xenophon's
Anabasis
—I dip in, and in thirty pages I have a taste of something important that I don't have the training to really benefit from reading to completion anyhow. For years all I'd read of
Ulysses
was the first hundred pages plus the Molly Bloom soliloquy, and nevertheless I had the audacity to still consider myself an admirer of that work. Later I read the whole thing, but in that earlier time, it was much better to have read some of it than none of it.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

There are various major works I have not read—
Anna Karenina
,
The Red and the Black
,
The Betrothed
. But nothing I am embarrassed not to have yet read. Reading widely and deeply is crucial, I constantly read, but knowing every important work of literature, if you want to be a novelist, is not required and could even hinder things. A writer is someone who can ask questions and follow bold instincts of assimilation. A vast intellectual, someone incredibly erudite about the entire canon, might have more difficulty doing so.

Rachel Kushner
is the author of
The Flamethrowers
and
Telex from Cuba
.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank four groups of people. First, at
The New York Times
, I want to thank Sam Tanenhaus, for hiring me first as children's book editor, then as features editor, and for giving me big shoes to fill at the
Book Review
. I am hugely grateful to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Dean Baquet, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, and Janet Elder for their tremendous leadership, encouragement, and support at the
Times
. At the
Book Review
, I've had the pleasure and honor to work with a great team of people: Bob Harris, David Kelly, Alex Star, Jenny Schuessler, Barry Gewen, Alida Becker, Jen McDonald, Greg Cowles, Parul Sehgal, Jen Szalai, Sarah Smith, John Williams, Blake Wilson, Steve Coates, Elsa Dixler, Ihsan Taylor, Amy Rowland, Doug Sanders, Valencia Prashad, Jude Biersdorfer, Francis Mateo, Jeffrey Hanson-Scales, and our art director, Nicholas Blechman, who makes By the Book—and every issue, every week—look so distinctive.

I want to thank those who worked specifically on this book: Alex Ward, for helping shepherd this project. My terrific agent, Lydia Wills, as always. Scott Turow, a great champion of books and their authors, for writing a lovely foreword to the book. And Jillian Tamaki, the talented illustrator who creates portraits each week for the column, beautifully reproduced in the book and on its cover.

At Henry Holt, Paul Golob, whose meticulous reading and edits both awe me and put me to shame. Emi Ikkanda, mistress of organization. Everyone I've worked with at Holt has been terrific: Stephen Rubin, Gillian Blake, Pat Eisemann, Maggie Richards, and the entire sales team. And Meryl Levavi, Rick Pracher, and Molly Bloom, who gave the book its great look and brought it out on schedule.

And at home, I want to thank my husband, Michael, and my three burgeoning readers, Beatrice, Tobias, and Theodore, for all their love, inspiration, and support—even when I had to work at night and couldn't read by their side.

Index

The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

Abbey, Edward

“About Writing” (Delany)

Above the River
(Wright)

Absalom, Absalom!
(Faulkner)

Acheson, Dean

Act of War
(Cheevers)

Act One
(Hart)

Adams, Alice

Adelman, Jeremy

Adventures of Augie March
(Bellow)

Adventures of Pinocchio, The
(Collodi)

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The
(Conan Doyle)

Advice to a Young Scientist
(Medawar)

Aerogrammes
(James)

Aesop

After Claude
(Owen)

After Mandela
(Foster)

After Visiting Friends
(Hainey)

Agassi, Andre

Agee, James

Aiken, Joan

Alain-Fournier, Henri

Alameddine, Rabih

Al Aswany, Alaa

Alcott, Louisa May

ALEC
(Campbell)

Alexander, Elizabeth

Alexander, Michelle

Alexandria Quartet, The
(Durrell)

Alexie, Sherman

Alger, Cristina

Alice in Wonderland
(Carroll)

Allen, Woody

Allende, Isabel

All of It, The
(Haien)

All the Best
(Bush)

All the King's Men
(Warren)

All the Way
(Schenkkan)

Almost Invisible
(Strand)

Along Came a Spider
(Patterson)

Als, Hilton

Alter, Adam

Alvarez, Julia

Amazing Bone, The
(Steig)

Ambassadors, The
(James)

Ambrose, Stephen

American Gods
(Gaiman)

American Life, An
(Reagan)

American Religion, The
(Bloom)

American Studies
(Merlis)

American Tragedy, An
(Dreiser)

American Wife
(Sittenfeld)

Amis, Kingsley

Anabasis
(Xenophon)

Anatomy of an Epidemic
(Whitaker)