After graduation, I set about liquidating my belongings for the move back to the United States. Towels and kitchen things went to college-poor friends, my bike went to the family down the hall, and then things got very serious. All of the books I’d amassed in three years of studying literature in two languages, plus the stacks purchased solely for pleasure, towered before me on a haphazardly shelved wall. The thought of leaving them behind made me nauseous; it was not possible. So I left my shoes. I left my clothing. I left my shampoo. And I filled four enormous suitcases with my books, carefully aligning the spines so their pages would not be crumpled in transit.
My nerdified youth secured my relationship with books early on. Little league softball? No, thanks, I just got a copy of Little Women. The memories of my childhood are comingled with the smell of the page and the thrill of discovery. It all started with The Secret Garden; I was in first grade, and felt as though I’d entered a secret society that gave passage to magical worlds other than my own. In my school years, I soaked up the required reading: Harper Lee, Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Conrad, and then stayed up til dawn reading Plath, Salinger, Camus, Kerouac, Chekhov, all of whom made me feel dangerous, alive, elite, invincible. And then I found Nabokov. I remember reading the first page of Lolita, then reading it again, then reading it out loud, just to hear the exquisite resonance of the language. I became aware, for the first time, of how emotive language could be: that prose could be poetry, and that words were like music.
My current reading life is an ordered jumble of fiction, non-fiction, biography, and memoir. I am an adulterous reader; at any given time, I usually have my hand in at least three books. On my nightstand at the moment are David Foster Wallace’s The Infinite Jest, the memoir of Patti Smith, a collection of Raymond Carver stories, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s book about vegetarianism. On the shelves are bindings that remind me of the places I have explored, the friendships I have made and lost, and the stories that inspired me to be a writer.
So much of what I have learned from reading is not literary; it is universal. Flannery O’Connor assured me that religious crisis was intrinsic to the human experience. From Proust, I learned that the quotidian could be transcendent. Ian McEwan showed me in Atonement the horror of betrayal, and that “it wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy …above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you." I think that truth is the secret of the fiction writer, or really any writer: the ability to look at another person and see their story, imagine their fears and prejudices and dreams, and create a character as complex as the reader. I aspire to create those characters – the ones that break your heart and make wrong decisions, but that are utterly human.
I am captivated by writers who incorporate place and language actively into the fabric of their fictional worlds, who remind us that our environment powerfully informs our behavior. There are writers that do this effortlessly, as Junot Díaz does when he plays with intermingling Spanish and English in Drown and The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao. There are so many others – Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Gabriel García Márquez – that create settings that are so vivid and alive that they become a force, if not a character, in their novels. The verdant Sundarbans sweat out of Midnight’s Children; in A Bend in the River, the Congolese jungle is an open-mouthed trap, spring loaded with tension; Macondo mirrors the lives of generations of Buendías in Cien Años de Soledad. These writers are inspirational for me, exemplars of the kind of thoughtful universes I want to create for my characters. That these worlds are fictional is indubitable. That they are unreal – it’s just not so. Somehow, these carefully imagined worlds seem to bring us even closer to what is true.
I try to read as much new fiction as I can. Along with Granta, McSweeney’s, and Zoetrope, to which I subscribe, I try to read other quarterlies as often as possible. They have turned me on to writers that I have followed through collections of short stories and then to novels. The humor and pathos intertwined in the work of Ben Fountain and Eric Puchner have me watching to see what they will produce next. I was pulled into the alter-realities of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Daniel Alarcon’s Lost City Radio. And I feel that Jonathan Franzen’s most recent reflection on the American family picks up where Roth left off in American Pastoral a decade ago.
When I am working on a project, I find that my reading scale tips to the side of nonfiction, as I research my story and the history, language, and peculiarities of the characters. I much admire writers who devote themselves to getting the details right. Barbara Kingsolver, for example, is an author I have read since my early teen years, and who continues to impress me with her tireless research. Her most recent offering, The Lacuna, is an ode to Mexico City and to Asheville, NC, a fictional biography of Frida Kahlo, and cautionary tale about anti-communism in the United States. The years of research represented in that beautiful novel belie a dedication to historical accuracy, cultural realism, and speak to her great imagination.
Lately, I have been interested in writers that write fiction based on nonfictional experiences. Dave Eggers’ What is the What and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, not to mention Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and any number of works by Graham Greene, are revisitations and reinventions of personal histories.
These stories fall much more in the vein of my own work: fictional stories populated with familiar faces and re-imagined lives. I love to start with a real place, a sense memory, and work outward from a moment. There is such precise joy in seeing and touching and smelling a place deep in memory and feeling the life of a place breathe back into you. As I was applying to MFA programs, I remember being so attracted to Bennington’s slogan. Read a hundred books. Write one. It seems so simple, doesn’t it? But there is such a difference in reading for pleasure and reading to dissect a book, to figure out why it works, how it works. It is such rewarding work, though, reading. We learn so much from others’ worlds, and bring so much from our own. In fact, I think I will go have a read right now. I’m galloping through Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists this afternoon, and really enjoying it. I’ll let you know when I’m through.
Talk soon,
Rachel
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