What a Lonely Little World This Would Be
Some of my favorite books and some of my favorite
writers?
I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Dewberry and Robert Olen
Butler. I like to just get that out of the way. I actually
am; I really am.
I gave a reading a couple weeks ago with Jonathan Safran Foer
whose work I admire greatly and somebody asked that question.
He went first and he said, “You can’t answer a
question like that. You know? It changes all the time. It
depends on where you are and every day it changes; it’s
not the same. And different things...and different reasons...and
blah blah blah.” I’m not making fun of him, because
he’s incredibly smart and a great guy. But I was like:
“Oh, I can. I can tell you.”
There are books like The Magic Mountain, and One
Hundred Years of Solitude, and Lolita, Anna
Karenina, that are on everybody’s top list. And
then there are books that just change all the time. I’ve
been on a huge William Maxwell kick. In fact, this is really
funny; this comes back to Lucy: When Lucy died, one of her
friends who went and cleaned out her apartment kept saying,
“What do you want? what do you want?” I don’t
want anything. I don’t want anything. And she had very
little left because she moved many times; she had practically
nothing. But Sophie sent me two books. One was The Last
of the Peshwas and the other one was They Came Like
Swallows. I was so mad at her for sending me the books
and I tucked them in my bookshelf. Probably two years later,
I was going on a flight and I pulled out They Came Like
Swallows and took it with me. That was the first William
Maxwell book that I read. And I think I’ve read all
of them since then. To read They Came Like Swallows
and then to read So Long, See You Tomorrow is one
of the most remarkable experiences. They’re both extremely
short novels and they were written fifty years apart, or fifty-five—he
wrote one in his late twenties and one at 80—and they’re
about the same characters in the same time. So Long, See
You Tomorrow is one of the most perfect, perfect books.
I’m a great admirer ambition—ambition isn’t
a matter of size, but it is about fully capturing something—and
this book is extraordinary in that way.
I’m on a giant Joan Didion kick. The Year of Magical
Thinking: phenomenal book and also a real answer to Truth
and Beauty because it talks about her year of grief after
her husband dies. That got me to go back to early Joan Didion
which I had read before and loved. So, I re-read Slouching
Toward Bethlehem, The White Album, After
Henry, and one that I hadn’t read before called
Where I Was From. I’m never able to get her
fiction very well but her nonficiton is enormously important
to me.
I just read the new Cormac McCarthy book, and I loved it.
Did anybody read that? Oh, I couldn’t put it down. Unbelievably
violent and disgusting but...Cormac McCarthy who I deeply
love. I think Suttree is one of the great novels
of our time. It’s a really, really, really hard book.
No Country of Old Men is like some sort of torturously
fast, whiplash, amusement park ride and it just really completely
leaves you breathless.
So, these are not, like, my favorite books of the Ages.
Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain: a book I always
really like to recommend.
And those Rabbit Angstrom novels? John Updike? Drop out of
graduate school tomorrow. Everything I ever needed to learn...I
learned more by reading those four books—one, two, three,
four—I learned more about writing than I learned from
anything else in my life. Really a profound experience for
me. Lots of people hate them. You have to read them at the
right time. Sort of like Lolita. You know, it’s
such a wildly offensive book, and if you read it at the wrong
moment in your life you’re only offended by it; if you
read it later or at the right moment of your life and you
can see the structure, and the beauty, and the language it’s:
Ahhh! There’s nothing better than Lolita. And
the same is true with the Rabbit novels. I know people who
are, “Ah, they’re just so misogynistic. How can
you possibly read them?” They are incredibly
misogynistic, but, you know, at some point you say, “Hey,
let’s not; let’s go with it.” There’s
so much to learn. If we ignored all great works of art because
they were misogynisitic, what a lonely little world this would
be.
Read this question and answer session with Ann Patchett in
it's entirety in Sight
& Sound. Or listen to her entire reading and Q &
A here.
