FEBRUARY 3, 2015
INFLUENCED BY
A Survey of Writers on Contemporary Writers
Listening to writers read and discuss their work at Newtonville Books, the bookstore
my wife and I own outside Boston, I began to wonder which living, contemporary
writers held the most influence over their work. This survey is not meant to be
comprehensive, but is the result of my posing the question to as many writers as I
could ask.
—Jaime Clarke
JHUMPA LAHIRI
© Dan Callister
ALETHEA BLACK: When I first read Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, I’d been writing for eight
years, and was still about eight years away from publishing my first book. Her elegant
prose,and what it taught me about precision, power, and restraint, was a turningpoint,
and is still a touchstone I return to. What I love most is the way sheis simultaneously
insightful and entertaining, fluid and masterful. Her workmakes me feel as if I’ve
dropped down into the hidden undercurrent of truelife, and never fails to remind me of
why I became a writer in the first place.
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER: As a graduate student, I studiedJhumpa Lahiri’s
stories the way someone else might study a car’s engine, bydismantling them and
studying the parts. Gradually, I got better at sensing the architecture of those elegant
stories, the way the later sections rise directly but imperceptibly from the earlier events.
I probably learned more about storytelling from her story “A Temporary Matter," the
ending of which is simultaneously surprising and inevitable, a subtle sleight of hand,
than any other single work I’ve ever read.
CHANG-RAE LEE
© David Levenson
RACHEL DEWOSKIN: The last lines of Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life read, “I will
circle round and arrive again. Come almost home.” The first time I landed on “Come
almost home,” I flipped straight back to the beginning and read the book again. Slowly
the second time, because I had blazed through it so fast the first. I subsequently read
every one of his books, ravenously once and then carefully again, circling back. His
novels have changed my writing, teaching, and thinking. My own books are about
people on the periphery, and no one writes outsiders’ stories quite like Chang-rae Lee.
His protagonists have still surfaces; they are constructed as finely as phrases of
detached, perfect diction. And yet underneath their cleanly assimilated, Englishlanguage exteriors are histories of turmoil powerful enough to drive whole (often epic)
novels. Theirs are stories of love in the time of comfort women, of war, and of perpetual
circling, trying to find some balance between interior and exterior lives. History
alternately creeps up slowly and accelerates, slamming into the present tense.
I always assign Chang-rae Lee’s novels to my undergraduate and graduate students, not
just because I want to read them again and again myself, not just because they’re
structurally brilliant, but also and always because they are full of empathy and grace. All
of his protagonists get loving, calm, three-dimensional treatment, even in instances of
criminal behavior, even when the plots reach frenzied pitches. Lee harnesses the
repressed energies of his characters into stories so suspenseful that they are themselves
at odds with his quiet style. How can we all be as simultaneously restrained and fullthrottle, telescopic and giant in our scope?
RU FREEMAN: I admire Chang-rae Lee’s meticulously written prose which somehow
manages to bridge the inherent self-consciousness of craft with the utter abandon of
story-telling.
IRINA REYN: It is no exaggeration to say that Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker
convinced me that becoming a writer was a worthy enterprise for an immigrant after all.
It was published a year after I graduated from college, at a time I was drifting from job
to job while struggling to cobble together a narrative around my immigration from the
former Soviet Union. Everything I wrote felt too simple, organized into neat dichotomies
of “here” and “there”. From the very first line—“The day my wife left she gave me a list of
who I was”—Native Speaker was a revelation. I still remember that “false speaker of
language” was one of the items on that damning list. Yes, I thought. At last. The way
duality of language and culture fragments a psyche. The way we are forced to shuffle
identities depending on the company we keep. This was no common tale of rosycheeked, striving, assimilating immigrants, not merely a story of isolation and alienation
that we might expect, but something narrator Henry Park calls his “American
education”: “My ugly immigrant’s truth… is that I have exploited my own, and those
others who can be exploited.” Immigrants as exploiters. Now this was something new.
JONATHAN LETHEM
© Matthew Salacuse
IVY POCHODA: I grew up in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn back when you were lucky to
convince a taxi driver to cross the bridge, when it was necessary to justify my parents’
preference for our borough over Manhattan, when it wasn’t somewhere “cool” but some
place special. My friends and I would play unsupervised in the street, on the sidewalks,
in the alley next to my house. We played city-kid games: stoopball, running bases, four
square. We had block long water fights and tried our luck with skateboards on a
homemade quarter-pipe. We knew our neighbors, rang their doorbells, stopped by
unannounced.
Whenever I left home, for summer camp and later for college, I never tired of trying to
explain Brooklyn to the uninitiated. My borough is and was important to me in ways I
struggled to articulate, ways I didn’t understand. It was tough and beautiful, hopeful and
desperate.
I moved abroad after college, looking for my own “Brooklyn,” somewhere I could
discover, or rather rediscover, like my parents had Cobble Hill. And in my absence, my
old neighborhood changed. Streets that I was forbidden from walking down when I was
a kid became home to Michelin-star restaurants. Italian social clubs turned into private
yoga studios. My neighborhood, my Brooklyn, began to slip away, and I grew worried
that I’d lost it forever.
I read Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude when I was living in Amsterdam.
From the first page, I knew I’d come home. (Lethem’s book is set five blocks from my
parents’ house.) It was all there both physically and emotionally: the delicious freedom
of being allowed to play on the street after dinner, the old men sitting on milk crates,
rolling empties of Manhattan Special, the inner city wonder of an ailanthus pushing
through the sidewalk, the remarkable childlike perspective of an entire world narrowed
to a single city block. Lethem brilliantly recovered a time and a place I feared lost to
gentrifying invaders, to people who love Brooklyn but for entirely different reasons that
I did and do. The Fortress of Solitude captures the entire panorama of my childhood,
from the precise the slang of my corner of Brooklyn, the class anxieties of growing up in
a neighborhood on the verge, to the pride I derived from my own outer-boroughness.
Of course there are no shortage of books set in Brooklyn, Lethem’s own Motherless
Brooklyn for instance. But unlike other books set in the borough, The Fortress of
Solitude unashamedly mixes poetry and street slang. It’s tough without being
hardboiled. It’s magical and musical. It’s a novel of contradictions, both wholly realistic,
yet imbued with a daring dose of magical realism that recalls the most powerful
childhood imaginings. In other words, it’s a perfect reflection of the Brooklyn itself. My
Brooklyn.
I was struggling to write my first novel when I read The Fortress of Solitude. I thought
books had to be wildly imagined, fantastically conceived, take you places you’d never
been, force your mind into different worlds. I didn’t know that the best stories could be
found so close to home, that my own block might hold enough magic and wonder,
poetry and pain.
MATTHEW SPECKTOR: Jonathan Lethem embarrassed me. I came to Lethem’s
work late—this isn’t the embarrassing part—but after Motherless Brooklyn, and after
the half-decade or so of work that preceded it, I picked up Fortress of Solitude. A little
reluctantly. I’d nibbled the edges of earlier books without being fully persuaded (without
giving them the sort of attention that would’ve allowed them to persuade), and so it took
a wolf in so-called realist’s clothing to do it. Unlike its predecessors, unlike even
Motherless Brooklyn, which was too alert in fucking around with gumshoe tropes to
qualify, Fortress was a social novel. An evident social novel, anyway: by the time we got
to any reality-bending elements, I was too deeply immersed in the Boerum Hill of the
70s to care. The thing was, I was touched by it. It wasn’t ambition, or scope, or scale, or
ideas—I could feel the press of DeLillo all over it, his muddy thumbprints smudging the
sentences, but I didn’t care about that, either—it was depth. And a very specific kind of
depth, at that. His characters were not merely haunted, or round: they were humiliated,
in a way that felt nearly metaphysical. They were not mocked, but rather, butterflied.
For all the yokings and beatdowns, the street-level subjugations endured by Dylan—and
Lethem seemed to need to invent an even greater nerd, just to contain the overflow, in
the indelible Arthur Lomb—the book seemed to contain neither a hunger for
punishment nor one for revenge. Fortress isn’t a sadistic book, nor a masochistic one,
but it is almost infinitely humane.
To that point, I suppose, I’d been under the spell of writers who were more or less
mandarin: a James Salter here, a Shirley Hazzard there, writers whose sentences
attained to a perfect equipoise. Lethem was deliberately lumpy (Ebdus joined a parade
of protagonists whose names lodge like a bone in the throat: Lionel Esrog on one side,
Perkus Tooth on the other), fine-tuned in his perceptions, calmly musical perhaps but
never fussy. Yet the more important thing was this openness to embarrassment. The
moment I saw it enacted as drama, I began to notice, too, the presence of humiliation as
theme, as leitmotif, as organizing principle even. (How often the word ‘shame’ appears
in middle-period Lethem, as well. Search The Disappointment Artist and see how often.
Even when he’s writing warmly and lauditorily about Philip K. Dick, one of his heroes,
Lethem returns again and again to Dick’s alleged worst novel, Vulcan’s Hammer, calling
it out for “special shaming.”) What is Lionel Esrog’s Tourette’s syndrome but an engine
for such, the relentlessness of the private, inappropriate self busting out in public?
Lethem’s predecessors—Saul Bellow, say, in Seize The Day—give us the agonizing feel of
the effort to maintain appearances in the face of private collapse. Motherless Brooklyn
simply dispenses with the effort. The self can’t help but irrupt, in all its red-faced glory.
This is the American Grain, of course. Whether our secrets must be declared (Whitman)
or suppressed (Henry James), our literature exists to shine a light on them, and
Lethem’s casual disarming of his own defenses—the way he seemed to pick the lock on a
generational self-consciousness—helped me put paid to my own. It did what writers
have always done for each other, what Hawthorne did for Melville, for example. It
liberated me, it woke me up, and it freed me to maximize my talents, to embrace—rather
than dodge—my literary limitations.
CHARLES YU: Jonathan Lethem is unclassifiable. I don’t think he is constrained by
anything, stylistically, thematically, formally. Many novelists of his caliber are, like him,
in a category of one, but what Lethem does that makes him so important, I think, is that
he imagines new completely new areas in literary possibility space, and then fills the
possibility with an actuality, and does it in a way that acts as a bridge for other novelists
to cross into the space.
GARY LUTZ
© John Madera
RYAN BOUDINOT: I’ve noticed that Gary Lutz’s lecture that he delivered at (I think)
Columbia, "The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” is frequently passed around by writing grad
students who are drawn to language-driven prose. It’s kind of ridiculous to even use the
term “language-driven” because isn’t all prose driven by language? Regardless, Lutz, to
my mind, is the best example of the acolytes of Lish, the writers whose work makes you
stop and savor individual lines. He pushes his language into the realm of poetry and
some of his stories barely hold together, plotwise. And as far as subject matter, he’s
pretty uni-dimensional—his stories convey the same weary, alienated mood most of the
time. But I want to underline every one of his sentences. He’s like a guitarist who can
play three notes and you know who’s playing them immediately. A Gary Lutz sentence is
like no other. There’s a whole domain of the English language that seems to belong only
to him.
NELLY REIFLER: Reading Gary Lutz’s Stories in the Worst Way was like catching a
virus. For several years I couldn’t get his weird precision and gymnastics with parts of
speech out of my brain. I’d spend ages on each sentence that I wrote. Writing was a
difficult; I felt contorted, twisted up in knots. It made me a better writer.
WHITNEY TERRELL: There are writers I read and admire even though their work is
very different from my own. For instance, contemporary experimental writers like Gary
Lutz. My interest in him quickened after my exposure to the war in Iraq, where I worked
as an embedded reporter. The war was, to put it mildly, a surreal experience. When I
looked back at past war literature, I found that writers like Blaise Cendrars and Celine
had managed to bring that feeling to the page by defying and distorting the normal
confines of realism. That led me to contemporary writers who did the same thing. I don’t
know if I can define how Lutz and other writers like him (Aimee Bender, George
Saunders, Adam Johnson) influence my work yet, except to say that they continually
remind me that my way of doing things isn’t the only option.
–
Alethea Black is the author of the short story collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely
Karen Thompson Walker is the author of the novel The Age of Miracles
Rachel DeWoskin is the author of the novels Blind and Big Girl Small
Ru Freeman is the author of the novels On Sal Mal Lane and A Disobedient Girl
Irina Reyn is the author of the novel What Happened to Anna K
Ivy Pochoda is the author of the novels Visitation Street and The Art of Disappearing
Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That
Summertime Sound
Charles Yu is the author of the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
and the short story collections Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You
Ryan Boudinot is the author of Blueprints of the Afterlife, Misconception, and The
Littlest Hitler: Stories
Nelly Reifler is the author of the novel Elect H. Mouse State Judge and the short story
collection See Through
Whitney Terrell is the author of The King of Kings County and The Huntsman
Lettering by Caleb Misclevitz