JANUARY 27, 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
MARY GAITSKILL
© edrants.com
ALICIA ERIAN: In college, my friend lent me her copy of Mary Gaitskill’s first book, a
collection of stories entitled Bad Behavior, and said I should read it. What exactly that
should meant wasn’t clear, but my friend was one of the best dressers I’d ever known,
and this caused me to take her literary recommendations very seriously.
I connected with the disconnected misery of Gaitskill’s characters. They depressed the
hell out of me, but they never bored me. I always needed to know what was going to
happen to them. They mirrored my own emptiness, and from this I inferred that I had a
shot at being interesting as a person, too.
Most especially, I connected with the story “Secretary.” It made me incredibly horny,
and incredibly ashamed of being horny, since what was making me horny wasn’t
something that was good for the main character, whose boss was sexually abusing her.
At the same time, as a wannabe writer, I was aware that what Gaitskill had
accomplished in terms of eliciting these conflicting responses from me was the apex of
literary success. Gaitskill had revealed to me who I was—my basest instincts—before I’d
even understood such things myself. I didn’t know her, but somehow, she really, really
knew me. I hoped to offer the same experience to another reader one day.
ELLIOTT HOLT: I was in college—this was nearly twenty years ago—when I read
Mary Gaitskill’s story, “A Romantic Weekend.” Everything about it was a revelation: the
deadpan title; the cool, unsentimental tone; the confident shifts in perspective; the taut
sentences. The subject matter was revelatory, too: I had never read a story about
sadomasochism before. In fact, I had never before read something so unsparing in its
description of “romance” and desire. “A Romantic Weekend” is a story about
disappointment, mostly: the man is a sadist and discovers, in their weekend away, that
his new lover is not the true masochist that he thought she was. They are not sexually
compatible. But once they let go of their rigid definitions and ideas of one another, they
actually connect—briefly (we know it won’t last)—as human beings. Gaitskill’s sharp
descriptions are unforgettable: “In the big coat he looked like the young pet of a budding
secret police force. She thought he was beautiful,” observes her female protagonist,
Beth. Meanwhile Beth’s sadistic lover thinks: “She was in love with the idea of
intelligence, and she overestimated her own.”
I devoured Gaitskill’s first collection Bad Behavior. And then, some ten years later,
when I was getting my MFA, her stunningly good novel Veronica was published. (I
recently reread it and it’s even better than I remembered: the fierce voice is amazing.)
Gaitskill is a brave writer: reading her gave me permission to take risks in fiction. And in
2006, while I was still in graduate school, I sent my first finished short story,
“Evacuation Instructions,” to the Zoetrope: All-Story annual short fiction contest. Mary
Gaitskill was the judge. Over 1500 stories were submitted to the contest that year, but I
won 2nd prize. It was the first time that I had been paid ($500!) for my fiction and it was
the first time that I felt like a “real” writer. I had never been published. But Mary
Gaitskill had read my story and liked it enough to give it an award. It was just the
encouragement I needed to keep writing, to believe in my voice. I’ll be forever grateful.
JAMES SCOTT: I think Mary Gaitskill is a badass. In fact, I think it’s that very quality
that draws many young writers to her. She’s unflinching, and this, too, is influential. The
problem arises from young writers pretending to be Gaitskill. In doing so, they often
abuse their characters not for the sake of characterization, but for some misguided sense
of ‘reality.’ Of course, lots of writers have this effect (Denis Johnson is one of the other
oft-cited influences in this regard) but there’s something especially gritty about Gaitskill
that enamors people.
DAVID GATES
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JIM GAVIN: David Gates terrifies me. His novels make me laugh out loud—the cokefueled jam session in Preston Falls is one of my all-time favorite comic set pieces, up
there with Sebastian Dangerfield’s London bender in The Ginger Man and Frederick
Exley’s last night with Mr. Blue in A Fan’s Notes—but Gates only seems capable of
providing the kind of laughter that might come upon a man who’s facing a firing
squard. A dread cackle that spooks the ravens from the trees. Gates is peerless in his
depection of male depravity, but his characters are not rogue outsiders, bravely
marauding through the American night. His bastards hide in plain sight. They have
familes, corporate jobs, front lawns, mortgages. They like to BBQ and watch the ball
game. They love these suburban ideals, even though they know it’s all bullshit, but they
also want desperately to escape, to recapture the promise and anarchy of their youth,
and they try sometimes, but only in half-ass fashion, because they know, in their
battered hearts, that wanting to escape is just another cliche, another form of bullshit,
and so one evening, unable to reconcile their dreams and desires and horrible selfknowledge, they wander down to the basement and intentionally shoot themselves in
the hand.
J.G. Ballard said: “The suburbs are far more sinister places than most city dwellers
imagine. Their very blandness forces the imagination into new areas. I mean, one’s got
to get up in the morning thinking of a deviant act, merely to make certain of one’s
freedom.” If nothing else, Gates’ dickish heroes want freedom, a simple but essential
wish, and maybe this is why I’m so willing to follow them as they sink into the Slough of
Despond and trudge their way through the Valley of Humiliation. They are degenerates,
but this is the source of their honesty. They are incapable of lying to themselves. Every
thought is undercut by the next, every motive gets questioned, every truth gets
dismissed as an illusion. Gates captures this ongoing mental calculus in masterful
style. First, let it be said that no living writer makes better use of italics. Especially in
his dialogue, which by itself is worth the price of admission. But once he gets inside his
characters’ heads—“Some inner life, boy”—you don’t have a chance. You will plunge to
the bottom. You will watch each of these men become their own firing squad. Not a
single sentences stands out as “beautiful” or, God help us, “lyrical,” but the cumulative
effect of the voice—jittery and rhythmic and faithful to the vernacular—is so hypnotic, so
pitch perfect, that you’re never distracted by a sentence trying too hard. It all goes down
so easy. You forget that you’re reading. The book dissolves in your hands and it’s more
like you’re listening to music. Hilarious and terrifying music.
–
Alicia Erian is the author of the story collection The Brutal Language of Love, and the
novel Towelhead
Elliott Holt is the author of the novel You Are One of Them
James Scott is the author of the novel The Kept
Jim Gavin is the author of the short story collection Middle Men
Lettering by Caleb Misclevitz