Farther Away: Essays (12 page)

I'm going to begin by addressing four unpleasant questions that novelists often get asked at an event like this. These questions are apparently the price we have to pay for the pleasure of appearing in public. They're maddening not just because we're asked them so often but also because, with one exception, they're difficult to answer and, therefore, very much worth asking.

The first of these perennial questions is:
Who are your influences?

Sometimes the person asking this question merely wants some book recommendations, but all too often the question seems to be intended seriously. And part of what annoys me about it is that it's always asked in the present tense: Who
are
my influences? The fact is, at this point in my life, I'm mostly influenced by my own past writing. If I were still laboring in the shadow of, say, E. M. Forster, I would certainly be at pains to pretend that I wasn't. According to Mr. Harold Bloom, whose clever theory of literary influence helped him make a career of distinguishing “weak” writers from “strong” writers, I wouldn't even be conscious of the degree to which I was still laboring in E. M. Forster's shadow. Only Harold Bloom would be fully conscious of that.

Direct influence makes sense only with very young writers, who, in the course of figuring out how to write, first try copying the styles and attitudes and methods of their favorite authors. I personally was very influenced, at the age of twenty-one, by C. S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Louise Fitzhugh, Herbert Marcuse, P. G. Wodehouse, Karl Kraus, my then-fiancée, and
The Dialectic of Enlightenment,
by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. For a while, in my early twenties, I put a lot of effort into copying the sentence rhythms and comic dialogue of Don DeLillo; I was also very taken with the strenuously vivid and all-knowing prose of Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon. And the plots of my first two novels were substantially borrowed from two movies,
The American Friend
(by Wim Wenders) and
Cutter's Way
(by Ivan Passer). But to me these various “influences” seem not much more meaningful than the fact that, when I was fifteen, my favorite music group was the Moody Blues. A writer has to begin somewhere, but where exactly he or she begins is almost random.

It would be somewhat more meaningful to say that I was influenced by Franz Kafka. By this I mean that it was Kafka's novel
The Trial,
as taught by the best literature professor I ever had, that opened my eyes to the greatness of what literature can do, and made me want to try to create some literature myself. Kafka's brilliantly ambiguous rendering of Josef K., who is at once a sympathetic and unjustly persecuted Everyman and a self-pitying and guilt-denying criminal, was my portal to the possibilities of fiction as a vehicle of self-investigation: as a method of engagement with the difficulties and paradoxes of my own life. Kafka teaches us how to love ourselves even as we're being merciless toward ourselves; how to remain humane in the face of the most awful truths about ourselves. It's not enough to love your characters, and it's not enough to be hard on your characters: you always have to try to be doing both at the same time. The stories that recognize people as they really are—the books whose characters are at once sympathetic subjects and dubious objects—are the ones capable of reaching across cultures and generations. This is why we still read Kafka.

The bigger problem with the question about influences, however, is that it seems to presuppose that young writers are lumps of soft clay on which certain great writers, dead or living, have indelibly left their mark. And what maddens the writer trying to answer the question honestly is that almost everything a writer has ever
read
leaves some kind of mark. To list every writer I've learned something from would take me hours, and it still wouldn't account for why some books matter to me so much more than other books: why, even now, when I'm working, I often think about
The Brothers Karamazov
and
The Man Who Loved Children
and never about
Ulysses
or
To the Lighthouse
. How did it happen that I did
not
learn anything from Joyce or Woolf, even though they're both obviously “strong” writers?

The common understanding of influence, whether Harold Bloomian or more conventional, is far too linear and one-directional. Art history, with its progressive narrative of influences handed down from generation to generation, is a useful pedagogical tool for organizing information, but it has very little to do with the actual experience of being a fiction writer. When I write, I don't feel like a craftsman influenced by earlier craftsmen who were themselves influenced by earlier craftsmen. I feel like a member of a single, large virtual community in which I have dynamic relationships with other members of the community, most of whom are no longer living. As in any other community, I have my friends and I have my enemies. I find my way to those corners of the world of fiction where I feel most at home, most securely but also provocatively among my friends. Once I've read enough books to have identified who these friends are—and this is where the young writer's process of active
selection
comes in, the process of
choosing
whom to be “influenced” by— I work to advance our common interests. By means of what I write and how I write, I fight for my friends and I fight against my enemies. I want more readers to appreciate the glory of the nineteenth-century Russians; I'm indifferent to whether readers love James Joyce; and my work represents an active campaign against the values I dislike: sentimentality, weak narrative, overly lyrical prose, solipsism, self-indulgence, misogyny and other parochialisms, sterile game playing, overt didacticism, moral simplicity, unnecessary difficulty, informational fetishes, and so on. Indeed, much of what might be called actual “influence” is negative: I don't want to be like this writer or that writer.

The situation is never static, of course. Reading and writing fiction is a form of active social engagement, of conversation and competition. It's a way of being and becoming. Somehow, at the right moment, when I'm feeling particularly lost and forlorn, there's always a new friend to be made, an old friend to distance myself from, an old enemy to be forgiven, a new enemy to be identified. Indeed—and I'll say more about this later—it's impossible for me to write a new novel without first finding new friends and enemies. To start writing
The Corrections,
I befriended Kenzaburo Oe, Paula Fox, Halldór Laxness, and Jane Smiley. With
Freedom,
I found new allies in Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Alice Munro. For a while, Philip Roth was my new bitter enemy, but lately, unexpectedly, he has become a friend as well. I still campaign against
American Pastoral,
but when I finally got around to reading
Sabbath's Theater
its fearlessness and ferocity became an inspiration. It had been a long time since I'd felt as grateful to a writer as I did when reading the scene in
Sabbath's Theater
where Mickey Sabbath's best friend catches him in the bathtub holding a picture of the friend's adolescent daughter and a pair of her underpants, or the scene in which Sabbath finds a paper coffee cup in the pocket of his army jacket and decides to abase himself by begging for money in the subway. Roth may not want to have me as a friend, but I was happy, at those moments, to claim him as one of mine. I'm happy to hold up the savage hilarity of
Sabbath's Theater
as a correction and reproach of the sentimentality of certain young American writers and not-so-young critics who seem to believe, in defiance of Kafka, that literature is about being nice.

The second perennial question is:
What time of day do you work, and what do you write on?

This must seem, to the people who ask it, like the safest and politest of questions. I suspect that it's the question people ask a writer when they can't think of anything else to ask. And yet to me it's the most disturbingly personal and invasive of questions. It forces me to picture myself sitting down at my computer every morning at eight o'clock: to see objectively the person who, as he sits down at his computer in the morning, wants only to be a pure, invisible subjectivity. When I'm working, I don't want anybody else in the room, including myself.

Question No. 3 is:
I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters “take over” and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too?

This one always raises my blood pressure. Nobody ever answered it better than Nabokov did in his
Paris Review
interview, where he fingered E. M. Forster as the source of the myth about a novelist's characters “taking over,” and claimed that, unlike Forster, who let his characters sail away on their passage to India, he himself worked his characters “like galley slaves.” The question obviously raised Nabokov's blood pressure, too.

When a writer makes a claim like Forster's, the best-case scenario is that he's mistaken. More often, unfortunately, I catch a whiff of self-aggrandizement, as if the writer were trying to distance his work from the mechanistic plotting of genre novels. The writer would like us to believe that, unlike those hacks who can tell you in advance how their books are going to end,
his
imagination is so powerful, and
his
characters so real and vivid, that he has no control over them. The best case here, again, is that it isn't true, because the notion presupposes a loss of authorial will, an abdication of intent. The novelist's primary responsibility is to create meaning, and if you could somehow leave this job to your characters you would necessarily be avoiding it yourself.

But let's assume, for charity's sake, that the writer who claims to be the servant of his characters isn't simply flattering himself. What might he actually mean? He probably means that, once a character has been fleshed out enough to begin to form a coherent whole, a kind of inevitability has been set in motion. He means, specifically, that the story he originally imagined for a character often turns out not to follow from the lineaments of the character he's been able to create. I may abstractly imagine a character whom I intend to make a murderer of his girlfriend, only to discover, in the actual writing, that the character I'm able to make actually work on the page has too much compassion or self-awareness to be a murderer. The key phrase here is “work on the page.” Everything under the sun is imaginable and proposable in the abstract. But the writer is always limited by what he or she is actually able to make work: to make plausible, to make readable, to make sympathetic, to make entertaining, to make compelling, and, above all, to make distinctive and original. As Flannery O'Connor famously said, the fiction writer does whatever she can get away with—“and nobody ever got away with much.” Once you start writing the book, as opposed to planning it, the universe of conceivable human types and behaviors shrinks drastically to the microcosm of human possibilities that you contain within yourself. A character dies on the page if you can't hear his or her voice. In a very limited sense, I suppose, this amounts to “taking over” and “telling you” what the character will and won't do. But the reason the character can't do something is that
you
can't. The task then becomes to figure out what the character
can
do—to try to stretch the narrative as far as possible, to be sure not to overlook exciting possibilities in yourself, while continuing to bend the narrative in the direction of meaning.

Which brings me to perennial question No. 4:
Is your fiction autobiographical?

I'm suspicious of any novelist who would honestly answer no to this question, and yet my strong temptation, when I'm asked it myself, is to answer no. Of the four perennial questions, this is the one that always feels the most hostile. Maybe I'm just projecting that hostility, but I feel as if my powers of imagination are being challenged. As in: “Is this a true work of fiction, or just a thinly disguised account of your own life? And since there are only so many things that can happen to you in your life, you're surely going to use up all of your autobiographical material soon—if, indeed, you haven't used it up already!—and so you probably won't be writing any more good books, will you? In fact, if your books are just thinly disguised autobiography, maybe they weren't as interesting as we thought they were? Because, after all, what makes your life so much more interesting than anybody else's? It's not as interesting as Barack Obama's life, is it? And also, for that matter, if your work is autobiographical, why didn't you do the honest thing and write a nonfiction account of it? Why dress it up in lies? What kind of bad person are you, telling us lies to try to make your life seem more interesting and dramatic?” I hear all of these other questions in the question, and before long the very word
autobiographical
feels shameful to me.