by Pamela Paul
In addition to your novels, you’ve also written a memoir. What makes a good memoir? Any recent memoirs you would recommend?
It’s not recent, but I would recommend Bad Blood, by Lorna Sage. It’s a memoir of childhood and private life that has an almost eerie immediacy. When I was reading it, I felt as if the author were talking to me: and I talked back (at least, in my head). Memoir’s not an easy form. It’s not for beginners, which is unfortunate, as it is where many people do begin. It’s hard for beginners to accept that unmediated truth often sounds unlikely and unconvincing. If other people are to care about your life, art must intervene. The writer has to negotiate with her memories, and with her reader, and find a way, without interrupting the flow, to caution that this cannot be a true record: this is a version, seen from a single viewpoint. But she has to make it as true as she can. Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself, so you must do it when you are ready.
Are there particular kinds of stories you’re drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
Sad to say, I do like a bit of action. I get impatient with love; I want fighting. I don’t like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities. (Though I love Jane Austen because she’s so shrewdly practical: you can hear the chink of cash in every paragraph.) I can take the marginally magical, but I find realism more fascinating and challenging; it is a challenge for me to pay attention to surfaces, not depths. I like novels about the past, not about the future. For light reading I like novels about the present, but consider them to be an extension of newspapers.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Stacks of books on cricket. I am fascinated by its history. It’s a story told in match statistics, but it’s also bred some stylish prose. My head is full of the ghosts of men in white playing games that were over before the Great War.
Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?
I’m a self-help queen, dedicated to continuous improvement. I read books about problems I don’t have, just in case I develop obsessive-compulsive disorder or crippling phobias. Of course there’s nothing I recommend. If I ever found anything useful, I’d keep it to myself, to steal a mean advantage.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
When I was nine, I was given a set of slightly abridged classics for Christmas, and the same again when I was ten. My mother got them from a mail-order catalog. We weren’t a household that owned many books so it was a novelty to fill a whole shelf. There were plain cloth bindings and no pictures. (That’s just the way I like it; I make my own pictures, thanks.) That’s when I became enthralled by Robert Louis Stevenson, and failed to like Dickens, and met the Brontës. They were clever abridgments, too, as I came to realize when I read the full texts later. (Imagine, Jane Eyre without the embarrassing bits.)
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
I’m sorry if it sounds pious, unoriginal, and smug, but no book has mattered to me as much as the dirt-cheap Complete Works of Shakespeare I laid my hands on when I was ten. Previously I’d only read one scene from Julius Caesar that I found in an ancient schoolbook. It definitely qualified as the best thing I’d ever read, and I almost exploded with joy when I found there was a whole fat book of plays. I was a strange child.
What’s the best thing about writing a book?
The moment, at about the three-quarter point, where you see your way right through to the end: as if lights had flooded an unlit road. But the pleasure is double-edged, because from this point you’re going to work inhuman hours, not caring about your health or your human relationships; you’re just going to head down that road like a charging bull.
The hardest or least enjoyable part?
I have to take a deep breath before I start the first full revision. I used to hate myself for procrastinating, but now I see it might be wise. You need to pause in holy fear at what you’ve done, and make sure you don’t wreck it in panic.
What are your memories of being read to as a child?
My family had scant formal education, but I was lucky enough to be the only child in a three-generation household, with aunts and grown-up cousins next door. So lots of people were willing to read to me. I had the capacity to remember by heart what I heard, as if I were a throwback to a preliterate age, and so I was lazy about learning for myself because I had slaves to read for me, and I could say the passages over when I pleased. They had to read me tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I didn’t really like anything else. It meant that by the time I went to school I had a bizarre vocabulary and a limited but martial outlook.
Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?
Once I’d banished King Arthur, and I was nine or ten, the characters I lived through were the two leading men in Kidnapped, the strait-laced young David Balfour and the weathered desperado Alan Breck. The lessons I learned through David were that you had to leave home, go out into the world, and become your own man; and you must not despise any unlikely role models you might meet. I didn’t find any similar story to teach me about being a woman.
What books are on your coffee table?
There’s never anything on my table except the newspapers. I am addicted to them and read the fat Sunday supplements all through the week. I just like the stories, I don’t mind if they’re stale. I admire the indefatigable columnists, and yet I take a malicious pleasure in watching them struggle to get eight hundred words out of two bald facts and one unoriginal opinion.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
I have a block about Dickens. I know I’m missing something great; everybody says so. But I didn’t take to him as a child, and I can’t stand his moralizing and his crass sentimentality, and the galumping humor that’s sentimental too. I’m not so fond of George Eliot as I might be, perhaps because in Africa I had to teach Silas Marner to a class of teenagers with basic English; I kept wanting to apologize for it. And I’m still working on Henry James; at the moment I prefer William and Alice, but I think I’ll like Henry by and by. I believe it’s fine to give up books even after a page; there’s so much to read in the world that will delight you, so why should you work against the grain? With a widely admired author you should persist, and you should always return to authors who puzzle you; maybe time needs to pass. I tried Ivy Compton-Burnett when I was twenty, and it didn’t take. I thought, “She can’t actually write.” I came back six years later, and couldn’t stop reading her; no twentieth-century novelist is closer to my heart.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
Old Daddy Shakespeare, of course. I don’t believe in asking writers questions. I’d just follow him about for a day and see what the routine was. I’d be invisible, of course. I wouldn’t want to spook him.
What are you planning to read next?
As I have reached the stage in life where I assume the role of parent to my aged parent, I’ve been thinking a lot about families and have just started reading Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree. Next I’m going to read Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense.
Hilary Mantel is the author of twelve books, including the novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.
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What the President Should Read (Continued)
The Guide to Getting It On! seems like it would have something to offer anyone, although if Obama’s singing is any indication he’s got it covered.
—Lena Dunham
One of mine. Preferably on a day when he gets asked a really awkward question at a press conference he’d rather not answer. So he’d distract them by going, “The economy? Bombing Iran? Wall Street? You know … I read this
really great book the other day by Neil Gaiman. Has anyone here read it? American Gods? I mean, that scene at the end of chapter one … What the heck was going on there?”
—Neil Gaiman
A book of mine. What else? What am I, an altruist? He can choose which one.
—Richard Ford
The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey. It would definitely transport Obama out of the Beltway.
—Carl Hiaasen
I’m sure the president has read James Baldwin, but he may have missed Giovanni’s Room—a short novel of immeasurable sadness. That is the novel he should read—or reread, as the case may be—because it will strengthen his resolve to do everything in his power for gay rights, and to assert that gay rights are a civil rights issue.
—John Irving
For the sake of the general good, I’d have him absorbed in poetry. What would suit him well, I believe, is the work of James Fenton.
—Ian McEwan
I would give them a kindergarten teacher’s manual and let them know, “You’re going to need this when you deal with Congress.”
—Arnold Schwarzenegger
It would be Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince. Machiavelli is frequently dismissed today as an amoral cynic who supposedly considered the end to justify the means. In fact, Machiavelli is a crystal clear realist who understands the limits and uses of power. Every president (and all of us nonpoliticians as well) should read Machiavelli and incorporate his thinking.
—Jared Diamond
Whatever it is, I am sure he has read it. Maybe something like Middlemarch, just to take his mind off things and remind him that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
—Caroline Kennedy
It would behoove the president to read Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s searing masterpiece of relentless close-up journalism. No other book I’ve read charts so clearly the trajectory of poverty and its corrosive compulsions. It’s impossible to read it and not become a more empathetic person. The president could use its lessons on the quadrant of society that we’ve largely abandoned.
—Andrew Solomon
The new Lee Child, of course! It might be nice for him to escape for a few hours to a world where one man can solve every one of the world’s problems with nothing but his wits and his fists.
—Malcolm Gladwell
* * *
Walter Mosley
When and where do you like to read?
I like to read either in motion or in water. And so I am most satisfied reading on subway cars, trains, planes, ferries, boats, or floating on some kind of air-filled device or raft in a pool, pond, or lake. But I am happiest reading in the bathtub; lying back with my head resting on the curved end of the tub, one leg bent and the other resting along the edge. Now and then I add a little hot water with a circular motion of my toe. I decided on my apartment because it had a deep tub with water jets to massage me while I read science fiction and magical realism.
Are you a rereader?
Reading is rereading just as writing is rewriting. Any worthwhile book took many, many drafts to reach completion, and so it would make sense that the first time the reader works her way through the volume it’s more like a first date than a one-time encounter. If the person was uninteresting (not worthwhile) there’s no need for a repeat performance, but if they have promise, good humor, hope, or just good manners, you might want to have a second sit-down, a third. There might be something irksome about that rendezvous that makes you feel that you have something to work out. There might be a hint of eroticism suggesting the possibility of a tryst or even marriage.
The joy of reading is in the rereading; this is where you get to know the world and characters in deep and rewarding fashion.
What makes a good mystery novel?
This question deserves examination. I could answer by saying that in a good mystery there’s a crime and a cast of characters, any of whom may or may not have committed that crime. Readers have their suspicions, but most often they are wrong—if not about the perpetrator then about the underlying reason(s) for the commission of said crime. In a very good mystery, the detective comes into question and the investigator is forced to face his, or her, own prejudices, expectations, and limitations. In a great mystery, we find that the crime being investigated reveals a deeper rot.
But this answer only addresses, finally, the technical execution of the mystery. A good mystery has to be a good novel, and any good novel takes us on a journey where we discover, on many levels, truths about ourselves and our world in ways that are, at the same time, unexpected and familiar. If the mystery writer gives us a good mystery without a good novel to back it up, then she, or he, has failed.
It once seemed the Easy Rawlins mysteries might be a thing of the past, but you decided to revisit?
This month, I have a new Easy Rawlins mystery out; the title is Little Green. It’s the first one since Blonde Faith (2007). I had to take some years away from the series because my writing about Easy was becoming, well … too easy. I needed to rebuild the fires under that continuing story about the black Southern migrant who re-created himself in the California sun.
There is now, I believe, something new about Easy in a world that is both familiar and transformational.
Do you plan to write more nonfiction?
Yes. The change of century is a challenging moment for the world. We have to face our deepest fears and prejudices in order to save the human race and the planet we inhabit. We have to encourage strange bedfellows and forgive many trespasses.
Science and religion, capitalism and socialism, caste and character are all on the auction block. The waters are rising while we are dreaming of dancing with the stars. We call ourselves social creatures when indeed we are pack animals. We, many of us, say that we are middle class when in reality we are salt-of-the-earth working-class drones existing at the whim of systems that distribute our life’s blood as so much spare change.
These subjects can be addressed in fiction or plays, even in poetry, but now and again the plain talk of nonfiction is preferred.
Which books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Because I don’t know who’s reading these words or who has asked the question, I cannot say with any accuracy what you might find surprising, but I just went to my shelf and jotted down a few titles.
There’s The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien. This writer, I believe, is one of the great twentieth-century wordsmiths. He is filled with humor and insight without the slightest hint of arrogance or elevation.
The Popular Educator Library is a series of hundreds of essays in ten volumes designed to provide the essence of a college education for those who were not able to attend college. Published in the late 1930s, this book covers everything from accounting to the principles of aviation. Cool.
Collingwood’s Principles of History is the quintessential book on history and perception; of how we might imagine that which is impossible to know. The City in History, by Lewis Mumford, shows us how human organization, technology, and technique form us in ways that we are completely unaware of. Bitch Reloaded, by Deja King, is a perfect example of what they call street lit. I like it because it allows me to understand all the ways that people, all kinds of people, come to reading. It’s not just college professors, librarians, and convicts. People on the street are reading, looking for themselves in books that want to tell the stories that history will inevitably wash over and forget.
Where do you get your books?
I find books in used-book stores, chain and independent stores, on friends’ shelves, and being read by some woman sitting opposite me on the subway. I find books the way a cow finds a new pasture, by looking to see where the other cows are headed.
I find books on the Internet and in overheard conversations at rest
aurants. And, more and more, I find books in my memory; an author’s name that some professor (whose name I have now forgotten) mentioned in a seminar, the topic of which I no longer remember. I remember the writer’s name, and sometime later a title comes to mind. After a few days I connect the author’s name and the title. It’s a small step from there to reading happily on the Staten Island Ferry.
What were your favorite books as a child?
I know that as a working writer I should answer this question in such a way as to make me seem intelligent; maybe Twain or Dickens, even Hesse or Conrad. I should say that I read intelligent books far beyond my years. This I believe would give intelligent readers the confidence to go out and lay down hard cash for my newest, and the one after that.
But the truth is that the most beloved and the most formative books of my childhood were comic books, specifically Marvel Comics. Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, The Mighty Thor and The Invincible Iron Man; later came Daredevil and many others. These combinations of art and writing presented to me the complexities of character and the pure joy of imagining adventure. They taught me about writing dialect and how a monster can also be a hero. They lauded science and fostered the understanding that the world was more complex than any one mind, or indeed the history of all human minds, could comprehend.
Which novels had the most impact on you as a writer?
I am one of those rare writers (at least I believe this to be true) who do not equate reading and writing in any kind of direct way. I know for a fact that the father of the Western tradition of the novel, Homer, was illiterate. Many of the storytellers and poets of the West were not schooled in letters. The founder of one of the world’s great religions, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, created a religion in an environment where no one wrote. The scriptures had to be submitted to memory only to be written down long after.