By the Book (42 page)

—
Alain de Botton

Andrew Solomon

What are you reading at the moment? Are you a one-book-at-a-time person?

I'm rereading
The Portrait of a Lady
, which I do every few years to remind myself that there really is such a thing as elegance, in life and in prose—and to remember how much devastation can unfold around it. I am moved by Henry James's ineffable sadness, the belief that human experience is full of loss and that high morals don't stand a chance. I don't entirely agree with that point of view, but I find it galvanizing. I've also read a good bit of William James for research recently. I tend not to think that brevity is the soul of wit, and neither do the James brothers, so reading them in sequence makes me feel like a houseguest at a very congenial house.

What's the best book you've read so far this year?

Christian Caryl's
Strange Rebels
argues convincingly that the problems of the twenty-first century were all hatched in 1979, and looks particularly at the move away from secularism and the welfare state; it's a bold and illuminating take on our time, and its analysis of militancy seems particularly relevant as we look to Syria. On a lighter note, I loved Cécile David-Weill's
Suitors
, a charming comedy of manners set at a country estate in the South of France, apparently one of the few places in the world where anyone still has enough manners to make a comedy about.

If you had to name a favorite novelist, who would it be?

I have a soft spot for George Eliot. She achieves scope without ever sacrificing her devastating precision. Her psychological insight accumulates through perfectly observed details, without a trace of pomposity. The way she assembles multiple portraits is one of my great inspirations as I try to construct my own nonfiction. Virginia Woolf is my other favorite. I feel as if she is writing not simply about the mind, but about my mind. Her books are as visceral to me as music. I find that Woolf, like chocolate, requires rationing; I could easily become emotionally obese if I let myself consume her work too often.

Care to call out your nominees for most overlooked or underappreciated writer?

Rose Macaulay, for her wistful humanity and her glorious sense of humor. There is a scene in
The Towers of Trebizond
in which the narrator realizes that she has copied the wrong sentence out of her Turkish phrase book and has accidentally been soliciting the attention of a hotel guest when she merely wished to explain that she didn't speak the language; it ranks among the best comic scenes in fiction. Emma Lazarus, for her humanitarian passions. She wrote the poem on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor”), but we've largely forgotten the sedate beauty of her other work, including the prose poems
By the Waters of Babylon
. Rumer Godden, who is incorrectly categorized as a children's writer, and who writes with so much understatement that readers can miss the depth of her insight and her vivid grace.
An Episode of Sparrows
was reissued, and I find it quietly transporting.

You recently earned a doctoral degree in psychology from Cambridge. What were the best books you read during the course of your research?

I was studying motherhood, and I started with D. W. Winnicott, progenitor of the theory of the “good enough mother.” Winnicott presumed that mother-infant interactions were reciprocal and satisfying to both. “The most remarkable thing about a mother,” he observed, “is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby and to hate so much without paying the child out, and her ability to wait for rewards that may or may not come at a later date.” Winnicott sees this selflessness as a hallmark of successful mothering. The book that influenced me the most was Rozsika Parker's
Torn in Two
, published in the United States as
Mother Love, Mother Hate
. Parker's book argues that competent mothering requires two conflicting impulses—to protect and nurture the child, and to push the child out into the world—and suggests that ambivalence is the engine of achieving these dichotomous objectives. Her book notes that we have stigmatized the pushing away and sentimentalized the clinging, and that in doing so, we have denied basic truths about motherhood, causing mothers who experience ambivalence to see themselves as bad mothers when ambivalence is in fact a healthy, necessary state.

What kinds of stories are you drawn to? Any you steer clear of?

I like the long and associative, and read a lot of neo-Proustian stuff. I tend to be put off by action stories—by anything that is about sports, physical danger, or machines. My four-year-old son, however, loves stories about sports, physical danger, and especially machines. So I may be revising my point of view.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

Every Peanuts anthology ever. I played Linus in my summer camp production of
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown
and have been addicted to the comic strip ever since. I read them when I'm stressed out, and they serve as something of a security blanket.

Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?

I'm never clear on how “self-help” differs from “help.” Books help; they've helped me to understand love, taught me empathy, and given me courage. Even when they merely entertain, they help. For a delicious analysis of the extremely unhelpful self-help industry, see Jessica Lamb-Shapiro's forthcoming
Promise Land
.

What's the last book that made you laugh out loud? That made you cry? And the last book that made you angry?

Jennifer Finney Boylan's endlessly witty
Stuck in the Middle with You
made me laugh out loud over and over again; it's about her experience as a transgender parent, who started off as her children's father and ended up as their “Maddy”—not quite a mom, but definitely no longer a dad. Louise Erdrich's
Painted Drum
made me cry: “And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
Cracked
, by James Davies, made me furious. Davies argues against psychopharmacology by proposing that all medical approaches to depression, bipolar illness, and schizophrenia are tainted by profit and are therefore ipso facto fraudulent. But everything is tainted by profit; a farmer profited from growing the chicken I ate for dinner last night, but its deliciousness is not a fraud. Davies's book, like Irving Kirsch's
Emperor's New Drugs
, Robert Whitaker's
Anatomy of an Epidemic
, and Daniel Carlat's
Unhinged
, embraces a smug populism that will keep people from taking medications that could save their lives.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

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.

Did you identify with any literary characters growing up? Who were your literary heroes?

Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, of course. Sebastian Flyte. I suffered under the misapprehension that I was an Old World aristocrat manqué, rather than a middle-class, striving, and slightly affected New Yorker descended from peasants.

What books have you most enjoyed reading (or rereading) with your children?

We've been reading
Winnie-the-Pooh
, and I am trying to nail the voices of Pooh and Eeyore and Owl half as winningly as my father did. We have a bit of a Moomintroll addiction. And then there are Carl Sandburg's
Rootabaga Stories
, by which I remain as wholly captivated in adulthood as I was in childhood. We're entranced by Tim Egan's recent Dodsworth series about a nattily dressed indeterminate animal (badger? woodchuck?) traveling the world with his hapless, ill-behaved duck.

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?

Oliver Sacks relates fascinating case histories and he writes fluently, but he treats his subjects with a tinge of the ringmaster's bravado—an underlying tone of, “Hey, if you think that's weird, wait until you get a load of this one!” It is possible to have clinical rigor without such voyeuristic emotional deficits.

If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

The J writer, or Yahwist, of the Torah. I'd want to ask him what he intended to be literal and what he intended to be figurative. And I'd point out that confusion around this question has had a toxic effect on the rest of history.

If you could be any character from literature who would you be?

Godot. I rather like the idea that everyone is waiting for me.

What book have you always meant to read and haven't gotten around to yet? Anything you feel embarrassed never to have read?

Moby-Dick
.

What do you plan to read next?

Moby-Dick
. But I've said that before.

Andrew Solomon
is the author of
Far from the Tree
and
The Noonday Demon
.

 

On My Nightstand (Continued)

Right now I'm looking right at Mary Gaitskill's
Bad Behavior
; the new Diane Keaton autobiography;
Having It All
, by Helen Gurley Brown (research); and
The Consolations of Philosophy
, by Alain de Botton —all in various states of having-been-read-ed-ness.

—
Lena Dunham

My current audiobook (Yes, they count; of course they count; why wouldn't they?) is
The Sisters Brothers
, by Patrick deWitt. It was recommended by Lemony Snicket (through his representative, Daniel Handler), and I trust Mr. Snicket implicitly. (Or anyway, as implicitly as one can trust someone you have never met, and who may simply be a pen name of the man who played accordion at your wedding.)

—
Neil Gaiman

Shalom Auslander's
Hope: A Tragedy
. His last book,
Foreskin's Lament
, really made me laugh.

—
David Sedaris

Raylan
, by Elmore Leonard, one of my writing heroes. There is nobody better at lowlife dialogue. And also, by the way, not a cooler guy on the planet.

—
Carl Hiaasen

I'm reading
Zona
, the latest book by one of my favorite contemporary writers, Geoff Dyer. The premise of the book sounds immensely boring—an essay on Andrei Tarkovsky's film
Stalker
—but fortunately, like most of Dyer's works, it isn't about anything other than the author: his obsessions, his fears, his encroaching (and always endearing) feelings of insanity.

—
Alain de Botton

The Summer of 1787
, by David O. Stewart. As I grow older, I am increasingly fascinated by our founding fathers. The challenges they faced and the compromises they made, good and bad, to create a nation have inspired us and people around the world. I wish today's political leaders, especially in Washington, would show the courage and willingness to fight for what they believe in, but possess an understanding of the need to compromise to solve the nation's problems. They all need to go off and read
1787
.

—
Colin Powell

Mary Poppins
, by P. L. Travers.
Dancing to the Precipice
, by Caroline Moorehead.
Bring Up the Bodies
, by Hilary Mantel. I've always got two or three on the go.

—
Emma Thompson

The Priceless Gift: The Love Letters of Woodrow Wilson and Ellen Axson Wilson
, edited by Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, and
Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters
, volumes one and two, by Ray Stannard Baker. (Research for my next novel.)

—
Joyce Carol Oates

Moonraker
, Ian Fleming, 1955.

—
Michael Chabon

Right now I'm shuttling between
The Map and the Territory
, by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, and
The Patrick Melrose Novels
, by Edward St. Aubyn, which everyone I know seems to be reading. Houellebecq's known for being a provocateur. He'll say things like “Life was expensive in the west, it was cold there; the prostitution was of poor quality.” He says a lot of depressing, un-American things I get a big kick out of.