By the Book (49 page)

What's the best book you've read recently?

Well, it could be Herodotus's
The Histories
in the Landmark edition published by Pantheon. Herodotus is spectacular—part historian, part investigative reporter and inveterate storyteller. Or maybe
Mind and Cosmos
, by Thomas Nagel, an intense philosophical takedown of neo-Darwinism and scientific materialism. It's a brave contrarian book. Reminds me of Wittgenstein's remark: “Even if all our scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.” Another best is Don DeLillo's
Cosmopolis
. A beautiful conceit runs this novel—an epic journey by limo across midtown Manhattan. And then his new story collection,
The Angel Esmeralda
. DeLillo has a consummate comprehension of the world. And then Harold Bloom's
The American Religion
, which argues that our domestic Christian religions are more Gnosticism than Christian. Mormonism in his view is the religious future of this country. And I'm recently into
From Eternity to Here
—the physicist Sean Carroll's fascinating book about time. Time confounds the physicists. They ask why it goes only one way. And finally, if a reread qualifies, I'm going again through Seamus Heaney's translation of
Beowulf
. Here's a book that can be sung.

When and where do you like to read?

At my desk. Or out of doors in the backyard when the weather's fine.

As a rereader, what books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

Montaigne. Chekhov. They never fail you. Montaigne is the most honest memoirist in the world: He didn't try to construct a narrative of his life; he just went wherever his thoughts took him, diving into his own mind and setting down its reflections and feelings for everyone to see. A kind of experiment in self-portraiture under a white light—published under the title
Essais
, or
Essays
. As for Anton Chekhov, no one puts life onto the page as Chekhov does. He defies critical analysis—the prose seems artless, as if he just splashes out the sentences. I recommend the five short novels including
The Duel
and
Three Years
in the translations of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. But the truth is, I've never read any translation of Chekhov in which that rigorously judicious mind didn't come through.

You were involved in theater while in college and were a script reader in Hollywood. How did those experiences inform your approach to storytelling?

Yes, I was heavily involved in acting at Kenyon College. I find that astonishing now. Who was this boy playing Edgar in
King Lear
, and Joe Bonaparte in Clifford Odets's
Golden Boy
? At the time, I intended to write for the theater, you see, and so needed experience onstage to understand what actors went through. And when you are cast in a role as I was as Gloucester's good son, you read the text intently, obsessively, as you might not read it as, say, an English major. And so you learn how the play is put together, how it's constructed, and how it flows forward and maintains its tension, and how character is rendered. You feel its heartbeat. And with Shakespeare, you say the words aloud and hear the music of the language, the rhythm of the meter, and that stays with you; you are in a sense given the English language as a present. So that was valuable no matter what form my writing took—because I did drift away from theater when I took up the writing of novels.

As you say, I worked as a reader for a motion picture company—not in Hollywood, but here in New York, where the publishers were. The studios were in the hunt for books that could be filmed. I read scripts, yes, but mostly novels in galleys, and that was encouraging because I saw how many bad books were being published. It was very useful to realize that simply because something was in print didn't necessarily mean that it should have been. But there were some great moments in that job: I remember finding on my desk a first-draft partial manuscript of Saul Bellow's
Henderson the Rain King
. It was under option by Columbia Pictures, and I urged them to pick up the option. Of course they didn't. But Bellow was important to me—I'd read his
Adventures of Augie March
in college, and it was in the nature of a revelation, the freedom in that narrative—that there were no rules for the writing of a novel except as you made them up.

Some months later the finished
Henderson
was published, and I found the first third of the book disappointing. It was somehow less than it had been in manuscript. Bellow had neatened things up; he'd met some formal obligations of the story, but in so doing he'd flattened the life out of it. I found that instructive.

You spent your early years as an editor at the New American Library and the Dial Press. What are your fondest memories of working in publishing? What has been the most significant change you've witnessed in the field?

At New American Library, a mass-market reprinter, we were publishing books with a price of fifty or seventy-five cents or a dollar and a quarter for a huge novel, and distributing them in great numbers all over the country. Or we'd buy a good first novel that had sold maybe two thousand copies in hardcover, and print a hundred thousand and put it in every airport and railroad and bus station in the country. That was wonderfully satisfying work. NAL's list was eclectic—publishing Mickey Spillane, but also Faulkner; Erskine Caldwell's
Tobacco Road
, but also Susanne K. Langer's
Philosophy in a New Key
. We published The Signet Classic Shakespeare, of which I was the house editor, and a science list which fell to me to handle. It was all very exciting, reading these books, bidding for the reprint rights, entertaining proposals, and dealing with the likes of Ayn Rand and Ian Fleming. But the game changed with the advent of the trade paperback. Trade publishers were now keeping the reprint rights for lists of their own. And so the mass-market business changed, and some of the reprinters went to what they called “originals”—genre products like thrillers, romances, and so on. You can still find good classic public-domain titles at the big paperback houses like NAL, but they're not freely distributed as they used to be—they are mostly on educational lists so far as I can tell.

I moved over to Dial, a trade publisher, in the mid-1960s, and it was a very exciting place to be—not only because this was the '60s but because your most creative juices were required just to keep that house in business. I was editing Mailer, James Baldwin. I published William Kennedy's first novel, Ernest J. Gaines, Thomas Berger, and a book by Joan Baez. But also a hoax called
Report from Iron Mountain
, a satirically inspired, dryly written presumed government study claiming that peace was not only unattainable but undesirable. This was during the Vietnam War, you see. The book was covered on the front page of
The New York Times
and hit the bestseller list.

Conglomeration—the acquisition of houses by large corporations—is the story of how things have changed. Trade publishing was never purely a business. How could it be when a house's prime assets were the tastes of its editors? You floated the consequential books with the money you earned with the commercial things on your list. Publishing was a cottage industry. People loved to be in it and took its low salaries in return for its creative excitements. A house's balance sheet could veer from good to dismal and back again from year to year. That's because it didn't offer products that were endlessly the same, like breakfast cereals or automobile tires. The hunches of its editors were very hard to quantify on a balance sheet. Now, wanting publishing to be a business like any other, the big conglomerates naturally like to increase their profit margins from one year to the next. There's a pressure on editors to sober up and produce books that earn their keep. Oddly the conglomerates have more money to play with, and so, perversely, they may be less daring, less freewheeling. This is not true of the best of them, of course. Good books are still published with vigor and are still major acts of the culture, but the corporate ethos makes it probably not as much fun.

Which books might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves?

The Oxford Study Bible
. And mysteries and thrillers: Simenon, but not Agatha Christie. That Swedish couple of forty or fifty years ago, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. Of the current practitioners, John Sandford and Lee Child. Two very skilled and smart writers.

Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?

I think the books I read as a child made me want to write: Stevenson's
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
; C. S. Lewis's
Out of the Silent Planet
and
Perelandra
; Mark Twain's boy books, and his
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
; Jack London's
Call of the Wild
and
White Fang
; Dickens's
David Copperfield
,
Great Expectations
, and
A Tale of Two Cities
; Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories; Victor Hugo's
Hunchback of Notre Dame
and
Les Misérables
. Poe's detective and horror stories; the Horatio Hornblower sea novels of C. S. Forester; all the Oz books; and in middle school,
Mario and the Magician
, by Thomas Mann, and Kafka's
Metamorphosis
. For starters.

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

He's a reader and doesn't need my instruction. On the other hand, if I could require Republican members of Congress to read one book it would be Keynes's
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
.

What does your personal book collection look like? Do you organize your books in any particular way?

No, they may track my life—as a child, as a student, as an editor, and as a writer—and I think of them as precious objects, but they're like life in not being organized. Though I did at one point put some of my books together on one shelf—the works of the poets I read in college—Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Frost, Wallace Stevens, A. E. Housman. And also the books of poets who've been friends of mine—James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine.

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?

Sometimes I put books down that are good but that I see too well what the author is up to. As you practice your craft, you lose your innocence as a reader. That's the one sad thing about this work.

E. L. Doctorow
is the author of many books, including
The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake
,
World's Fair
,
Billy Bathgate
,
The March
, and most recently,
Andrew's Brain.

 

Someone Else Should Write

I'd love to read a concise, nonhysterical biography of Michael Jackson. I just want to know everything about him.

—
David Sedaris

The Playboy of the Western World
, the second volume of Nigel Hamilton's biography of JFK and sequel to
Reckless Youth
.

—
J. K. Rowling

I really wish Michelle Alexander, who wrote
The New Jim Crow
, about African-American men in prisons, would write a sequel, focusing on the plight of women. There are tens of thousands of women doing decades for nonviolent offenses, and the abuse they suffer behind bars is virtually a given. Given Alexander's skills and audience, an exposé on the subject would have a critical impact.

—
Dave Eggers

I wish my mom would let me type and edit her journals from when she was my age, but she doesn't trust me that they're a fascinating account of the inner life of a young artist in 1970s SoHo. I also wouldn't mind reading Bill Murray's memoirs or an instructional guide to getting dressed by Chloë Sevigny.

—
Lena Dunham

A great biography of John von Neumann, the most important mathematician of the twentieth century.

—
Sylvia Nasar

I'd like somebody to write a book that really told the truth about life now. Leo Tolstoy but with drive-through windows.

—
Nicholson Baker

The poet Charles Simic says there should be a book called
The History of Stupidity
. He says it would be the world's longest book: an encyclopedia. I don't think he plans to write it, but I wish that someone would.

—
Francine Prose

I'm waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh's pharmacist writes a book.

—
Carl Hiaasen

Could someone please write a book explaining why the Democratic Party and its allies are so much less effective at crafting a message and having a vision than their Republican counterparts? Kurt Eichenwald! Mark Bowden! John Heilemann and Mark Halperin! I'll preorder today.

—
Ira Glass

A definitive history of bohemianism, that ever-present undercurrent of antinomian thought and behavior wearing funny clothes. It should start with Petronius and his Satyricon hipsters. And I'll bet ancient China and Pharaonic Egypt had beatniks too.

—
P. J. O'Rourke

Dave Barry: The Greatest Human Ever
.

—
Dave Barry

A work of such brilliant prose, such imaginative powers, such sweep, such flair, with such an irresistible story and riveting characters that simply by reading it attentively one could understand those discoveries of molecular biology, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, “philosophy of mind,” and “string theory” in the way that their discoverers/creators understand them.