How to Read a Novelist

by John Freeman

Overview

The novel is alive and well, thank you very much

For the last fifteen years, whenever a novel was published, John Freeman was there to greet it. As a critic for more than two hundred newspapers worldwide, the onetime president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the former editor of Granta, he has reviewed thousands of books and interviewed scores of writers. In How to Read a Novelist, which pulls together his very best profiles (many of them new or completely rewritten for this volume) of the very best novelists of our time, he shares with us what he's learned.
From such international stars as Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, and Mo Yan, to established American lions such as Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, John Updike, and David Foster Wallace, to the new guard of Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and more, Freeman has talked to everyone.
What emerges is an instructive and illuminating, definitive yet still idiosyncratic guide to a diverse and lively literary culture: a vision of the novel as a varied yet vital contemporary form, a portrait of the novelist as a unique and profound figure in our fragmenting global culture, and a book that will be essential reading for every aspiring writer and engaged reader—a perfect companion (or gift!) for anyone who's ever curled up with a novel and wanted to know a bit more about the person who made it possible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374710576
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/08/2013
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

John Freeman is an award-winning writer and book critic. The former editor of Granta and onetime president of the National Book Critics Circle, he has written about books for more than two hundred publications worldwide, including The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, La Repubblica, and La Vanguardia. His first book, The Tyranny of E-mail, was published in 2009. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, ZYZZYVA, and The Paris Review. He lives in New York City.
John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary annual of new writing. His books include How to Read a Novelist and The Tyranny of E-mail, as well as Tales of Two Americas, an anthology of new writing about inequality in the U.S. today. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, andThe New York Times. The former editor of Granta and one-time president of the National Book Critics Circle, he is currently Artist-in-Residence at New York University.

Read an Excerpt

How to Read a Novelist

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By John Freeman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2013 John Freeman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71057-6

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CHAPTER 1

U and Me: The Hard Lessons of Idolizing John Updike

My first apartment in New York was in a Brooklyn brownstone owned by a magazine editor and her silent, bookish husband. I spent a lot of time before a long, dusty bookshelf that ran parallel to the staircase in their home. To get a volume from the F section, you had to climb halfway up the stairs and lean out over the banister. One day, the silent, bookish husband caught me craning over the ten-foot drop, Flaubert's Sentimental Education in my hands. He became talkative. He told of disappearing into Proust over a teenage summer on Fire Island. How Tolstoy was a passionate college-age fling. I came late to reading, and so I envied his library and these summers spent in a book. Mine were spent performing rebound drills at basketball camps. I asked him what I should read. First he pulled down a volume of short stories by John Cheever, then he gave me Rabbit, Run by John Updike.

The Cheever I put down without finishing: The stories felt whiny and overdetermined, their trick endings too neatly engineered. But Updike was another thing. I blasted through Rabbit, Run in a few days, ferrying it into the city on the A train in a muggy trance. In college, I had fallen for Jack Kerouac's novels, particularly On the Road. Here was that book's exquisite opposite—the story of a man who made himself a prison of small-town domestic life, a man whose big countercultural act was not to light out for the open highway but to get in a car and drive across town to sleep with his mistress.

I felt an instant connection with Updike's fiction. I had lived in eastern Pennsylvania for six years as a child, and the region's gentle embrace felt like a third parent to me growing up. Now that I was an adult, I could see how such a life might have become stifling. In Updike's prose, it was gorgeously so.

One book led to another, and before long my Updike appreciation had turned to mania. I amassed an almost complete set of first editions of his books—more than fifty in all; I was missing just his tales for children—and my girlfriend, bemused and never smitten by Updike, often accompanied me to bookstores to get them signed. When I decided I, too, wanted to be a writer, I did what Updike had done forty years before me. I quit New York and moved with my girlfriend into a white clapboard house in New England. She took a job in technology research, and I began to write. Only I didn't. Instead, I spent my time reading Updike, aware that at my age he had published a volume of light verse and a short novel, but also increasingly conscious of his work's magnificent melancholy—of the families broken up and destroyed, the repetitive failure of fleshly desire to relieve his characters' desire for transcendence. At night, I would occasionally look at the shelves in our bedroom and worry they might collapse from the black weight of their content, smother us in our sleep.

During the daytime, though, the air would clear and my ever-expanding shelves of Updike titles became, again, a beacon. His industry and mindfulness of every detail of the visible world—so prevalent in even the soggiest of his novels—taught me a lot about the beauty of everyday things. If Updike himself functioned as my model for how to behave as a writer, his characters—whose lives mine was beginning to resemble—were the anti-models of how to behave as a person. Perhaps through the repetition of reading I might avoid the relationship immolation his characters provoked, again and again and again.

I took a job abridging Tarzan of the Apes for a children's publisher. It occurred to me that what I had been doing with Updike was similar to this tedious bit of hackery: tracing my life over that of another writer's. At the end of the workday, as the New England chill settled below the rafters, my girlfriend and I would snip at each other with the rancor of people looking for someone to blame. I was unhappy because I wasn't writing; she was unhappy for reasons I didn't quite understand. Even though we were only in our mid-twenties, a sense of opportunities lost began to hover.

After a year my girlfriend and I had to admit our New England experiment was a failure. We moved back to New York. Away from the predetermined doom of our Updikeian stage set of a life, we felt our sense of possibility recharge. We began cooking and taking dance classes. We trained for a marathon. I decided to propose, which meant I needed a ring. For the last time, I turned to Updike. I had gone through periodic purges of my shelves, attacking my bibliophilia like a cancer that required repeated radical surgeries. But it always came back, often more aggressive and pernicious. This time, however, I performed the most radical operation—my entire Updike collection. It took three cab rides, but in a few hours I'd managed to transport all three shelves to a New York dealer. Traveling down Park Avenue in a cab a week later, a little red leather box nestled in my lap, I felt purged and absolved. All the heartache and the wisdom and the weakness I'd absorbed through those books had been boiled down to something eternal, and pure: a wedding ring. No longer would the spines of those books stare out in judgment and gloom. I was free to become the husband I wanted to be, the writer I was meant to be—whatever that meant. I had swallowed Updike whole and spat out the bones.

I was surprised by how quickly things fell apart. A year after we were married, my wife moved out. When times were bad with her, I had fantasized about living alone, like a young Updike, writing in my garret. Only Updike had never lived alone. And now I had the place all to myself and I filled it with cigarette butts. As I looked out the window and smoked, I often thought about all the Updike books I had read in the past ten years and how witnessing his fictional marital breakdowns seemed to have done me so little good.

My wife and I divorced in the autumn. She had moved to California, and the laws of Maine—where we had married—required one of us to be present during the final proceedings. I drove up from New York alone, and spent the night with my soon-to-be ex-in-laws in their house on the beach, eating the saddest lobster dinner I've ever had. The next morning I drove to the court with my mother-in-law, who waited outside the empty chambers while I cut the thin legal string that still connected me to her daughter.

I didn't drive directly home. That afternoon, by a fluke of scheduling, I had arranged to interview John Updike at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He had just published a collection of essays on art called Still Looking, and the interview conceit was that we'd wander among the paintings so he could riff on art in real time. It was not my first time interviewing him. Four months after my wedding, I'd interviewed him about his twentieth novel, Seek My Face. I'd been dazzled by his gentle but colossal intelligence, relieved to be able to treat him as an interview subject rather than the living embodiment of an abandoned dream.

I got lost on my way to the museum and arrived late. I found Updike waiting by the foyer, dressed in khaki slacks and a sports coat. Just over seventy years old, he had a full head of hair and the easy physical presence of a man at home in the world. We passed through a few galleries, Updike dispatching prose poems of appreciation with chummy good humor—as if surprised by how easily his mind created felicities with language. At some point I must have begun to flag, however, because he turned to me and asked, "Is this enough? I mean, you look pretty tired. I understand you are coming from Vermont?"

I told him it was not Vermont but Maine, and in response to his question about what I was doing up there I said I was getting divorced. The museum tour came to a dead halt. Updike faced me with real feeling, his ironic pose collapsing.

"I'm really sorry," he said. He would not allow me to make light of my newly minted divorce, and said that he had gone through this once before, too, which I knew, and that it was hell. His advice continued, briefly, but it was so surreal to hear him reference his private life that I can hardly remember what he said.

Apparently, though, he remembered. When Terrorist, his twenty-second novel, approached publication, a newspaper editor asked me if I could once again speak to John Updike. I called his publisher and was put on a junket schedule, then bumped, and bumped again. Finally I got through to his publicist. He switched from speakerphone to handset.

"We got some mixed feedback from John on the last conversation," the publicist explained. My ripped jeans and two-day stubble might have been noted, my mid-interview explosion of personal detail—which I remembered as more of a leak—had possibly made John feel uncomfortable. I had to understand, "John was of the old school."

I didn't know what to say. If I hadn't known before, I knew now: It was a breach of everyone's privacy when a reader turns to a writer, or a writer's books, for vicariously learned solutions to his own life problems. This is the fallacy behind every interview or biographical sketch, to tether a writer's life too literally to his work, or to insist that a novel function as a substitute for actually living through the mistakes a person must live through in order to learn how to properly, maybe even happily, survive.

I convinced the publicist to let me go ahead with the assignment. We sat in a conference room so high up over midtown Manhattan it felt like riding in a helicopter. In between bites of a turkey sandwich, Updike described what he saw on 9/11. I wore my nicest suit, in fact the one I got married in. I did not mention this detail to Updike, and just once did I interrupt the snowfall of his verbal prose poems: to ask him if he had read the Koran. He had, and then described it with beauty and grace. It was a perfect Updike moment—powerful and contained, only the littlest bit strange. He would have nothing to do with its shaping or its meaning, in either my fiction or my life. That would be up to me.

* * *

I have always felt there is something electrifying about meeting novelists. It isn't like running into a celebrity, where your eye readjusts to the true physical contours of someone seen primarily on-screen. It has to do with grasping that the creator of a fictional world, a universe that lives inside you as a reader while also feeling strangely disembodied, is not as interior as that world but alive: flesh and blood.

In this fashion, I wanted the pieces I wrote about novelists to describe an encounter, to show to the reader what the writer revealed to me, at their own choosing, over an hour or two or three, sometimes more, of talk. An interview, though, is not an actual conversation, but rather a form of conversation that has the same relationship to talking as fiction does to life. In order to work, fiction must abide by a set of rules it defines for itself, even if invisibly, and if an interview is to flow like a chat between two people it, too, must follow a set of conventions, some of them quite contradictory to how we are taught to interact naturally. Namely, that the interviewer asks all of the questions, offers pieces of information only for the purpose of stimulating more from the subject, and, primarily, that neither party calls attention to the artificiality of what is happening. My mid-interview explosion with Updike broke all three rules.

Novelists haven't always been representatives of their work, it's important to note. Yes, Charles Dickens bundled himself onto a train to travel across fifty cities in as many days when his books were released. But he was the exception. He was famous. So were Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, and, to a different degree, Ernest Hemingway. And through their fame they extended the power of the nineteenth-century novel into the public sphere, speaking and writing on all manner of things, even as the readership of the literary novel was about to begin its steady decline.

In the eighties, as bookstore chains expanded and the U.K. festival circuit began to develop, public readings became popular. Around this time Kazuo Ishiguro, whom I interview here, recalled going to an event for his hundredth or so time at the podium. He was reading with William Golding, who had won the Booker and the Nobel Prize but had yet to give a public reading. Ishiguro remembers Golding shaking with anxiety.

Some novelists, like J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, decided to sit out this expansion in their public role. Others have leapt to it. A great many, Updike included, were or are equivocal about it, even if they enjoy the attention, since the work that has brought them into the light—sitting at home in a room alone—is diametrically opposed to the task of talking about it in public with readers, journalists, or fans. When I started out in these assignments, arriving over-prepared, with twenty questions, often written out, I thought this was at least the most respectful place to begin. I quickly realized, though, that prepared questions lead to prepared answers. Gradually my list of questions decreased until I began arriving at interviews having read the books but without a single question in hand. This forced me to listen to people's answers, and it meant we could have an actual conversation, with all the unpredictability and freshness of a good one.

True storytellers write, I believe, not because they can but because they have to. There is something they want to say about the world that can only be said in a story. When it came to selecting the pieces I wanted to include in this book, my immediate preference was for those on subjects who felt that sense of urgency, and necessity, and whose work was important, beautiful, and enjoyable at the same time. In our interview, Robert Pirsig used the word compelled; he was compelled to write Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, partly for his own sanity. It was a way of making the disparate parts of the world, and his experience, whole.

This theme—the consolations of narrative—kept coming up in interviews. Edwidge Danticat, Aleksandar Hemon, Peter Carey, and several other novelists I talk to here come from two places, and have distinct before and after periods in their lives. They spoke of their books as works of literature but also as a way to fathom the distance between these two worlds. To keep memory alive. An interviewer's job, I found, was not to close that gap—between here and there, between what was broken and what was whole—but to make it more mysterious.

For some novelists, like Toni Morrison or Ngugi wa Thiong'o or Louise Erdrich, this task of telling stories about a place has a political dimension; it is about making visible a history, a sensibility, which history has repressed or occluded. For other writers, like David Foster Wallace, the need to write grew from an obsession with language, and further dimensions of their work all developed from that originating fire. Some of these novelists, like Mark Danielewski or Susanna Clarke, were so new to publishing that what haunted them was still developing and they spoke of it warily, revising and thinking aloud. Others were so near the end of their career—such as Philip Roth or Norman Mailer—they had already begun to try to curate how their work was read after they stopped writing or living.

All of these pieces were written on deadline for newspapers or magazines, with the exception of those I have included from 2013. Even if I hadn't been writing for newspapers and magazines, which at least in the United States are not terribly interested in the first person, it would have felt grandiose to include much of myself in these pieces. I am there, I suppose, in the questions I ask and in the things I note. I am there in the tack I take through their books, and the quotes I chose to give the narrative of our encounter sail, as all interviewers must do, but the self I live in, the one made by factors accidental and chosen, remains, I hope, discrete. I have done this with the goal of making it easier for readers to step into the frame and imagine themselves there. A handful of these novelists, Aleksandar Hemon, Peter Carey, and Edwidge Danticat, are friends of mine, and to write about them I had to re-estrange myself from them as people. With other novelists, like Robert Pirsig, who hadn't given an interview in twenty years, or Imre Kertész and Mo Yan, who give so few, to insert myself into the arc of the interview would have been, frankly, preposterous.

I haven't focused very much on craft, either. The problem with craft as concept is that it can become, like the idea of a novel itself when it lodges in a writer's mind, too much of an ideal. Wood carves differently in different environments. So does narrative. And thus my other hope, with these profiles, has been to reinstate some atmospheric context into the legend of a writer's life and work. A shelf of books has an inevitable feel, being of weight and mass; every writer I've ever spoken to, though, has mentioned how provisional their work seemed as they constructed it, how tentative and fearful they recall being about the prospect of achieving it, and especially how terrifying it is when the result of so much solitary thinking and chance and failure enters the world and leaves their hands.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from How to Read a Novelist by John Freeman. Copyright © 2013 John Freeman. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
U and Me: The Hard Lessons of Idolizing John Updike,
Toni Morrison,
Jonathan Safran Foer,
Haruki Murakami,
Richard Ford,
Ngugi wa Thiong'o,
Günter Grass,
Nadine Gordimer,
David Foster Wallace,
Doris Lessing,
Hisham Matar,
Mark Z. Danielewski,
John Irving,
Kazuo Ishiguro,
Charles Frazier,
Edmund White,
Geraldine Brooks,
E. L. Doctorow,
Imre Kertész,
Aleksandar Hemon,
Kiran Desai,
Philip Roth,
Dave Eggers,
Vikram Chandra,
Tom Wolfe,
Robert M. Pirsig,
Peter Carey,
Mo Yan,
Donna Leon,
David Mitchell,
John Updike,
Joyce Carol Oates,
Amy Tan,
Don DeLillo,
William T. Vollmann,
Louise Erdrich,
Norman Mailer,
James Wood,
Margaret Atwood,
Mohsin Hamid,
Richard Powers,
Ian McEwan,
Michael Ondaatje,
Salman Rushdie,
Marilynne Robinson,
Edmundo Paz Soldán,
Susanna Clarke,
Orhan Pamuk,
Ayu Utami,
Jonathan Franzen,
Jeffrey Eugenides,
Edwidge Danticat,
Geoff Dyer,
A. S. Byatt,
Michael Cunningham,
Jennifer Egan,
Acknowledgments,
Also by John Freeman,
About the Author,
Copyright,

Interviews

Barnes & Noble Review Interview with John Freeman

"I've always felt there is something electrifying about meeting novelists," writes longtime literary journalist, editor, and critic John Freeman. While meeting an actor or a musician prompts a comparison between their physical self and the images we see on the screen, there's something more numinous and paradoxical in these encounters, when one comes face to face with "the creator of a physical world, a universe that lives inside you as a reader while also feeling strangely disembodied" — a flesh-and-blood meeting with a creature something like a god.

Freeman has racked up enough of these encounters to know: the former editor of the literary magazine Granta and president of the National Book Critics Circle has collected, in How to Read a Novelist, the fruits of a decade of conversations, with writers from A. S. Byatt to William T. Vollmann. These fifty brief pieces capture novelists in moods of career-spanning reflection (Norman Mailer), puckish humor (Amy Tan), guarded cooperation (Don DeLillo), and expansive rumination (Jeffrey Eugenides).

John Freeman spoke with us about How to Read a Novelist via email (a subject he also has a few things to say about in The Tyranny of E-mail). The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. —Bill Tipper

The Barnes & Noble Review: Your essay "U and Me" sensitively captures the curious contradictions implicit in all interviews, but particularly in the strange case of the interview with a novelist, whose imagination readers have already become so intimate with. The interview with a journalist mimics an intimacy that can't approach what happens in the act of reading fiction. Yet we crave these opportunities to enter into a different sort of relation to the authors we love. Why is that? Why do you think we can't leave well enough alone?

John Freeman: Have you ever been reading a book you're enjoying, and as you get closer to the end, you start flipping to the back flap to look at the author photo? As if to say, Who are you? I've done that for sure. The last time was with David Vann's Legend of a Suicide. I was on a train to Edinburgh, and that book was slowly cracking open my head and I wanted to see, well, who was wielding the crowbar. Why did he know so much about me? The intimacy of that encounter, between reader and writer, can be so great it would feel strange not to know anything about them. It's different than music, say, or dance, or even film, because the author is merely supplying the words; you, as the reader, are making them come to life with your imagination. So you're co-creating the experience of reading the book. You're building an experience together. And it's only natural, I think, to want to know more about the person you're doing it with.

BNR: You titled the book, of course, How to Read a Novelist. You performed these interviews over a period that spans more than a decade. When you looked back on them to put this volume together, did any central insights about the nature of novelists, and how to understand them, emerge? Have your own feelings about reading fiction changed?

JF: Yes, certainly, and maybe it's because I just had an event with Marilynne Robinson, whom I talked to for the book, but a lot of the central insights mimic the questions of faith. Doubt comes up quite a bit. Many of the writers here do not know, as they are writing, what they are making. Like Mark Danielewski, who couldn't fathom, at the start, whether he was even writing a book when he put together House of Leaves. Or Haruki Murakami, who says he just opens the door of his imagination and wanders in and discovers, there, what he will write about. Louise Erdrich said she just hears voices and gradually over time knows which one belongs to which book. And then, when the project coalesces, they wonder if they can pull it off. They worry, as David Foster Wallace talks about in the book, about language's capacity to capture thought. They get stuck, as Margaret Atwood mentions, with big books. This feeling of not-knowing terrifies them, but it also drives them, and it becomes essential to the fictive impulse. I found this, as a writer, incredibly reassuring.

BNR: Some of the novelists included herein have been able, to paraphrase John Updike, to keep themselves entertained by writing. But there are certainly examples of others — here I'm thinking particularly of the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o — who write for the most urgent political reasons, sometimes endangering themselves in the process. Do we do misunderstand their work grouping it under the same catchall as, say Tom Wolfe's?

JF: Actually, I don't believe so, because all books — whether it's a bulging page-turner by Wolfe or a novel about South Africa post- apartheid by Nadine Gordimer — sign the same contract with a reader, which is they must transport them. Make the reader forget he or she is reading, take them somewhere else, dramatize and punch forward the stuff of life. This isn't entertainment as in a big popcorn-thriller at the movies. It's entertainment of the mind, because the reader's mind is producing all the 3-D effects, it's doing all the work of the cinematographer, it's doing the casting, it's doing the soundtrack. Every great writer has a different way of making it possible for you, as the reader, to do all these things, and when a novelist does it well, your mind comes alive. It is entertaining, in essence, itself with the fabulous capacity we all have to dream.

BNR: You masterfully paint the picture of Don DeLillo withdrawing himself from your conversation, "unrevealing himself piece by piece" — one gets the sense the interviewee somehow escaping via a magic trick. How do you handle it when a writer's defenses start to go up?

JF: I come from a family of social workers, so I can question silence with the best of them. "How did that make you feel?" etc. "Do you want to talk a little more about that?" And I also went to a Quaker college, so I'm also not uncomfortable with silence. The thing I eventually learned after a few hundred of these interviews is to know when to question and to know when to wait. The latter is much harder, but these were not radio interviews so I had the luxury or doing that. Out of waiting I wound up with some of the best encounters in my experience as an interviewer. Like Kazuo Ishiguro giving me advice about how to put clotted cream and jam on my scones at a café in London. "Just think of it like putting blood on fresh snow," he said. It can be stressful, that silence, but if you give the writer time to find a thought they want to pursue, it gives them freedom. DeLillo was this way — if I let the silence lie, sometimes, he'd find a thought and pick it up and start rolling it over in his hand like a pebble. If I jumped in he'd become more reactive and tense.

BNR: One of my favorite interviews in the book is with Robert M. Pirsig, the reclusive author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — a man who has been spurned by the philosophic community he has devoted his writing life to, and simultaneously embraced by readers all over the world, who are moved by his books whether or not they want to grapple with his "Metaphysics of Quality." He stands out among these other portraits — almost a literary outcast.

JF: I think it was his first interview in almost twenty years. There we were at a hotel on the Charles, in a very stark room, with a tatami mat and a piece of paper so he could draw out ideas. His wife was nearby, sometimes interjecting. His hands shook, too. I felt an incredible responsibility, there, to get it right, or at least do right by what he wanted to talk about, which were his ideas. His books, for him, were life rafts, and he got on them and floated away from the things which made his life so unwieldy. And yet, he never really got away from them. The need to systematize life's onslaught, to break it down, as he does in Zen. And the loss of his son, the boy he wrote about in Zen and who was murdered in San Francisco, shattered him. It certainly colored Lila, his second book. Made that book necessary. Anyway, we sat and talked about how these two books build a Metaphysics of Quality. He gave his life, in a way, to making that system and if he wanted to talk about it for two hours I felt it was my duty to listen.

BNR: We all form ideas about a writer's personality from reading them. Who were the biggest surprises to you in conversation?

JF: Most writers, I found, were a lot like their books. Peter Carey has a high-decibel personality, Edmund White is one of the best sources of literary gossip I've ever found and yet is also forgiving of people's faults. Richard Ford is confident, Salman Rushdie extremely funny, Nadine Gordimer crisp and remote, but in that remoteness warm, and Günter Grass avuncular. John Irving seemed like he'd rather be arm- wrestling, Aleksandar Hemon tells great stories about places, and speaking to Marilynne Robinson is like talking to the oracle. Imre Kertész has an arachnid intelligence, while Joyce Carol Oates spoke of Hawthorne and Melville as if they were her next-door neighbors. I suppose only Ian McEwan, who asked as many questions as he answered, struck me as a surprise. His books, especially the early ones, have a honed-in-a-tunnel kind of perfection to the prose. I always imagine that the compressive pressure required to make sentences like that would not translate well to the everyday world, where there are pauses and dead-time, things one cannot shape. And yet I found him very good company, curious, and easygoing.

BNR: Who isn't in this book that you wish was there? Who are you still looking forward to meeting?

JF: I left out many pieces I wrote, because there were simply too many for one book — so Gary Shteyngart, Richard Russo, and Shirley Hazzard were hard interviews for me to drop, but the first two are people I'd like to re-interview. Shteyngart's life will become so much clearer with this incredible memoir he has coming out in January. And in Russo's case, I don't think I got him right the first time. I missed the way his humor proceeds from a kind of rage about the failures of American life. I would very much like to talk to Denis Johnson, whose work has the feel of an epic landscape: wide open and strange, beautiful, haunted. Herta Müller, too, her ferociousness is intimidating and inspiring. I published a few pieces by Alice Munro at Granta but never met her: we talked of Eudora Welty on the phone as we went through her edits, and yet I missed the chance to go to see her. Karen Russell, Aminatta Forna, Eleanor Catton, I know all these writers but have never interviewed them. I doubt I'll stop doing this. I can't imagine why I would.

—November 1, 2013

Editorial Reviews

"Ranging from the profound to the amusing,Freeman eloquently appreciates novelists and the “consolations of narrative.”—Booklist

"To read about the personal, emotional, mental, political, and artistic struggles and triumphs of great writers is to see them as flesh and blood human beings...intimate and thoughtful sketches."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2013-10-10
Flattering profiles of modern novelists by an astute, occasionally fawning reader. Despite the idle boast of the title, this collection by Granta editor in chief Freeman (The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, 2009) doesn't really cut it as literary criticism, but it is definitely literary appreciation. Over the past 15 years, the author has gotten the book-chat interview down to a science. He plays the perfect host to each of these 55 novelists, doing his homework, asking questions his subjects like hearing and, despite one chilly encounter with John Updike, neither alienating his subjects nor requiring them to think too deeply. Occasionally, he'll strike silver, if not gold, such as when Haruki Murakami announces that the imagination feeds on a repetitious life. Generally, though, it's Freeman who does the heavy lifting. Having gleaned a lot of precise assessments from reading his subjects in depth, he tends to be more interesting in describing his subject than they are about themselves. E.L. Doctorow has "the folksy charm of an afternoon radio host." Aleksandar Hemon's fiction "beats like a heart with two ventricles, one of them Chicago, one of them Sarajevo." John Updike's hands "are pink and somewhat gnarled, as if he has spent a lifetime vulcanizing words, rather than twisting them into shape on the page." At times, Freeman slips into hyperbole (David Foster Wallace); at others, he is entirely too impressed by a writer's commercial value (John Irving). Admittedly, he does an impressive amount in a tight space, but the articles don't leave much behind. As typical Sunday magazine fodder, they are pleasant enough to read. Stacked together, they only underscore his formulaic approach to his subjects. A box of literary bonbons: addictive in spurts, but after a while, they all taste the same.

Kirkus Reviews