CHAPTER 1
READING AND INFLUENCES
WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR IN A NOVEL?
SUSAN MINOT: Transport. Enchantment. Guidance. Pleasure. Beauty. Novelty. Entertainment. Charm. Poetry. Truth. Solace. Wit. Wisdom.
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA: I look for the same thing that I try to achieve when writing a novel--a well-told story. I believe that is the most difficult thing, to tell a story in an absolutely persuasive manner. To make readers live that experience--not just as readers, but to really experience it. For me the novels that achieve that are the most moving and leave a lasting impression in my memory.
YIYUN LI: I look for a world--sometimes it is one as familiar as this one world we have, and sometimes it is a strange world that perhaps would only happen in a dream--but in either case when I read a novel I look to live in that world along with the characters.
PAUL AUSTER: Passion, power, integrity, beauty.
HARUKI MURAKAMI: If I want to read it again, it must surely be a good novel.
CHRIS ABANI: The most important thing for me is that a novelist has a philosophical engagement with the world, some deeper question about their place in all of this that emerges subtly and beautifully through the work they do, regardless of what the apparent subject is. So for instance, Toni Morrison wants to understand what love is and what it means to us and the ways in which we understand it, use it, and want to control it.
For her, trauma, violence, and hate are symptomatic of our inability to face and accept all the facets of love. Language, exquisite prose is also essential: I cannot read a book for the story anymore, no matter how compelling. I also love books that challenge our ideas of convention, novels are meant to be just that, novel.
RICK MOODY: A certain kind of irreducible complexity, a mixture of very good and memorable prose, originality with respect to the form, and a density of thematic material. What I don't require and don't consider relevant: "likeable" characters, naturalism, epiphanic transformations, pilotting, or a rationale for what is going on around us in the world.
ADANIA SHIBLI: I usually can only see the words, how they come to express what they express. I'm rarely interested in what they express; that is the being of the word rather than what it tells.
COLM TÓIBÍN: A novel looks for something in me. Meaning, there is no type of novel I like or look for, or no set of emotional contours or contexts I look for. But if what a novel exudes has not been felt properly or seriously or deeply enough by the writer, then it will show and I will become tremendously bored and irritated.
CRISTINA GARCIA: I look for poetry in a novel. And that means from the get-go it's singing to me in some particular, peculiar voice. And if that doesn't exist, it's hard for me to get interested.
STEPHEN KING: Entertainment and good language.
SANTIAGO RONCAGLIOLO: Emotions and ideas. I want a story that I can't put down, that makes me forget the real world but that, like Richard Ford said, brings me back better prepared to live it. I look for an experience that transports me to other lives, and returns me to mine after having looked at it from the outside.
JOSH EMMONS: I look for well-crafted language and authorial intelligence; with these in place every story can provide the aesthetic bliss Nabokov said was literature's greatest reward.
ALAA AL ASWANY: At this point I think of the novel as a life of the people, similar to our daily lives but more composed, more significant, more beautiful. What do I care about while reading a novel? The human experience, the human feelings, the human logic. This is the real challenge of the novelist.
RODDY DOYLE: Surprise and reassurance.
JENNIFER EGAN: The thing I most crave is to be sucked into a novel and feel that helpless sense that I can't stop reading, and that I'd do anything--give up anything, certainly a night's sleep--in order to keep reading. When I step back and look at what qualities in a novel inspire that sense of urgency (and I wish it happened more often) I'd say the top one is surprise. The surprise can arrive in many forms: a fresh, distinct voice; a story whose moves are counterintuitive or unexpected; the language stands out as being original, or innovative. What most excites me as a reader is the sense that I'm encountering material I haven't seen before.
JOSÉ MANUEL PRIETO: A different way of looking at the world, one that expands my way of understanding it--not through factual knowledge (data, dates, historical events) but with a new philosophy, a unique grammar of existence.
GLEN DAVID GOLD: Sheer entertainment.
ADAM MANSBACH: Truth and beauty. Soulfulness. Honesty. Emotional resonance. Insight into the human condition expressed in prose that is original and well-wrought--and funny, when possible. Beyond that, I don't know that I have specific criteria; certainly, there are topics that will make me pick up a book, because they dovetail with my own interests--the complexities of race in America, for instance--or because they offer clues about some problem I'm trying to solve in my own work. But I'm also learning not to trust my own interests too completely; to only read the books with obvious appeal is to miss out on a lot.
SAŠA STANIŠI: I look for a novel to entertain and enlighten me.
RABIH ALAMEDDINE: After reading a great novel, I am not the same person I was before I read it. Now all that stuff we take for granted--great story, great structure, great language--that all makes for a really good novel. But a great novel is not the one that transforms the character but the one that transforms the reader. In a lot of workshops they tell you there has to be a movement in the narrator. For me, that's minor.
ALEKSANDAR HEMON: I look for what I don't expect. Great novels make you change your mind about what you know, what you expect. They teach you how to read them, which is to say that they force you to drop your expectations and aesthetic prejudices, they force you to read in a way you are not accustomed to. I want the reading of a novel to be a transformative experience.
MEHMET MURAT SOMER: For some time I've been discerning in my appreciation and my liking. As a reader I look at what I like, which is joy. It's very essential for me. And wit. I love to have a smile on my face, both while reading and for some time after, as residue in my memory.As an author, I appreciate many books, even envy the way they were written, but do not like all of them. I don't feel comfortable with slaps to my face or fists in my stomach. Perhaps because I'm still in my never-ending rose-colored phase.
CLAIRE MESSUD: Ah--satisfaction and a challenge both. What exactly these entail it is impossible properly to elaborate; but suffice it to say that for me, no novel is satisfying without some challenge, whether narrative or structural or linguistic or intellectual or some combination of these; and yet, if a novel impresses me as all challenge--that's to say, without any tangible narrative satisfactions--then I'm unlikely to be won over.
TAYARI JONES: I am drawn to novels about families--I love the permanence of the relationships, the way they tend to box the characters in, forcing them to really stretch the relationship to the snapping point. I like sad and difficult stories. If something is blurbed as a feel-good story, I go running the other way. I want a story to give me hard truths. I want a novel that isn't afraid to follow a story to its true end, even if what is discovered there isn't good news.
T COOPER: Sometimes it's no more complicated than wanting to get out of my own head for a spell. But I suppose I also want the usual: to be surprised and moved, inspired to think about some small thing in some different way--and I guess I also secretly want a novel to inspire a little envy (I know it's the right book when I find myself ensnared in a desperate love/hate relationship with it).
DINAW MENGESTU: In general whenever I'm reading I'm looking for language first--for a strong, distinct, accurate, and even beautiful prose style. After that I think I tend to look for novels that feel like they have a real engagement with the world, for novels that look beyond certain conventions or settings.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: A great story. Good plot. Beautiful language. Good pacing. I want a novel to grab me by the throat and not allow me to put it down.
GEORGE PELECANOS: An original voice.
NELL FREUDENBERGER: I look for characters in a novel. This is my bias, but beautiful sentences or a particularly compelling setting (and I'm a sucker for books that take place in countries, cities I've never visited) isn't enough for me. I like that shock of recognizing things about human beings that seem to be true, even if I've never been articulate enough to put them into words myself. I think of George Eliot as the master of this particular novelistic skill.
JONATHAN LETHEM
