Writers On Other Writers' Writing
Part 1 of 2, featuring Yelena Akhtiorskaya and Nell Zink
For a long time I'd been dissatisfied with the standard format for live author interviews in the United States: Such and such author "in conversation with" another author or magazine editor or various sub-literary personality about their new book. In most cases, these events devolve into a higher primate ritual of mutual back-scratching and grooming, tepid and self-congratulatory. Polite things are said between the authors, a brief passage or two is read—often not commented upon or—god forbid—analyzed or challenged—the audience claps while plotting where they’re going afterwards to have drinks.
Like the writing of book reviews, the live author interview has been placed under the sign of "marketing and publicity," and treated less as a distinct skill than part of an ethos of service—something that "professional" writers do for other writers and for their publishers—as well as signaling everyone's support for the perennially endangered small bookstores and event spaces that host them. The assumption is that the interviewer, like the interviewee, has something to sell. Since everyone is engaged in promotion, no one has to be paid. The sense that the interview is a devalued form, anyone can do it, especially if they published a book a year before the book under discussion, makes it a kind of professional corvée for writers whose value accrues elsewhere. This can often have a corrosive effect on the quality of the events. I have been to evenings where it appears the interviewer hasn't even read the author's book. More recently they have become another opportunity to indulge in guilty feelings and remind everyone in attendance that something more important and painful is happening elsewhere. In general, people come to these things to look rather than to listen and they do them to be seen rather than heard. The author will be signing books afterwards; there will be free drinks before you go out to pay for drinks; you can take a selfie if you want.
These are cynical, world-weary objections, albeit sometimes true. But my discomfort with the form has a thicker root. I come from a particular philosophy of literature that holds writers to be in the worst position to offer insights into the books they have written. Authors are not authorities, especially about themselves, and we do a certain violence to both the author and their work when we ask them to pretend to be so.
Harold Bloom was fond of reminding his students that the word "about" derives from an Old English word that means "outside of." The persistent uncanniness we feel when we speak about "about" arises from having to use a word that once denoted what's on the outside to also mean what's on the inside and has become mistakenly synonymous with "essence." "Mr. Tolstoy, tell us please, what is your latest novel about?" "I have written a novel about the different consequences of adultery for men and women in Russia in the 1850s." "Thank you, we will put that description in your algorithm and Library of Congress classification."
Asking someone what their book is "about," or what they are "about" when they are writing is a recipe either for a description of a surface, a periphery, a shell or case, a sales pitch, or some "talking points." A lot of the weirdness and discomfort of these author conversations, for me, arises from asking someone to talk as if they were on the outside of something they were very much inside of. They default to mythologizing or other kinds of defensiveness; they split; they say a lot of stuff they have heard others say in similar situations, or they just crack jokes.
The author you are interviewing is just one mask of many that belongs to the being who wrote the book. This mask can be boring or exciting, but it is a mask. Crucially, too, masks may be more true or more false. This is another way of saying that live events are a form of performance in their own right, a kind of dancing or acting about literature, or, more simply, conversation considered as one of the fine arts. They are both independent aesthetic objects and intended to awaken a desire in the audience for a different kind of performance experience, i.e. reading the book the event is based upon. Whenever I was the host or interlocutor for these live author events (and for a while I did about three a year) I tried to keep this in mind and create something with the author that was faithful to the spirit of their work and to their truest public mask.
It's also true that a lot of writers do not and cannot think in this multiplied-masked way about themselves. I certainly struggle with it. Writing is the performance. On stage they are helpless, awkward and grumpy. Understandable then that they'd reach for the literary world's equivalent of the mass-produced drugstore Halloween mask, no matter how bad the fit. What many of my favorite living writers can do extremely well, however, is discuss other writers’ books, in particular those that have had a profound effect on them, the books that made them want to become writers in the first place, or showed them how it might be possible to write in a new way, or which they kept returning to as a source and kind of sustenance.
I’d had many such conversations with these people in private and I wondered what a public-facing version of this might look and sound like, and how we’d involve the audience as well, as readers of both the featured author and the featured author’s featured author.
So, about a year ago, when David Samuels—my wonderful, maverick editor at Tablet—asked if I could put together a series of live events about literature, I pitched him on this long-standing fantasy of mine. Because he is a maverick and also because he is usually as bored as I am by most live literary events, David gave me the green light and a handsome budget for guests and amenities. Between February and May of 2024, we did four of these conversations under the Tablet aegis, hosted at the Russian Samovar restaurant and café-concert venue in midtown Manhattan.
The sad thing about live events, when they're good, is that they are ephemeral. The happier news is that these events can be recorded and experienced at second-hand. Tablet initially recorded these events for their membership podcast, but they have kindly granted me permission to publish them freely here on Substack for a different audience. Four hours is a lot of audio and people don’t often return to Substack emails, so I am going to space these out in two installments over the next few weeks. You may find the first of the audio links below. It’s high quality sound-editing and audio but depending on which player you use, the recording might glitch.
Today’s second installment features the distinctive mind of one of America’s greatest living novelists, the expatriate American author Nell Zink, as she thinks through the life and work of Robert Walser with me.
[And now here is where Substack would like me to put a paywall, to tease some, annoy most, and trigger an impulsive need in others to pay me for the pleasure of completing a circuit and getting the whole set. They have studied these things! They know what works! For as long as possible, I'd like to avoid paywalling pieces here. At the same time, The Feckless Bellelettrist is now entering its 12th month. (For those newly arrived, welcome, and please consult the homepage for a list of everything published over this past year.) I enjoy publishing here, but I too need to be writing things for money. The purpose of this Substack is not to promote my work from elsewhere, nor to persuade you to buy my first book (now, I believe, dwelling in the purgatory of print-on-demand and e-book), but to continue as a place for the kind of unclassifiable and elsewhere unpublishable essays I enjoy writing, editing, or promoting, also occasional gossip, restaurant tips and museum reviews.
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For now, the subscription rate will remain at the price of a round-trip New York City subway ride in 2015 CE, i.e. five dollars per month with a discount for those who take an annual subscription. If it helps, I encourage you to think of each post as a there-and-back-again journey through the metro system of the Feckless Bellelettrist's invisible city. A special thank you to those who have shown faith and supported this publication from the beginning, enduring through the fallow period that lasted from May through last month! Herein endeth the service announcement. Kindly proceed downscroll to find the embedded audio links for the remaining Samovar series episodes and the button to upgrade your free subscription or become a new subscriber.]
And now you can also listen to Nell Zink on Robert Walser!
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