Read Great Write Great
Surprise. Francine Prose in her lastest book READING LIKE A WRITER A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, espouses a close reading of the great works of literature for those who want to join the Canon. Here, from the chapter called Words is what she does with a passage from Paul Bowles’s story A Distant Episode The contents of the Professor’s two small overnight bags full of maps, sun lotions and medicines provide a tiny mini-course in the importance of close reading. The protagonist’s anxiety and cautiousness, his whole psychological makeup, has been communicated in five words (maps, sun lotions and medicines) and without the need to use one descriptive adjective or phrase. (He was an anxious man, who worried about getting lost or sunburned or sick and so forth.) What very different conclusions we might form about a man who carries a bag filled with dice, syringes and a handgun.
So much of what is published today, although perhaps good, is not great, despite what the hype machines tell us. And although one wants to be current, and doesn’t want to ignore interesting work, there is only so much time. This is precisely why most of the books I read are ones recommended by Clifton Fadiman and Harold Bloom and others kindred. Not because they were written by dead white dudes, many weren’t, but because they deliver the best quality goods; the best bang for the browse. It’s interesting that a lot of the writers I’ve interviewed over the past year do exactly the same, and, as a result, are hard pressed, I would suggest, to read many works written by their contemporaries. Unless of course they have been selected to sit on the Booker jury, in which case they will have read 112…closely I’ll bet… in a matter of 112 days…or whatever.
