In an email interview, the Vancouver Island-based novelist described why being a Booker Prize judge turned out to be surprisingly “exhilarating.” SCOTT HELLER
What’s the last great book you read?
“Change,” by Édouard Louis. He writes about how the abandonment of modest roots for a more privileged life can enact a kind of violence on intimate relationships. I read everything he writes.
What’s your go-to classic?
I was 18 when I started reading “Anna Karenina,” and I continue to read it every few years. I remember how grown up and worldly the characters once seemed. Now they are all so young!
Your favorite book no one else knows?
“The Cave,” by the Dutch author Tim Krabbé, is an elegant puzzle of a novel.
Do books serve a moral function? How so?
They can, but they shouldn’t set out to. When readers open themselves up to the intensity of another’s experience — even that of an invented person — it can be transformative. Books can leave you feeling less singular, strange and alone, but they can also expose you to a way of being that is completely alien to you, against which to measure your own choices.
Novels that are written with a pointed moral or a message are not novels. They are propaganda.
Do you consider yourself a writer of historical fiction?
Every time I describe myself as a writer of historical fiction, I feel an inward cringe as I sense those unfamiliar with my work picturing scenes of ripped-off bodices and men riding horses across twilit downs. Inevitably when I’m asked again, my reply is always the same. Something in that description must feel true. But I chafe against it.
When “Washington Black” came out, you told The Times that it would be “daunting” to write a novel set in the present. Are you getting closer to trying?
The temptation is still to look to parallels in the past for what’s going on now. The past has contours the present simply doesn’t possess for me; its throughlines feel more easily grasped and wrestled into a kind of shape. But I think it’s probably an important skill to be able to confront the moment as it now appears, somehow.
What surprised you most about chairing the Booker Prize panel in 2023?
What a healthy state literature is in. You can only hear that the novel is dying so many times before you start to feel cynical about the whole enterprise. Paring down the list became excruciating — our jury had many rigorous conversations from which we all mercifully emerged with our limbs still intact. It was a fascinating, combative, respectful, exhilarating experience.
What surprised you most about seeing “Washington Black” adapted for television?
I was struck by how much more externalized the storytelling has to be. This would seem an obvious fact, but it can still surprise you. Because characters’ inner worlds can’t be accessed as readily, everything must be recreated as surface, as something that can be gleaned visually. And so the set design is ferociously intricate, and multitudes are expressed in a glance or a grimace or the way a masterful actor carries her body. In a novel, the writing is everything. In a series or a film, it is one thread of a larger netting.
Tell me about western Canadian writers the wider world should know more about.
Patrick Lane was one of our greatest poets — his work is in many ways evocative of Cormac McCarthy. Also wonderful are the short stories of Tamas Dobozy and the novels of Patrick deWitt; Michael Christie’s era-spanning “Greenwood”; Jasmine Sealy’s epic “The Island of Forgetting”; Steven Price’s elegant “Lampedusa”; the beautiful poetry of Lorna Crozier and Jan Zwicky. For canonical works, I’d suggest Sheila Watson’s high modernist novel “The Double Hook,” Jack Hodgins’ Vancouver Island stories “Spit Delaney’s Island,” and Joy Kogawa’s “Obasan,” about the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II.
How do you organize your books?
I recently moved house, so my entire book collection is unfortunately boxed in my garage! When I get the shelving up, I’ll again arrange things alphabetically, and also by genre. It’s the only way to find anything when you’ve got over 10,000 books.
What’s the last book you read that made you laugh?
Kevin Wilson’s “The Family Fang” is an utter delight. Katherine Heiny’s “Single, Carefree, Mellow” was also a singular pleasure.
What books are on your night stand?
Ben Lerner’s exquisite “10:04,” which I’ve somehow only just come to; James Fox’s “The World According to Color: A Cultural History”; Percival Everett’s “James”; Alan Hollinghurst’s “Our Evenings”; Katie Kitamura’s “Audition”; and Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s “The Brittle Age.”
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
I’ve never been able to finish “Moby-Dick,” an admission made all the more dreadful for the fact that it is my partner’s favorite novel.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
Leo Tolstoy, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante — though I fear Tolstoy might spend the evening lecturing us on the world’s ills.
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