I always find it hard to list the books that have influenced me the most. Memory is tricky, and a work can assert its influences over my thinking long after I’ve forgotten its particular details, or even its title. Moreover, people who set as their job the task of judging what others do, and why, are not always reliable when turning the lens upon themselves. And then there’s the fact that any list of books that I feel made me, as both a writer and a human, changes with the day and feeling. Still, on that changing list there are a few mainstays.
Take Tony Judt’s Postwar. I first encountered Tony in a swirl of legend and myth, an intellectual hero who, in the dark post-9/11 years, inveighed against the Israeli occupation and filleted the “useful idiots” who sanctified the War on Terror. Having, at that time, read very little of Tony, I was left with the impression of an intellectual monk who eschewed the dictates of party or crowd. I’ve always been skeptical of writers who are spoken of in this way, intellectuals praised for violating the dictums of both “the left and the right” as though the best answer somehow lay unerringly in between. Maybe that’s why I didn’t read a book by Tony until after he’d died. It was my mistake. It was my loss.
On Saturdays, I came in around 9 am, an hour before we opened the phone lines, to grab a grapefruit from the walk-in, put on a pot of coffee, spray down the phones with Lysol, and get a plate of whatever the overnight porters prepared for their version of family meal. Family meal was when the entire staff sat down and ate together before the start of service, and it usually flowed into the pre-service meeting where George gave everyone the scoop on who was coming in that night. The overnight porters broke for a meal in the early morning, right around the time I arrived.
Most importantly, I locked the front door. Prospective guests showed up before 10 am, and I wasn’t so sure some of them wouldn’t stab me if I couldn’t give them a reservation. Some drove in from the suburbs of New Jersey or Connecticut, hoping to make a reservation for whatever date we were releasing that morning. What kind of person would drive all the way into Manhattan on a weekend just to make a dinner reservation? A smart one. That was what you had to do to get a table. Some of the more zealous resorted to banging on the windows. Everyone assumed that our lack of open tables was a publicity stunt and that we were intent on shutting out the average person, which was ridiculous—the more bodies we pumped in and out every night, the more money the front of the house made.
A maestro of the dramatic opener, Neal Stephenson began his 2015 novel, Seveneves, with the line “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” That’s a hard act to follow, but he gives it the old college try in his latest, Termination Shock, heralded, when first announced, as the celebrated science-fiction author “finally” taking on the subject of global warning. Termination Shock begins with the queen of the Netherlands piloting a business jet in an emergency landing at the Waco airport, a maneuver that goes terribly wrong when her plane’s landing gear collides with a herd of feral hogs that, chased by an oversize alligator, swarm the airstrip.
The City of Good Death, winner of the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, on the one hand engages in staple exoticisms related to India — gods, ghosts, religion, and death — but on the other hand displays an earnest attempt at vividly capturing the life of the characters and of Kashi through the author’s lush and evocative prose.
It may be laden with whimsical details and witticisms, but the opening chapter of Helen Oyeyemi’s Peaces feels grounded given her penchant for disorienting fables. Any predictability vanishes, however, when narrator Otto, his partner Xavier and their pet mongoose Árpád Montague XXX arrive at a dozy Kent railway station and board a sleeper train named the Lucky Day. Instantly, they find themselves in “an upside-down sort of place”, figuratively and also literally: in one carriage, the seats and tables are fixed to the ceiling. Others contain a library, a greenhouse, an art gallery (all the canvases are white, revealing different images for each viewer). From here on in, this smart, inventive narrative moves with antic momentum, darting between past and present, and from storyline to storyline.
H. G. Wells is remembered today mostly as the author of four visionary science-fiction perennials with premises so simple and strong that they can sustain any amount of retelling: “The War of the Worlds,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Time Machine,” and “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Social historians recall Wells as one of the brighter technological optimists and left-wing polemicists of the early part of the twentieth century. He is also remembered, among Brits with a taste for evergreen gossip, as perhaps the most erotically adventurous man of his generation, the satyr of the socialists. “I have done what I pleased,” he wrote. “Every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself.” The case is sometimes even made that Wells invented the word “sex”—that he pioneered its modern use, in his 1900 novel, “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” as a shorthand for the totality of the activity. Like most “first use” claims—the number of words that Shakespeare supposedly used first has decreased as Elizabethan data banks have enlarged—this is probably overstated, but Wells certainly made the word, well, sticky. A case can even be made—indeed, to make it you can draw on Claire Tomalin’s new biography, “The Young H. G. Wells: Changing the World”—that his eroticism was in no small part feminist in its promotion of a woman’s right to choose her own sexual partners, unconstrained by the strictures of a father or a husband.
All fruits are not created equal.
In September the pear tree produces
an army of hard pellets tasting
of twine, of whining,
tasting of the word but.