Our short and incomplete literary tour of the states ends in Massachusetts, the home state of Lev Grossman (and his twin brother and fellow novelist Austin). Grossman's novels, including the bestselling Codex and his upcoming book,The Magicians, which I guarantee you'll be hearing a lot about in the next couple of months, have often fantastic settings, sometimes not even restricted to the dimension we are accustomed to, but for a representative Massachusetts book (I'm not even sure it's a favorite, rather than an impish jab at his Commonwealth fellows) he went suburban realist, to the notorious stories of John Updike's 1963 collection, Couples:
In his recent books, Tracy Kidder has ranged from Haiti (inMountains Beyond Mountains) to Vietnam (My Detachment) to Burundi (Strength in What Remains, a sequel of sorts to Mountains Beyond Mountains that comes out in late August), but many of his best-known books have been set in his home state of Massachusetts, from the hardware labs of The Soul of a New Machine to the Holyoke classroom ofAmong Schoolchildren and the Berkshire village inHome Town. He admits a conflict of interest in his choice for a favorite Massachusetts book--the author, Richard Todd, has been his editor and friend for over 30 years--but he makes an eloquent case for Todd's only book in a lengthy literary career,The Thing Itself:
As identified with Brooklyn as Jonathan Lethem is, Richard Russo is just as strongly associated with his own part of the Empire State, the upstate towns where his novels such asNobody's Fool, Bridge of Sighs, and The Risk Pool are rooted. (His upcoming novel,That Old Cape Magic, though, takes a road trip to the Massachusetts vacationland of the title--I'll be posting our interview about the book in this space in the next few weeks.) For his representative New York book, he settled, with apologies to all those writers he would have liked to include as well, on the novel of a friend and fellow Pulitzer winner whose home turf of Albany is just a few dozen miles away from Russo's, but in a different world entirely: William Kennedy'sIronweed:
These days, Brooklyn has a writer in every brownstone, but none is more closely identified with the borough than Jonathan Lethem, who grew up there and who has set perhaps his two most significant novels there as well,Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. For his upcoming novel,Chronic City (which comes out in October and which I just described elsewhere as "meticulously hilarious"), however, he crosses the river to Manhattan and doesn't turn back. In fact, he mentioned to me in an interview I'll be posting here later this month that he did a text search of his manuscript for the word "Brooklyn," and it only came up twice, both times followed by "Bridge".
But when I asked him to think of a New York book, he returned to his home borough--indeed to a writer who lived on the same street where Lethem grew up: L.J. Davis, for whose 1971 novel of one man on the vanguard of gentrification,A Meaningful Life, Lethem wrote the introduction when it was reissued this year, after long being out of print, by New York Review Books:
Washington, D.C., whose non-political neighborhoods were so long neglected by novelists, is now blessed by two wonderful writers of intense local interests and loyalties, George Pelecanos and Edward P. Jones. Pelecanos has written 16 crime novels that span the last few decades of the city's life, while Jones, while he's best known for his single novel,The Known World, set in antebellum Virginia, is beloved by residents of the District for his two brilliant short story collections, Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar's Children. When I suggested choosing a state book to Pelecanos, his first thought was to choose something from Maryland, where he lives now, just across the District line, since D.C. has been as poorly represented by fiction as it has in Congress. But then we got to talking about Ed Jones, and he eagerly came back home, to talk about Jones's collection Lost in the City:
In the Javits Center, the New York home of BookExpo, there was a giant, Dan Brown-sized banner advertising Elizabeth Kostova's second novel The Swan Thieves--which is no surprise, since her first book,The Historian, was a giant breakthrough bestseller. But The Swan Thieves doesn't come out until early next year, and there weren't any advance copies available yet to read, so we didn't do a full interview. She did stop by long enough, though, to say a few words about the upcoming book (which I'll post next week), and to talk about a favorite book from Michigan (where she went to grad school and wrote The Historian):The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch, a professional poet and working undertaker in his small Michigan town. (It's a favorite of mine too, and was on my Michigan list.)
I've already posted my BookExpo interview with Michael Lewis, in which we talked about both his new book on fatherhood,Home Game, and his upcoming one on the Wall Street implosion,The Big Short. He's from New Orleans, but despite having named his son Walker (I asked: Walker Percy, along with Walker Evans, was indeed an inspiration), he chose another beloved local for his favorite Louisiana book: John Kennedy Toole'sConfederacy of Dunces:
Jane Smiley may be best known as an Iowa writer, thanks toA Thousand Acres andMoo, and she now lives in California, the setting of her recent novel Ten Days in the Hills and her upcoming one, her first book for young readers, The Georges and the Jewels, which winningly revives the lost genre of the horse book for girls. But she grew up in Missouri, and the book she chose from that very literary state is Jetta Carleton's 1962 novel,The Moonflower Vine:
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, husband and wife, have collaborated for over 20 years as Pulitzer-winning New York Times correspondents and as the authors of three books, including the upcomingHalf the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which follows the engaged style, full of calls to action, that Kristof has become known for in his Times columns. Kristof is from Oregon and WuDunn is from New York City, and when I asked for some hometown reading, Kristof chose his fellow Yamhill County, Ore., native, Beverly Cleary, while WuDunn, with the recent Wall Street upheavals in mind, thought of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's ode to the improbable,The Black Swan:
Even after almost 20 years in Seattle I'm still enough of an East Coaster that I automatically think everything should begin there, but let's go left to right in this week's national tour, starting with California. Josh Ferris is from Illinois, and he wrote the Florida essay forState by State, but when I asked him to talk about a book that represented a state the one that came to mind was a recent discovery of his from the California desert, Mary Austin's 1903 book, The Land of Little Rain:
Ferris, of course, is known for writing one of the most acclaimed debut novels in recent years, Then We Came to the End. His second novel,The Unnamed, won't be out until January, but I can report that it is both very different from his first one and remarkably good. I'll post our interview about it in the next few weeks. --Tom
P.S. The book by John Daniel he mentions is Rogue River Journal, from Oregon, which brings us to our next video...
