How to read a novelist

Review by Booklist Review

Critic and former Granta editor Freeman (The Tyranny of E-Mail, 2009) presents a collection of 55 deeply informed and closely observed encounters with exceptional novelists. After stumbling through his first interview with John Updike, Freeman learned that an interview is a form of conversation that has the same relationship to talking as fiction does to life. Over the subsequent 13 years, Freeman spoke confidently with novelists who have something to say about the world that can only be said in a story in conversations he deftly wove into compact yet defining literary newspaper profiles. And what a spectrum he covers, from such towering figures as Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Gunter Grass to Aleksandar Hemon, Kiran Desai, crime writer Donna Leon, and Jonathan Franzen. Haruki Murakami explains why a repetitious life is good for the imagination. E. L. Doctorow talks about the balance between the imagined and the historic, and Kazuo Ishiguro comments on the mess Freeman makes while eating scones. Ranging from the profound to the amusing,Freeman eloquently appreciates novelists and the consolations of narrative. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Award-winning writer and critic Freeman (The Tyranny of Email), editor-in-chief of Granta, has collected 55 interviews in which the great literary lights of our time "explain what it is they don't want left out." In pithy, penetrating profiles, Freeman discusses "the consolation of narrative" with a diverse roster of authors including Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Aleksandar Hemon, David Foster Wallace, Mohsin Hamid, Marilynne Robinson, Ayu Utami, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, Mo Yan, Philip Roth, and many more. In an insightful preface, Freeman describes the allure of the biographical sketch: we read about our favorite writers because we want to understand how a disembodied, imaginative world emerges from the body of the artist. At the same time, it would be foolish to insist that the details of an author's life and writing can explain the mysteries of fiction, or vice versa. To read about the personal, emotional, mental, political, and artistic struggles and triumphs of great writers is to see them as flesh and blood human beings, but that is not the same as understanding how and why people succeed in making transcendent art. These intimate and thoughtful sketches are supplementary pieces to that transcendent work. Agent: Sarah Burnes, the Gernert Company. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In this collection of 55 interviews with contemporary novelists, critic Freeman, the former president of the National Book Critics Circle and editor in chief at Granta magazine, celebrates his best previously published conversations with international literary figures. He describes his interview experience as seeing the "flesh and blood" of creators of fictional worlds. The most revealing detail mentioned in common among the interviewees is how many years authors dedicate to writing their novels. While the reader may spend one weekend with a book, authors dedicate years. Several writers discuss the motivation they experience after their contemporaries write negative reviews. Authors such as Richard Ford describe the need to get away from writing in order to begin the next novel, while others, including Joyce Carol Oates, say that all they know how to do is write. Additional interviewees include John Irving, Amy Tan, Tom Wolfe, Jennifer Egan, Jeffrey Eugenides, and, Freeman's favorite, John Updike. VERDICT This volume will inspire readers, lead them to new authors, and is an excellent resource for struggling novelists.-Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Flattering profiles of modern novelists by an astute, occasionally fawning reader. Despite the idle boast of the title, this collection by Granta editor in chief Freeman (The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, 2009) doesn't really cut it as literary criticism, but it is definitely literary appreciation. Over the past 15 years, the author has gotten the book-chat interview down to a science. He plays the perfect host to each of these 55 novelists, doing his homework, asking questions his subjects like hearing and, despite one chilly encounter with John Updike, neither alienating his subjects nor requiring them to think too deeply. Occasionally, he'll strike silver, if not gold, such as when Haruki Murakami announces that the imagination feeds on a repetitious life. Generally, though, it's Freeman who does the heavy lifting. Having gleaned a lot of precise assessments from reading his subjects in depth, he tends to be more interesting in describing his subject than they are about themselves. E.L. Doctorow has "the folksy charm of an afternoon radio host." Aleksandar Hemon's fiction "beats like a heart with two ventricles, one of them Chicago, one of them Sarajevo." John Updike's hands "are pink and somewhat gnarled, as if he has spent a lifetime vulcanizing words, rather than twisting them into shape on the page." At times, Freeman slips into hyperbole (David Foster Wallace); at others, he is entirely too impressed by a writer's commercial value (John Irving). Admittedly, he does an impressive amount in a tight space, but the articles don't leave much behind. As typical Sunday magazine fodder, they are pleasant enough to read. Stacked together, they only underscore his formulaic approach to his subjects. A box of literary bonbons: addictive in spurts, but after a while, they all taste the same.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Excerpt from U and ME: The Hard Lessons of Idolising John Updike I got lost on my way to the museum and arrived late. I discovered Updike waiting by the foyer, dressed in khaki slacks and a sports coat. Just over seventy years old, he had a full head of hair and the coiled physical presence of a man in good shape. We passed through a few galleries, Updike dispatching prose poems of appreciation with chummy good humour--as if surprised by how easily his mind created verbal felicitations with language. At some point I began to flag, however, because he turned to me and said, 'Is this enough? I mean, you look pretty tired. I understand you are coming from Vermont?' I told him it was not Vermont, but Maine, and in response to his question about what I was doing up there said, 'I was getting divorced.' The interview came to a dead halt. Updike turned to me with real feeling, his ironic pose collapsing. 'I'm really sorry,' he said. He would not allow me to make light of my newly minted divorce, and said that he had gone through this once before too, which I knew, and that it was hell. His advice continued, briefly, but it was so surreal to hear him reference his private life that today I can hardly remember what he said. Apparently, though, he remembered. When Terrorist , his most recent novel, approached publication, a newspaper asked me if I could once again speak to John Updike. I called his publisher and was put on a junket schedule, then bumped and bumped again. Finally I got through to his publicist. He switched from speakerphone to handset. We got some mixed feedback from John on the last conversation, the publicist explained. My ripped jeans and two days' growth might have been noted, my mid-interview explosion of personal detail--which I remembered as more of a leak--had possibly made John feel uncomfortable. I had to understand, John was of the old school. I didn't know what to say. At first I was hurt, embarrassed, but soon I became more circumspect. If I hadn't known before, I knew now: it was a breach of everyone's privacy when a reader turns to a writer, or a writer's books, for vicariously learned solutions to his own life problems. This is the fallacy behind every interview or biographical sketch, to tether a writer's life too literally to his work, or to insist that a novel function as a substitute for actually living through the mistakes a person must actually live through in order to learn how to properly, maybe even happily, survive. Excerpted from How to Read a Novelist by John Freeman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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