Welcome to The Spinoff Books Confessional, in which we get to know the reading habits of Aotearoa writers, and guests. This week: Damien Wilkins, author of 14 books, the latest of which is Delirious.
The book I wish I’d written
That They Might Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern. This was published in the US under the title By the Lake, which is accurate enough since the novel takes place by a lake in rural Ireland. It’s a sort of holy grail for some of us to write a novel without a central human character or even a plot. I think this is what a frustrated Katherine Mansfield meant when she wrote about hoping to create something freer than her “little” stories, which she thought were like “birds bred in cages”. How to disappear the cage?
McGahern’s masterpiece is about an isolated farming community, home to locals but also to escapees from city life. The seasons are observed, neighbours bump into each other laconically, the same patterns repeat with small and telling variations. I found the book almost unbearably poignant and writing this makes me long to be inside its world again. The older I get, the more Irish I feel. My maternal grandfather, to whom we were very close, visited his grandparents’ house in Ireland when he was on leave from ambulance driving in France in World War One. He saw the bed his own mother was conceived in. The room had a dirt floor. All of that is also somehow tied up now in my reading when I come to Irish writers such as McGahern or Dermot Healy or Anne Enright or Sebastian Barry.
Everyone should read
All Aunt Hagar’s Children by Edward P. Jones because Jones’ terrific novel The Known World is the one more people have heard of – it was voted number four on the New York Times list of the Best Books of the 21st Century. No one should miss this great book of short stories (#70 on that same list). All the stories are set in and around Washington D.C., cataloguing Black lives across the decades. There’s plenty of history to be learned or to be reminded of but it’s the astonishing imaginative range of Jones’ storytelling which makes this exciting and special.
The book that haunts me
Correction by Thomas Bernhard. I read all of Bernhard in my 20s, including his amazing autobiographical collection Gathering Evidence where he writes about his childhood through the years of the Second World War and his hospitalisation with tuberculosis. His fiction tends to be free of paragraph breaks or really any relief whatsoever. The intense, monologuing narrators, in pursuit of all forms of stupidity and hypocrisy (especially in his native Austria, where Bernhard is loved and reviled), go on and on. These books might be more of a young man’s thing! Correction, for some reason, physically frightened me. The story is about a man who obsessively designs a weird house for his sister, the only person he loves, and it kills her. Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom Bernhard revered, also designed a weird house for his sister.
The book that made me cry
The great novels of the 19th century and early 20th always get me: Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, The House of Mirth. And then a store of heartbreaking poetry: Thomas Hardy, Bill Manhire, Anne Carson of ‘The Glass Essay’, Louise Glück of Meadowlands.
The book that made me laugh
Waters of Thirst by Adam Mars-Jones is one of my favourite English novels. Set in 1977, it’s short, hilarious and about AIDS. Mars-Jones’ later short books are also definitely worth tracking down: Box Hill, Kid Gloves and Batlava Lake.
Encounter with an author
One time I ended up standing next to Janet Frame at a Writers Week event in the Michael Fowler Centre. I’d introduced myself earlier but we didn’t know each other. A young woman came up to Janet and asked to have her book signed and Janet looked astonished and said, “Oh, really? But I don’t have a pen.” For some reason I had a pen and I gave it to Janet. Then there was an awkward moment when Janet looked at the book the woman had given her and back at the woman. She was trying to work out how to sign the book in mid-air. Finally, Janet gestured that the woman should turn around. Janet placed the book on the woman’s back and signed it. How strange, I thought, that Janet Frame was doing this next to me. How brilliant! While she was signing, Janet gave me a mischievous look and said, “This reminds me of that moment in the Saul Bellow story.” Now I’d reviewed a book of Bellow’s short novels the week before in the Listener. Had Janet read the review? Was this some sort of test, an invitation to connect? But I couldn’t think of any moment in Bellow where something similar happens. I stammered some sort of reply, “I’m sorry, I can’t . . . ” Janet just smiled, gave the woman her book and was gone. That’s haunted me ever since. Which Bellow story? It’s not the sort of thing Janet Frame would get wrong. Maybe one day I’ll find it. Maybe she was just messing with me.
Greatest New Zealand book
Faces in the Water by Janet Frame. The risk is that Frame’s courageous personal story is so well-known now, we might lose sight of her artistic genius. She loved language. This awe-inspiring fictionalising of her experience fixes that fact to the page for all time. I’d also vote for The Bone People in any list of great works of fiction from Aotearoa. I’m still waiting for a really good essay on Keri Hulme. Like Frame, she’s a bit obscured by piety.
Best thing about reading
It appears unproductive. Lots of people are still suspicious of it. These tend to be the people behind any cuts to public libraries. I wouldn’t be a writer without the Lower Hutt Public Library.
I’m always recommending Reading for Life by Philip Davis. It’s a completely engrossing account of how a wide variety of readers interact with literary texts often in times of painful personal need. Davis set up the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society at the University of Liverpool and partnered with the outreach charity The Reader to take literature to often neglected communities in the UK. Davis writes a brilliant set of character portraits and conveys the unlikely ways reading can be transformative.
What are you reading right now
Springs of Affection by Maeve Brennan. More Irish stuff! Maeve Brennan’s book collects stories from the 1950s and 1960s, when she was a New Yorker writer. Brennan suffered from alcoholism and was frequently hospitalised later in her life. She apparently ended up sleeping in the New Yorker toilets and died out-of-print and out of sight in 1993. She’s now back in view. Most of these intense stories take place in the claustrophobic rooms of Dublin houses where trapped women describe their imprisonment. At this point someone recommending the book would say, “Despite this, these stories offer hope.” Not sure. They make you feel worried constantly. The title story is one of the greatest of the century. Anne Enright is a fan too: “. . . something lovely and unbearable is happening on the page.”
Delirious by Damien Wilkins ($38, Te Herenga Waka University Press) launches at Unity Books Wellington on October 17, and can be pre-ordered through Unity Books.