We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with National Book Award finalist Jess Walter (So Far Gone, Beautiful Ruins) about “patron saint of journalists who become novelists” Charles Portis, and with National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, the upcoming A Different Kind of Tension) about the “breathtaking painterliness” of James Salter.
Jess Walter on Charles Portis
What drew you to Portis?
His incredible sense of humor and play on the page. You read someone and you feel like they're having so much fun! His lack of pretension, his dialogue. And the way there's always something authentically American in what he's writing about. I share some of his predilections—cults and cars and road trips—and we both like a certain kind of self-deluded hero. Jonathan Lethem has called him “everybody's favorite least-known great novelist,” which is just a great, ironic way to say that he was kind of undiscovered for a while. But now the Library of America has just reissued him.
But beyond all that, when Donna Tartt was writing about him, she said that it sort of baffled her that he still referred to himself as a newspaper man, and so I think of him as almost a patron saint of journalists who become novelists. There's so many amazing classic writers—Hemingway and Twain and Dostoevsky and Dorothy Parker, and all the way up through William Kennedy and Joan Didion and Gabriel Garcia Marquez—so many writers who took that path. But I think what drew me was that he still referred to himself as a newspaper man, and I still think of myself that way. For me it was every bit as profound as if I'd gotten an MFA or if I'd studied literature, that career path. And because it's disappearing, I feel like that especially draws me to his work.
I’ve seen him referred to as a western writer but that really only fits True Grit. The rest of his work is far more varied. He’s really a humorist more than anything.
Yeah, I think he descends out of Twain certainly. That one book is a western and picaresque. There's almost always a road trip or a journey in Portis’s books, the way it crosses borders—Mexico, Belize. And I think that's another thing: he really is a writer of the South, and I love what we classically call Southern writing. But he eschews the mythical. When you read William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, there's this mythic quality, but because he's a humorist, he's so grounded in the world that his books feel more general to me, like his South is a place that someone from Spokane recognizes, because it's filled with these kind of hapless characters who, even though they might be bumblers, still aspire to these incredible things.
He only wrote five novels, so where do you think someone should start?
True Grit, I think, is his masterpiece. A lot of people would argue that it's Masters of Atlantis, especially people who come from sci-fi or who want that sort of bigger palette, but I guess I would say start with True Grit. I mean, if you were gonna start with Vonnegut, you should start with Slaughterhouse-Five. If you're gonna read Twain, you should start with Huckleberry Finn. So I think I would start with True Grit. It's got everything you want in a great American novel: themes of violence and religion, the ghosts of the Civil War and violence against native tribes. Even the place it ends, with the primacy of entertainment. I mean, where does that novel end? You think of it as this great Western adventure, and it is, but it ends with Rooster Cogburn dying while performing in a Wild West reenactment, and there's almost nothing more American than that.
What should writers learn from him?
I guess one really practical thing is that the world will not live or die on whether you get all the publicity you want for your books, and whether they're great sellers. With a writer like Portis, who feels under-appreciated, it’s always kind of rewarding when the world recognizes what was there. And I think that's the thing you strive for as a writer: that the work doesn't need you to post on Twitter about it. It can stand.
And then the next thing is the importance of humor not as a gimmick or series of jokes, but as acknowledging that whatever we take to be reverent in the world probably isn't, and will pass just like anything else. I think one of the reasons that Masters of Atlantis also rises in so many readers’ libraries is that it shows an America of cults and miracle cures and hucksters and con men, where we aren't victims of these things but willful participators in them. This vision of the country’s religious streak explains everything from Mormonism to the Atkins diet to QAnon. We are sort of addicted to quackery, I guess, and I think Portis is able to write about that sort of central flaw in what it is to be an American without ever resorting to didacticism or mockery.
Jonathan Lethem on James Salter
When did you first read Salter?
I first came across Salter when North Point was reissuing some of the books in the late 1980s. I started with Solo Faces—his mountain climbing novel—and devoured that and A Sport and a Pastime, and then did Light Years. And I guess you could say at that point he suddenly seemed like one of the great writers to me after those three in succession. But I felt that Light Years was the one, even above all the others. And it was also different because though he does write about women, he’s an expert on manhood, and most of his other works, even A Sport and a Pastime, which is obviously about heterosexual eroticism—could be called ‘man books.’ But in Light Years, he breaks across that limit and becomes a great writer. He has at least one imperishable, fully rounded, unforgettable female character in Nedra. And so that's part of why I think it’s the masterwork above even these others. When someone is such a perfectionist and his prose is so exquisite, there are no bad books. But I think Light Years is the one that bears the most rereading and the most contemplation, and where he instilled it with the gravest and deepest vision of life.
Light Years and several of his other works weren’t recognized for their excellence until much later. Why do you think that is?
For me, the question is sort of backwards. So many amazing books go wanting for readers. Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust sold 400 copies in its first edition. Salter is a writer's writer. Light Years is a magnificent novel, but it's not a sensational one. The fact that they were there for North Point to reprint at that point means that what we would now call Big Five publishing was not finding a way to keep him centered. But he wasn't writing fast. His subject matters are not sensational. There aren't that many people looking for novels about mountain climbers. I guess there was a little flutter of popular success with the sexiness of A Sport and a Pastime, but he didn't pursue that. And the kind of American writing that was more fashionable in his generation was mostly postmodernism. Look at the careers that were really blowing up, winning big awards and stuff, in his age cohort. You’ve got John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut.
So why does a given book—even one as beautiful as Light Years—suffer from want of readers? There are so many millions of reasons. It's such a miracle when they do land, when they do find connection.
I feel like Salter is kind of the missing link between Hemingway and DeLillo.
I like that. I think that in terms of language and compression and the minuteness of his observation, he sometimes reminds me of DeLillo. And then at the other end, he's very attuned to the current of I would say not just Hemingway but also Fitzgerald. That’s really clear, that they’re both forebears. There's almost a feeling that he's tearing up the floorboards of Great Gatsby in some ways, and saying, ‘Let me look underneath,’ you know? ‘Sure there's a giant closet full of shirts, but who made the shirts? Let me show you the tailor who made the shirts,’ you know?
There are a lot of painters who kept figurative painting alive between abstract expressionism and the revival of figuration in the 1980s and ’90s, but not too many of them got famous. So he's sort of in the position of someone like Philip Perlstein, working in a lapidary figurative mode, when abstraction and conceptual work—or in the case of literature, postmodernism—is more fashionable. Was he totally alone in that? No, of course not. But yeah, it does put him on a slightly lonelier path through those decades, those of his prime energy and greatest powers.
And yeah, I think what's interesting is there are little stirrings of that kind of worldliness that you get in DeLillo. The domesticity of White Noise, but also the internationalism of something like The Names when DeLillo starts kind of globe-spanning. Salter’s kind of thinking about what a global experience does to the lives of these characters. For a very American novel this is also a very European novel, and one thing about Salter is that he's as intelligent as any writer working in the mid-century in the United States, but he's not wearing his intelligence on his sleeve in the same way that fascinates or drives people crazy about a Pynchon or whatever. He just lets it inform things, but when he shows you a piece of the world's operation, you're absolutely humbled by his awareness and his capacity to think intelligibly about it. It just isn't the thing he most wants to impart—’Hey, I'm smart’ or ‘I'm experienced’ or ‘I'm worldly’—but it's a platform he's working on top of. It’s just a capacity that allows him to do what he's doing.
What do you think about his writing on a sentence level?
It’s kind of breathtaking in its painterliness. We call so many different kinds of writing beautiful. We call so many different kinds of books beautiful. Maybe too many. Language is a pretty ungainly tool, and very few books are thoroughly glinting and pretty and…I'm avoiding the word poetic because poetic points to poetry. I don't think he wrote poetry. It doesn't feel like poetry. To me it feels like prose that he's pouring light through like a painter making layers and it never lets up.
What should writers learn from Salter?
He trusts his reader. He’s gonna try really unusual things, and he's gonna stretch your capacity sometimes even to attach characters to the pronouns. Those are risks that can get edited out, but the value in the way he slows you down to make you work out the situation that you're in—even as the scene is already so precise and so evocative—that you're galvanized by it so you don't dare look away. But you're having to do some work to know everything you need to know, to operate the chapter. To me it's sensational confidence.
