Likes Scarlet Letter.

Transcript context

…Well, I think I had started reading Russian literature around that age. I had some friends, my family had friends. They had three daughters: one of them was a little bit older. She was already in college. When I would visit them, I would see these big volumes of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy on her desk, these Norton Critical Editions, and they were really appealing to me. So I tried to rise to another level of reading. That’s probably what I was reading a lot of. I loved Hawthorne even then. I was in 10th grade when I was 15. I read The Great Gatsby that year. And the following year I was introduced to Hardy, who has become so important to me as well. So it was in high school that I encountered, fortunately, certain authors who have stayed with me for all of this time, and who continue to inspire me. One of the things I’ve liked about comments you’ve dropped, is the way you read, say, Scarlet Letter, as actually a novel of immigrants. That maybe the characters wouldn’t have behaved that way in a “home” country. Even a lot of Hardy, especially Tess, a favorite of yours, you can read as a kind of immigrant novel. Coming from the countryside, moving somewhere quite strange — to use that as a lens for interpreting what otherwise might seem like strange character behaviors. Reading them through you is actually very rewarding, through your eyes, through your fiction. Does that make sense to you at all? Yes. I think what I’m responding to is the sense of displacement in those authors, in almost any author. Even Willa Cather you can read this way; Homer you can read this way. So many authors you can read this way. Some years ago I was asked this question by the New York Times Book Review about what was my problem with immigrant literature, and I made a maybe cheeky remark about how I didn’t believe in it. But it wasn’t being cheeky. It was just saying what I felt was true, which is that this is something I’ve responded to in literature from the very beginning. If I didn’t have this response to literature, then these writers wouldn’t have fed and inspired me the way they did because there would’ve been a “barrier” between their experiences and their times and mine, and that shouldn’t be the case. That’s not what literature does. Literature does the opposite. It allows us to cross over those boundaries in a beautiful way, in a magical way.…

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