Mentions personal use of The Great Gatsby.

Transcript context

…We’ll get to your most recent work, but one of the things I like most about everything you’ve done is, I always get the sense you’re trying to work out some problem for yourself and also for us. I’d like to survey your whole writing life and start with the question: When you were young, when you were, say, 15 years old, what was your favorite novel, and why? 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?…

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