Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Well, I think what was helpful about it is that it opened up the setting of The Lowland, which is set in part in Rhode Island, but it’s the first of my books in which I can actually mention Rhode Island by its name. Whereas the other books, the preceding books, are set in these sort of fake Rhode Island slash Massachusetts, this area, this terrain that really is Rhode Island, just to boil it down. But I couldn’t mention it. I couldn’t name it as such. And I think that’s telling. It was saying something, the fact that in the earlier books I was writing about the ocean. I was writing about this small campus, this little town, and describing these settings that I knew very well, the settings I had grown up in, but I couldn’t come out and say that it was Rhode Island. I kept calling it some suburb of Boston. So I think the writing of that piece unlocked something. Then in The Lowland, they’re in Rhode Island, and I don’t pretend anymore. 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.…

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