Writers and Company

Javier Marías and Lydia Davis

The writers who've most influenced the mundane minutiae of my personal pocket literary style and prosecraft over the course of the past tumultuous-but-worthy decade are Paul West, Alexander Theroux, Stanley Elkin, Javier Marías, and Lydia Davis. It shouldn't appear surprising this late in the development of the central dramatic complications, all the rising action having all but risen, that the way Lydia Davis compresses things down into unfussy palatable miniatures—only to accentuate their confounding complexity!—continues to influence, direct, and excite me very much. Both Lydia Davis and Javier Marías work with narrators who analyze their situation (analysis paralysis), their past, and things that are going on around them. The centralized nervous system of the human being is fielded within the greater systems we still only faintly apprehend. The self as escape room is the mad and finicky machine that obsesses, arranges, returns, mulls over, eddies, walks the perimeter over and over, ultimately seeking to make an elusive world somehow intelligible. Though it probably isn't one of his very best novels—and the man really ought to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature—Javier Marías's excellent 1994 novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me has one of the great opening set-ups in the history of literary fiction. The narrator, a ghostwriter and television screenwriter named Víctor, has been invited to dinner at the Madrid apartment of a married woman named Marta, whose husband is felicitously out of town.  After they finally get Marta’s two-year-old to sleep, the two retreat to the bedroom, where, right as they begin to undress, Marta suddenly feels inexplicably ill, very rapidly and quite surprisingly dying right in the arms of the mortified Víctor. What happens next? The real question is: how are you going to think your way out of this one? And in praising Paul West as a “vital writer and man of irrepressible spirit” who is “able to analyze his every last dilemma,” Alexander Theroux could just as easily have been talking about himself...or it could have been Paul West talking about Alexander Theroux. God, I love those guys.

The Nomadic Warrior Prince does not require answers to the Great Questions. The Nomadic Warrior Prince requires a way.

Beat Happening, "Bad Seeds"