What book is on your night stand now?
I’m currently reading “Ways of Going Home,” by the Chilean novelist and poet Alejandro Zambra. If it’s only half as good as his novella, “Bonsai,” it’ll still be a fine way to lose a weekend.
What was the last truly great book you read?
George Saunders’s “Tenth of December,” as much as I hate to say so given that recent obnoxious headline in The New York Times Magazine [“George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year”]. Saunders’s earlier books had left me faintly less amazed than I felt I’d ought to be, but “Tenth,” in addition to being funny and stylistically cunning, contains some of the best writing about the psychological toll of inequality that I’ve read in years. Plus, like Alice Munro, Saunders knows when to end his stories — the moment when the best choice a writer can make is to slip away and leave the reader to assemble the last parts on her own.
What is your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?
When your work is nonfiction about low-income communities, pretty much anything that’s not nonfiction about low-income communities feels like a guilty pleasure. Among recent happy diversions were Ben Fountain’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” Junot Díaz’s “This Is How You Lose Her,” Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” and the poet Jeet Thayil’s first novel, “Narcopolis,” about the drug-hazed Bombay of the 1980s. Fountain, Díaz, Strayed and Thayil have nothing in common except the most important thing, a total lack of pretension. They don’t beat you down with their self-seriousness, and it’s only when you’re done that you realize how much wiser you are for their books.
Were there any novels that helped prepare you to enter the world of the slums?
What helped me prepare for the slum reporting was the immersion work I’d done in the United States. Though every community is different, my personal rule is pretty much the same: It’s O.K. to feel like an idiot going in as long as you don’t sound like an idiot coming out.
Where novels come in, for me, is when the reporting stops and the writing begins, because fiction writers seem to know more than nonfiction writers about distillation — conveying their analytical or psychological insights with economy. Being intent on conveying the diversity of experiences in a single slum (and equally intent on not writing a 1,000-page tome), I paid particular attention to novels where points of view shifted quickly, among them “The Yacoubian Building,” by Alaa Al Aswany. I’m also obsessed with the documentary films of Frederick Wiseman, who stays out of the picture and allows the so-called subjects of his work to emerge gradually.
Are there any Indian writers with recent or forthcoming books you’re especially excited about?
Aman Sethi’s “A Free Man,” about an itinerant laborer in a Delhi slum, is one of my recent favorites — an original sensibility joined to a passion for reported fact. I’m also eagerly awaiting Naresh Fernandes’s “The Re-Islanding of Mumbai,” which should be out by the end of the year. When deep in my work at Annawadi I found it difficult to meet people from more affluent parts of Mumbai because the disconnects were too great. But talking to Naresh was different. He’s a genuine humanist in an age of very few, and understands the conflicts inherent in a city like Mumbai better than anyone I know.
Do you ever hear from Corean and Kim, the two women you wrote about in your National Magazine Award-winning New Yorker piece, “The Marriage Cure”?
Kim’s not been in touch recently, but Corean is doing well, and still fighting like mad on behalf of her children and grandchildren. She’s one of several women I’ve come to know in the course of my work whose example and insight have helped me conduct my own life less ridiculously. In fact I hold her personally responsible for my marriage.
What were your favorite books as a child? Did you have a favorite character or hero?
My sister and I loved Encyclopedia Brown, the fifth-grade nerd/observer who seldom took more than a day to unravel the nefarious conspiracies of childhood. Every child detective requires a sidekick, obviously, and I thought Encyclopedia’s sidekick, Sally Kimball, was way cooler than any of Nancy Drew’s. In addition to being smart, Sally was the only kid in town who could beat up Bugs Meany. About the particular criminals Encyclopedia and Sally outwitted, the only one I remember is a cheater in a disgusting-sneakers competition. But as a child I treasured the idea of this infinitely just place called Idaville. In Idaville the weak were rarely bullied for long, and the bad guys didn’t get away.
What was the last book that made you cry?
I’m not usually one for leaving tear stains in the margins, but in recent weeks I caught myself sobbing twice — while reading a Saunders story and a forthcoming book by my friend David Finkel. Finkel’s first book, “The Good Soldiers,” followed a battalion charged with carrying out George W. Bush’s “surge.” The new book follows some of those veterans as they struggle to reintegrate themselves into American life, and it’s devastating.
The last book that made you laugh?
“Spilt Milk,” by the Brazilian novelist Chico Buarque. A deathbed monologue about class, race, love and political history has no right to be this funny.
What’s the best love story you’ve ever read?
Shakespeare’s underrated “Troilus and Cressida,” a story of flawed people in a transactional historical context that renders notions of pure love absurd. It’s a love story for our time that just happened to be written at the turn of the 17th century.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
I’m useless when I meet writers I love — I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe. So I’m happy, even in my fantasy life, to give the Great Ones their space. It’s enough to know them from what they put on the page.
Who are your favorite writers of all time? And among your contemporaries?
My top-10 list is an unstable thing, with new favorites regularly charging in and threatening to unseat the venerables, but Joseph Roth, Herman Melville, and George Eliot and Orwell are always on it. First among my contemporaries would have to be the late Roberto Bolaño. “The Savage Detectives” and “By Night in Chile” double-handedly yanked me out of a depression several years back, and reading “2666” while reporting in the slums was like a little miracle.
I was working my butt off trying to investigate the violent deaths of some homeless children, under circumstances that had been covered up by the police, when I reached the section of “2666” entitled “The Part About the Crimes.” It begins with a relentless, near-forensic account of corpses and injustices (closely based on the murders of poor women in Juarez) that opens out into this fevered exploration of both the psychological cost of paying attention to the tragedies of others and the social cost of looking away. That section of the book undid me so thoroughly that I’ll probably never reread it, even though I surely grasped only a sliver of what Bolaño was trying to say. And I suppose that’s the built-in sorrow of my life’s most profound encounters with books, beginning with “A Wrinkle in Time” in third grade. To reread what you loved most at a particular moment is to risk the possibility that you might love it less, and I want to keep my memories undegraded.
If you had to give reading assignments to an aspiring journalist, what books would make the top of your list?
Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon”; Anna Funder’s “Stasiland”; Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea”; Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s “Random Family”; Philip Gourevitch’s account of the Rwandan genocide; Joe Sacco’s graphic reportage; “The Corner,” by David Simon and Ed Burns; and Denis Johnson’s nonfiction collection “Seek,” mainly for the piece about trying to meet Charles Taylor during the Liberian civil war. I could go on and on, but I’d probably end the list with Kathryn Schulz’s “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.” It’s about the animating power of doubt and correction, and a lack of self-certainty is something my favorite nonfiction writers seem to have in common.
