Tana French: By the Book

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/books/review/tana-french-by-the-book.html

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The author of “The Trespasser” likes crime writers who see “genre conventions as starting points rather than limitations, who refuse to recognize that supposed boundary between genre and literary.”

What books are on your night stand now?

My night stand is permanently jammed with books I want to read. Stuff is spilling out onto the floor. Just in the most accessible layer: Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (which is what I’m actually reading); Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings”; Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad”; Karen Perry’s “Girl Unknown”; Sophie Hannah’s new Hercule Poirot mystery, “Closed Casket” (I got a sneaky early copy); and Andrew Michael Hurley’s “The Loney.”

What’s the last great book you read?

Donal Ryan’s “The Spinning Heart.” It’s set in an Irish small town that’s been devastated by the economic collapse of 2008, and it shows the complicated web of local relationships tautening towards violence under that strain. It’s furious, it’s moving, it’s darkly funny, it punches you right in the gut, the writing is effortlessly wonderful, and every one of the wide variety of voices rings utterly true.

Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?

Donna Tartt blows me away — that impeccable writing, so rich you could eat it and so luminous that it lights up the whole room, and the way she brings her characters to life so completely and in such fine detail that you know them as intimately as your dearest friends. I’m a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell, for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose — I don’t do succinct well, so I’m in awe of writers who do. In TV writing, Armando Iannucci’s satire “The Thick of It” is brilliant — equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable and Oh-my-God-I-can’t-believe-he-actually-said-that — and it’s got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever. In journalism, Gene Kerrigan, who writes for The Irish Independent newspaper (as well as writing crime novels), regularly cuts right through the jaw-dropping quantities of blather and spin and double talk and misdirection and outright lies that coat Irish politics, and gets to the heart of the matter in one brief column.

Do you have an all-time favorite author?

I know it’s the cliché answer, but I can’t get past it: Shakespeare. After 400 years, actors and directors and audiences are still finding fresh surprises and sheer beauty and immense emotional punch in his work. Obviously he’s not perfect, but all you have to do is open his work to a random page and you’re almost guaranteed to find some line that will take your breath away. And when he’s on form, he’s economical in a way that almost no other writer can manage. Absolutely nothing is wasted, nothing is just thrown in there for the hell of it; every word, every break in the rhythm, the shape of every line tells you something.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I like historical true crime, the kind that uses the crime as a window into the time and place where it happened (“Damn His Blood,” by Peter Moore, does a great job of illuminating early-19th-century England, both the aspects that that society had in common with ours and the aspects that are totally alien to us). And I like atmospheric psychological mystery, obviously, especially stuff that messes with the (supposed) boundary between crime and literary fiction. Apart from that, I’m pretty eclectic. My all-time favorites include some literary fiction (Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible”); some magic realism (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s “The Mistress of Spices”); some historical fiction (Mary Renault’s Theseus books).. . . Basically, when it comes to fiction, I love character-based books with beautiful writing, plenty of atmosphere, secrets and mysteries, and maybe a touch of the numinous. I’ll take them wherever I can find them.

I don’t read anything that wants to tell me the secret of life/success/happiness/enlightenment, and I don’t read misery lit, those heartstring-tugger memoirs with titles like “Please, Daddy, Not the Anvil.” I don’t get the appeal.

Who writes the best crime fiction?

Kate Atkinson, Dennis Lehane, Stef Penney, Gillian Flynn, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott — and two of my favorite up-and-comers are Jamie Mason and Elizabeth Little. These are all writers who see the genre conventions as starting points rather than limitations, who refuse to recognize that supposed boundary between genre and literary. They’re writing books that, while they have the gripping plots that have always been associated with crime fiction, also have wonderful writing, complex characters, thematic depth, the whole lot. Their books may revolve around crimes, but they’re exploring mysteries far deeper, more intricate and more universal than just whodunit.

How do you organize your books?

Not in any way that anyone else would understand. My all-time favorites are in one place, plays are in another, poetry’s in another, stuff I haven’t read yet is in another, and everything else takes up the rest of the bookshelf space. (And more. We never have enough bookshelf space.) I can usually find any book I want pretty quickly, but I couldn’t explain to anyone else why it’s where it is.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

Maybe Eva Ibbotson’s “A Countess Below Stairs”? It’s the literary equivalent of a really good ice cream: all the comfort factor of junk food, but way tastier and more satisfying, and not bad for you. It’s a quirky, lovely, extravagant, funny romance, and anyone who has White Russian family members (which I do) will get extra laughs out of it.

What’s your favorite TV, film or theater adaptation of a book?

“The Princess Bride.” Great book, great film. It’s the ultimate fairy tale, the one that takes every essential element of fairy tales and dials it up to 11. It’s got a mysterious man in black; a beautiful princess; love that transcends all obstacles (including death, or at least mostly death); one sinister sadistic villain and one arrogant dumb one; Andre the Giant; Rodents of Unusual Size; and both the best sword fight and the best revenge scene ever on screen.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

I love T. H. White’s King Arthur in “The Once and Future King.” Arthur is such an iconic figure that in most versions of the legend he’s flattened under that weight into nothing but an icon, a pawn of the story; he’s not a three-dimensional human being. White makes him utterly human, and makes his greatness and heroism lie within that flawed humanity, rather than negating it. I read the book when my mother gave it to me to keep me occupied on a long-haul flight, and it was the first time I realized just how complex and contradictory characters (and adults, for that matter) could be.

Favorite antihero has to be Francie Brady in Pat McCabe’s “The Butcher Boy.” In small-town Ireland, young Francie Brady has done something terrible — but when the book begins, he’s just a kid from a tough background messing around with his best friend and looking for small-scale trouble. As the book unfolds, you watch his mind gradually warp into madness, you see the truly horrific thing he’s done, and yet you can’t help aching for him.

If you could portray one literary heroine on stage or screen, whom would you choose?

Viola in “Twelfth Night.” I worked as an actor for years, and that’s the single greatest regret of my acting life: that I never played Viola, not in a full production, and now I’m too old. I love the courage, intelligence, humor and integrity with which she navigates her way through a totally impossible situation. Everyone else in that play is furiously deceiving themselves and other people in elaborate ways, and yet Viola — although she’s forced into a situation where she’s deceiving other people — hangs on to the truth as hard as she can. Even when she can’t tell the truth, she plays with language carefully and deftly so that she doesn’t have to lie.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I read voraciously. (It probably helped that I spent a large chunk of my childhood in Malawi, where there was no TV in the ’80s.) I was a total-immersion reader: Give me a new book and I would basically stop existing in the outside world, for all practical purposes, till I’d finished it. I miss having the time to read like that. It isn’t the same experience when you have to put the book down and do real life after every couple of chapters.

I was a sucker for time-slip books where a character somehow ends up in the past. I loved Lucy M. Boston’s Green Knowe series; Alison Uttley’s “A Traveller in Time”; Nan Chauncy’s “Tangara”; Antonia Barber’s “The Amazing Mr. Blunden”; Penelope Farmer’s “Charlotte Sometimes” — I still have my childhood copies of all of those. I was always hoping that somehow I’d find an old house or a mysterious mirror that would let me slip back in time to the 16th century.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

I’ll go with Thomas Keneally’s “The Playmaker.” It’s the story of a play put on by the first bunch of English convicts transported to Australia, and it’s a passionate call to understand that the arts aren’t a trivial luxury, or a namby-pamby snobbish indulgence for the elite or a sinister corrupter of moral fiber; they’re an essential, and they need to be accessible to everyone. They’re one of the crucial things that make us human, by bringing us to the empathy and sense of connection that enable us to treat one another with respect and kindness; they’re one of the major factors that enable social mobility, by giving us the vision and sense of possibility to transform our lives; they’re one of the vital ways we can make sense of our own emotions and experiences, rather than being baffled and battered by them; they’re one of the core forces that raise us from a ragtag bunch of debased animals, ready to rip out one another’s throat for any reason or none, into a cohesive society. Anyone who’s running a country needs to understand that the arts matter, to the country as a whole and to every person in it, and that being deprived of the arts matters.

What do you want to read next?

Alan Lightman’s “The Diagnosis.” I love his “Einstein’s Dreams”; it’s one of my all-time favorites, and yet somehow I didn’t even know “The Diagnosis” existed until recently. He’s one of those writers who somehow make both beautiful, deeply sensory writing and startlingly original ideas look effortless. And Paul Kingsnorth’s “The Wake,” the story of a post-1066 guerrilla fighter, written in Kingsnorth’s own version of Old English — I love books that play with language to make us experience it in new ways.

And all those books jammed into my night stand.