Novelists' Favorite Novels: Markson, Vollmann, Moody

Novelists' Favorite Novels

What writers are considered the best by the best: David Markson, William T. Vollmann, Rick Moody offer their opinions about what we should be reading

By Alexander Laurence

After years of interviewing writers I noticed that there are a few special writers who are always cited as influential and important. James Joyce's Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow are often listed by critics and scholars as the main books of the 20th Century. Pynchon, along with Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy are probably the most frequently mentioned writers who are still working today. But who is writing the Ulysses of today? I talked to recently to three writers who themselves are often mentioned as being extremely influential.

David Markson: A Link To The Past

David Markson is one of the most well read and literary people I know. Conrad Aiken, Malcolm Lowry, William Gaddis, and Frederick Exley were among his friends. He is the author of Wittgenstein's Mistress, which Ann Beattie has called "An absolute masterpiece." He is also the author of Springer's Progress and Reader's Block. He has lived in Greenwich Village for almost fifty years.

Markson was a big reader of literary allusions and quotations. When he first read Under The Volcano, he wrote a fan letter to Malcolm Lowry. They met in Canada a while letter. Markson went on a personal crusade to draw attention to Lowry's work: "Which is why I wrote a master's thesis (at Columbia) on Lowry's Under The Volcano only four years after it was published, for instance, when nobody else had written anything except the original reviews, and so I had the allusions all to myself to dig out."

Markson was also the first person to give William Gaddis' The Recognitions its high rank also. He called it the most important American novel since Moby Dick? "Actually it was just a throwaway passage in an old detective novel I wrote," Markson confesses, "but there too it was only three years after Gaddis had published. I'm delighted, or even honored, when I'm still given credit for it.

Although he would give his right arm to have written The Recognitions, Markson is looks down at Gaddis' later work:  "That business of the nonstop conversation, with all the repetitions and digressions and so forth that are supposed to be precisely like real life--except that art is selectivity, damn it. I read an interview where he talked about authorial absense, but what happens instead is that what he hopes will sound natural simply sounds faked. It's a gimmick, and it ultimately makes us infinitely more conscious of the writer than we'd ever be otherwise."

Markson has little interest in current fiction, although he occasionally reads it. His all-time list would include Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights, The Stranger, early Celine, The Sot-Weed Factor, Nightwood, The Ginger Man, early Beckett. He thought very little of Thomas Pynchon. "I've got an odd bias against him. I've always believed that it's a serious reader's responsibility to pick up on virtually any valid literary allusion--even though a shrewd novelist tries to bury such things too, of course, so that the context makes sense even if the resonances are missed."

Markson did read Infinite Jest when it came out, but would make no comment. He remarked "Most of your enthusiasm is for the major stuff just before your own time. But deep down I know, know, that there are books out there just as good as Under The Volcano or The Recognitions--and it's my own damned loss that I've misread them."

William T. Vollmann: He Likes Ovid

William T. Vollmann, who lives in Sacramento, is the author of several novels, and ten have been published between a eight year span ending in 1996 with The Atlas, which is a book which looks back at his previous decade of world travel. His books like Rainbow Stories, Whores For Gloria, and Thirteen Stories & Thirteen Epitaphs are his inside look at the drug culture and the world of prostitution in San Francisco during the 1980s. His historical novels, The Ice Shirt, Fathers and Crows, and The Rifles, are expansive novels about exploration, technology, and discovery. These novels take place in Iceland and Northern Canada, and are a personal journey for Vollmann about why American history developed like it did, and looking back at the history of its people.

As William T. Vollmann told me: "Most people nowadays, including writers, know less of the body of facts, and aesthetics--the basic core of information about the work and culture and so forth, that makes up our heritage--than people did earlier."

When asked about favorite contemporary writers, Vollmann said: "By contemporary I assume you mean from the last two hundred years. Hawthorne may be the best, then Faulkner. Hemingway is usaually a wonderful read...

Vollmann's first book, Bright and Risen Angels, was often compared to Gravity's Rainbow in the first reviews. Vollmann then bought Gravity's Rainbow and brought it home on a bike. He crashed and the book fell in a gutter. It took a while for it to dry. He told me: "I hadn't read Gravity's Rainbow until after Angels came out, even though I'd read the other Pynchon books. But I don't think my stuff is much like Pynchon's."

Vollmann seemed unwilling to mention any recent writers favorably. When he wrote a blurb for Infinite Jest, the publisher misspelled his name on the back cover. When I mentioned Lautréamont, Vollmann said "Yeah, I like Lautréamont. I think Cormac McCarthy is really wonderful. He’s terrific. Some of the older writers I like better than most contemporary writers. I like some of the real old stuff like the epics and sagas like Ovid. Some of the Eastern European writers are neat."

The Literary Novel Is In Hiding: Rick Moody

The fact that literary novel is the only thing that will outlive us, and may be read long after the author dies is an interesting idea.  Rick Moody remarks "There are writers who we don't read right now who in thirty years will be considered the great writers of (those years)." Rick Moody is the author of The Ice Storm and Purple America. He lives in Brooklyn.

When asked about his favorite writers, Moody asks a familiar and funny question: "Are we speaking only of living writers?" We laugh. "Of the dead: Beckett, Bernhard, Genet. Woolf, Melville, Joyce, Plato, and Angela Carter. Of the living: Lydia Davis, Grace Paley, Donald Antrim, Jeffery Eugenides, Ben Marcus, and Denis Johnson."

Recently I heard a panel discussion about Thomas Pynchon's new novel Mason & Dixon, which included Rick, and most of the panel talked about the book with religious awe and with reverential respect. It like many readers treat books by Joyce and Pynchon like they would were the Bible. Rick Moody tells me "I think that's a really good comparison. I've been an armchair hermeneuticist for a while. That's one of the senses that I think I'm interested in theological debate, as a way of investigating what books mean, how they come to be books, how they're canonized as books."

There seems to be plenty of books out there to read, and I'm always excited when someone, maybe an author, mentions a book by someone who I have never heard of. It's possible that even those who I talked to, Markson, Vollmann and Moody, will be read far into the next century.

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Alexander Laurence is a writer who lives in New York City. He has done over 100 interviews with novelists, many of which, are accessible through the internet. His book reviews have appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, American Book Review, East Bay Express, LA Reader, Bay Guardian, and American Book Jam. He has been the editor of Cups Magazine since 1993.