Laurence Gonzales's first book was Jambeaux (1979), which Rolling Stone called "the best rock-and-roll novel since Harlan Ellison's Spider's Kiss, which is to say it's the best in almost twenty years." Since 1970, Gonzales's essays have appeared in such periodicals as Harper's, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure and many others. He has published a dozen books, including two collections of essays, three novels and the book-length essay One Zero Charlie, a classic of aviation literature. He won the 2001 and 2002 National Magazine Awards, and those articles went on to become part of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. Entertainment Weekly called his new novel, Lucy (Knopf, July 13, 2010), "a fast-paced Crichtonesque thriller about a half-human, half-ape girl."
On your nightstand now:
I read half of Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith and had to put it down. It was too disturbing. There is a quality to the book that is so sinister that I couldn't sit still with it. In the meantime, I have The Collected Poems of Derek Walcott, which I read little by little. The same is true of Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games by László Polgár. Of course, that's not really reading, since you simply look at the image of a chess board and solve the problem in your head. I'm also reading the new translation of The Odyssey by Robert Fagles and rereading The Plague by Albert Camus, Ulysses by James Joyce and The Orchard Keeper, the first novel by Cormac McCarthy. And, of course, I'm always reading dictionaries.
Favorite book when you were a child:
archy & mehitabel by don marquis. My mother used to read it to me, and I was amazed and fascinated by the fact that he could write an entire book with no punctuation or capital letters, as well as by the fact that my mother was permitted to say the word "hell" because it was printed in a book. I think that idea of freedom was what first made me want to become a writer.
Your top five authors:
I'll stick to writers in the English language here. George Orwell because everything in the novel 1984 had already happened by 1966. And because of his fine essays. Shirley Hazzard for The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire. When I read her novels, I feel as if I'm watching a fascinating and completely incomprehensible natural process unfold before my eyes. Cormac McCarthy because every time I read his work, I learn something about the language. Herman Melville because I never tire of reading Moby-Dick. James Salter, because Burning the Days is one of the finest pieces of nonfiction I've read, and I very much like to see nonfiction raised to a high art.
Book you've faked reading:
Everything I was assigned to read in high school and about half of the books in college. I didn't take well to school.
Book you're an evangelist for:
The Falcon: A Narrative of the Captivity & Adventures of John Tanner During Thirty Years Residence Among the Indians of the Interior of North America. Tanner was nine years old when he was kidnapped by Shawnee Indians in 1789. His book is a rare glimpse into a prehistoric world and a unique reflection of who we are beneath the thin veneer we call civilization.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape by Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting. When I saw the thoughtful face of the bonobo, I immediately felt that I had to get to know that creature. Besides my face-to-face experience with bonobos, that book was the greatest help when I was writing the novel Lucy.
Book that changed your life:
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I was a miserable senior in a high school run by sadistic Jesuits when a girl handed me this book. For days on end, I did nothing in class but conceal my copy inside other books and read, fascinated by the outrageous freedom embodied in that book. Around that time, the same girl gave me Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, which also blew my mind. In those books I saw for the first time an example of the sort of life I wanted (I mean that of the authors, not the characters).
Favorite line from a book:
"Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing."--William Faulkner, Light in August.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. This is one of those books that I had to put down as I read it, as if it were burning my hands.
Author photo: J. Dovydenas
