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| photo: B. Fishman | |
Thomas Van Essen is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Rutgers University, where he earned a Ph.D. in English Literature, although he has not been making a living in the literature business since he stopped teaching 25 years ago. He and his wife live in New Jersey, where he works at a large not-for-profit. The Center of the World (Other Press, June 4, 2013) is his debut novel.
On your nightstand now:
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, in the 1992 Pevear and Volokhonsky translation. I am working my way through all the great 19th-century Russian novels I first read as an undergraduate in the new translations. Like most people I read all these great novels when I was too young to really understand them. (Or rather: I am giving the person I am now the opportunity to understand in a different way the books that meant a lot to me as a young man.) Also Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying: The Secret WWII Transcripts of German POWs by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer. This is a grim book about what the German POWs knew about the Holocaust and German wartime atrocities. My father was a German POW, and this book is part of the background reading for my next novel.
Favorite book when you were a child:
I was a huge fan of Jules Verne--both Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island. It is sort of scary to me how much of how the world works that I learned from those two books.
Your top five authors:
Charles Dickens, Phillip Larkin, William Shakespeare (duh), W.G. Sebald and Julian Barnes--mostly for a Sense of an Ending and Nothing to Be Frightened Of.
Book you've faked reading:
The Archeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault. When I went to graduate school, my idea of literary criticism was Edmund Wilson, but it turned out that I was supposed to read all this French stuff (Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, etc.). I did an oral report on The Archeology of Knowledge, having read only the first 20 pages and a summary I found somewhere. I still feel sort of bad about that. But not that bad. I eventually went on to read and appreciate some of those writers, particularly Barthes, but it was a tough adjustment at first.
Books you're an evangelist for:
Austerliz by Sebald and A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. Austerliz is perfectly sad and perfectly beautiful, with enough wisdom about the nature of truth to last a lifetime. Go read it, whoever you are. A Month in the Country is a different kind of perfect, but it is perfect in the way a small diamond is. I had never heard of it, until a friend gave me a copy a few years ago. No one seems to have heard of it--but it is really worth reading.
Book you've bought for the cover:
This is sort of embarrassing, but I really fell for the cover of Tom Swift and His Repelatron Skyway by Victor Appleton II. The Tom Swift Junior books were a series of badly written adventures about Tom Swift Jr., the boy scientist, published (thank you, Internet) between 1954 and 1971. It was actually my mother who bought it, but I certainly wanted it on the basis of the cover. I was nine or 10 years old.
Book that changed your life:
War and Peace, particularly the epilogue. It convinced me that it was okay to have children and to go on living.
Favorite line from a book:
"Don't sauce ME in the vicious pride of your youth; don't hit ME, because you see I'm down. You've no idea how small you'd come out if I had the articulating of you." This is what Mr. Venus says to the boy who comes in for the stuffed canary in Book I, Chapter 7, of Our Mutual Friend. This line has always stuck with me for some reason.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
What book is your novel most like?
When I was working on it, I told people it was a bit like Possession by A.S. Byatt, a novel I admire very much. It's similar in the sense that the story goes back and forth between the past and the present and that both books are concerned with what art is and what it can mean to people. There is a big difference in tone; I think mine is a bit less earnest and, I hope, a bit more fun.