Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer deserves all the praise it’s received and then some. It could be named Reading Like a Good Reader—the kind of reader nearly every serious writer would love to have and too few actually do.

Reading this book is like having a knowledgeable senior professor as your guide in a seminar; it feels relaxed yet intense, and the feeling of being with an expert never departs. The book list at the back is useful too—I now look forward to picking up several of Henry Green’s books, although I’d never heard of him. There are too many writers like Henry Green who are too good for me to have never heard about them, and that is in part why I write this: to share the finds that make me say, “Hey! How have I reached this age and yet not known about this master?”

Or, at the very least, how have I not heard about this idea, since there are so many books and so little time. To the extent Prose’s book can be summarized, her advice to authors would probably be to read widely and deeply, and that they should pay attention to both the way others convey ideas and the details of the external world.

That’s sound advice that can be generalized to any person, in any profession, anywhere. The problem is in implementing the advice, and that is what Reading Like a Writer tries to help the reader—and aspiring writer—do.

Two friends of opposite temperaments express, through actions and discussions, contrasting but not necessarily conflicting philosophies of life. One is a monkish teacher, an intellect, and administrator. The other is a passionate and carefree artist. Together they are supposed to illuminate something that grad students can explain and the rest of us can feel.

Hesse preempts the grad students, however, by letting Narcissus take their place at the discourse lectern: “Whereas we creatures of reason, we don’t live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you… You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void.”

For a passionate artist, though, Goldmund has plenty of abstract ideas: “When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.” A more crass narrator might have simply said that it’s good to go around carousing and creating, without much responsibility.

Setting up the binary structure with two characters representing ends of a spectrum isn’t unique, and its chief danger is that the characters tend to be flat expressions of their ideas, much like obnoxious policy wonks, rather than being full people. There is also a verisimilitude problem for characters like Goldmund, who is more likely to end up dead, given his time and place; Narcissus and Goldmund both also understand and accept their relative places, which is something few accomplish.

No books come to mind that use the duality device as explicitly and strongly as Narcissus and Goldmund. Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is similar, although its four characters represent the male and female parts of heaviness and lightness and are more fully developed. Several famous narrators perceive another, though without the purity of duality of Narcissus and Goldmund: Heart of Darkness, Moby Dick, and All the King’s Men. None of those, however, use the pole method of expression.

Contrary to my tone above, I did like Narcissus and Goldmund, though it was painful to read at times because I recognize too much of Narcissus and too little of Goldmund. The stories that move from birth to death also elicit a twinge of the unpleasant knowledge of mortality, as does closing the cover of a good book one will never again be able to read for the first time.

A common fate awaits Narcissus, who keeps the world on running smoothly, or Goldmund, who has a damn good time in the fullness of experience. Whether the path chosen by the individual matters at all is also left up to the individual, as Narcissus and Goldmund implies that accepting and pursuing is more important than the destination.

Via Bookslut I came across an interview with Brian Evenson, which with his Bookslut interview led me to write an e-mail to him asking about influences.

I wrote:

I read the interview you gave to Largehearted Boy and not long after continued reading the third part of Robertson Davies’ The Deptford Trilogy. It reminds me somewhat of the descriptions of your work; The Deptford Trilogy has its own dark moments, although I think it has a strong undercurrent of right and of morality than what I’ve detected in some of your stories. Have you read it, and if so were you consciously thinking of it?

And yesterday he responded:

I’m glad you came across the Largehearted Boy interview. And yes, I’ve read the Deptford Trilogy, but literally read it fifteen or twenty years ago. I remember liking it–I even wrote a short paper on it for a class I took on Canadian fiction as an undergrad–but remember very little about it. I wasn’t thinking of it consciously, but there’s a good chance that it’s in there somewhere.

I found allusion where there was none, or at least none overtly, but I could see some Davies in Evenson.