“I feel very boring admitting that my biggest inspiration for writing novels is reading…novels. I spent four and a half years working on what will be my first published (and second completed) novel. During that time, I developed a habit of turning to Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road
and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. I could flip to any page of either for evidence of what makes them so terrific—the sheer density of smart observations (ideas that another writer would hang a whole chapter on a single one, in these books, follow each other in crackling succession), the deft prose, the intelligence, perspective and humor that is brought to bear on almost every character, no matter how mercilessly dissected. (Well, humor is in short supply in Revolutionary Road, but that lack is counterbalanced by Yates’s terrifically exacting eye for self-deception and affectation.) I keep both books on my desk always, along with Middlemarch.”
—Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P (Henry Holt, 2013)
Photo credit: Lou Rouse