We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who influenced them. This month we spoke with China Miéville (Perdido Street Station, The City & the City) and Keanu Reeves (BRZRKR) who discussed two authors whose influence can be felt in their new collaboration, The Book of Elsewhere. The former explored the “stiletto gaze” of fantasy writer Jane Gaskell, and the latter delved into the “magic trick” of Cormac McCarthy.
China Miéville on Jane Gaskell
She is severely out of print so it took some digging to find a copy of her work, but I’m glad I did. So why Jane Gaskell?
Primarily because she astonishes me, and I don't mean that in a glib way. Everything I've ever read by her surprises me. She has these two very distinct voices. She writes these kinds of fantastic novels and then she writes a series of putatively realistic mainstream London novels that from the outside would look like they were from two completely different authors, which is exciting to me straightaway. In fact, of course, the moment you start getting into it, the divisions are much less clear than it looks. But I think there's an urgency and a certain quality of ecstatic writing that is almost visionary, like you're reading a 16th-century Christian mystic or something. And I don't just mean in the fantastic works. In the 1963 book Attic Summer, which is a completely, quote, “realistic” book about London in the early '60s, the descriptions of London bring the hairs up on my body. They take my breath away. They read like visions of the City of God in Augustine or something. It's extraordinary stuff. I think she's a genuinely visionary writer, even though that term gets thrown around much too easily.
She has a real fever dream vibe.
I think of it as an urgency—the urgency to depict everything, including the undetectable. And I don't mean that she goes into deep detail about everything. I mean there are these extraordinary and counterintuitive formulations that describe the world and make it strange at the same moment. And one of the effects of that—she can be a very nasty writer. There's a vein of nastiness, and I say this as a compliment. I think that this ability to evoke this kind of poison—not always but sometimes—is simply breathtaking. She has this incredible stiletto gaze—everything feels so sharp it's bleeding.
There was a grittiness to her that was ahead of her time. You really didn’t see anything quite like it until the '70s.
I think that's absolutely right. She has a book from '66 called The Fabulous Heroine, which is a really nasty book, a really difficult book to read. But again, I say this as a deep compliment because it is a book that is a sort of avocation of the brutal dark side of the '60s, kind of Flower Power stuff but written from within it. What I think of as that kind of Quotidian Gothic. That kind of uncanny tends to come a bit later in the '70s and early '80s. But in '69—A Sweet, Sweet Summer—as you say there's a certain kind of grittiness to it and a certain kind of everyday uncanny. They're profoundly unsentimental, but at the same time they're quite ecstatic, and that's an extraordinary thing to negotiate.
What do you think writers can learn from her?
I can't speak beyond myself. I think what I have learned is to not be afraid of a certain kind of ugliness—linguistically, aesthetically. And that part of what you're doing is surrendering into a visionary exactitude about the everyday.
There's a scene in her wonderful book All Neat in Black Stockings, which is, on paper, a '60s sex comedy in Swinging London, Confessions of a Window Cleaner–type stuff about cool, bright young things getting hip and having parties and so on, but it's punctuated by these moments of the bleak sublime. And there's a moment midway through the book where a woman on a bus is watching an old man rub the tip of his walking stick with his hand absentmindedly, and this scene is depicted in this paragraph which starts to become an apocalypse. He can't take his eyes from this vision, and this vision becomes evidence for him that the crust over the abyss is crumbling and that the apocalypse is right there. And this is in the middle of a, quote, “realistic” novel about sexy, bright, young things in London in 1966, and it's just one paragraph, and then it sort of ebbs away. And the confidence, the kind of blazed certainty—I can't think of another writer who does that. She leaves me in awe.
Keanu Reeves on Cormac McCarthy
When did you first read McCarthy?
I was in my thirties and the first book I read was Blood Meridian, and that was an amazing novel: the storytelling, the seamlessness, the organics of his descriptions, the interior of the characters, the dialogue, and the way that he worked with the punctuation and the form of his writing—the shape of it, literally. There’s something shocking about it. And the way that I got drawn into the characters. And then I went to Suttree, and I was like, What?! Again, shape, form storytelling, flashbacks, and the different points of view and voicings of the characters. And then I read The Road, and then last year Stella Maris and The Passenger. There is the sense of play in Stella Maris and the fantastical element which I hadn't seen in the work quite like that before. And then through all of this, the kind of pathos of innocence that I related to, or that kind of yearning for connection. You know, there's a lot of men in his novels. And I related to the yearnings of these characters and the lessons they learn, their sense of place and what they're doing and how central characters are revealed to themselves by other characters that surround the play of the story.
I’ve always been interested in how Suttree and Blood Meridan came out back to back, because one is as close as he ever came to a comedy and the other is deadly serious.
When I was speaking about what I was struck by I didn't mention humor, but yeah. That just speaks to the facility of the author. When I think of Blood Meridian, it is kind of humorless, but it's not though, right? It has jokes.
I've always been struck by the sparseness and the propulsion of interactions of characters. The way the dialogue goes and where the scenes launch from and where they come out and what's been changed. It's always kind of nowhere and unknowing. And that's probably the architecture of storytelling, but the way Cormac McCarthy does it, it’s like a magic trick and you don’t know how it got done, you don’t know that, actually, you're in a magic trick. You don’t even know you’re watching something magical.
Do you think he impacted your work?
I probably read Don DeLillo before I read Cormac McCarthy, but I feel like they share something in terms of dialogue. Do you get what I mean?
That sparse precision.
It’s a style I like. It’s almost like an anti-Faulkner. Faulkner was doing away with punctuation and going on these riffs, but somehow it reminds me of like its fraternal antithesis, so connected in a way, in the Americana of it.
I was happy when you picked McCarthy because I feel like my entire worldview can be summed up as a combination of Blood Meridian and Bill and Ted.
They are! They are! Again, it’s that anti. It’s the duality that makes a whole. In a weird way, you can’t see one without the other. On one hand you have Be excellent to each other, and on the other, you have Blood Meridian and the cost.
These interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.
Jennifer Egan on Edith Wharton and Jinwoo Chong on John Okada
Chuck Palahniuk on Ira Levin and Claire Dederer on Laurie Colwin
Karl Ove Knausgård on Jorge Luis Borges and Olga Ravn on Doris Lessing
Valeria Luiselli on Juan Rulfo and Mauro Javier Cárdenas on Leonora Carrington
Roxane Gay on Marguerite Duras and Kaveh Akbar on Amos Tutuola
Emily St. John Mandel on Irène Némirovsky and Sarah Rose Etter on Tove Ditlevson
Paul Theroux on George Orwell and Ferdia Lennon on James Joyce
