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 2024 Booker-shortlisted Charlotte Wood (Stone Yard Devotional, The Natural Way of Things) about compassion in the novels of longtime New Yorker editor William Maxwell, and with 2015 Pulitzer finalist Laila Lalami (the Dream Hotel, The Moor’s Account), who discusses the peerless artistic commitment of Franz Kafka.

Charlotte Wood on William Maxwell

What draws you to Maxwell’s work?

A great modesty combined with skill. The understatement of it. The great compassion of his work. His ability to look at all these different people in this terrible situation and be utterly free of judgment about each one. He enters into the consciousness of these people without deciding in advance who's good, who's bad, who's to be judged, who's to be a victim, and so on. This great compassion for all of them is very inspiring to me, and something to aim for as a writer.

And I loved the way that So Long, See You Tomorrow was so loose and almost meandering. The confidence to let it breathe and be so open. There was an interview—it might have been the Charlie Rose one—where he said something toward the end of his life I've written down: “After 40 years what I came to care about most was not style, but the breath of life.” And I think the breath of life is absolutely present in anything I've read of his.

Maxwell spent several decades editing the fiction section of the New Yorker. Do you think the magazine’s literary style shaped his work, or was it the other way around?

I don't know enough about the New Yorker to say, but obviously his presence there for so long—who knows which came first? But the letters in The Element of Lavishness between him and Sylvia Townsend Warner, when they became friends because he was her editor, they start off very formally and they're just about the work, and then over 40 years they become very loving friends. A lot of those letters are about her stories—his accepting them, rejecting them. The sensitivity with which his rejections were written—it was just something we no longer have. The attention and the time devoted to a rejection that is truthful, and treating the writer as an adult and not a kind of nervous child, which I think often publishers are a little patronizing about writers’ sensitivities. Whereas these were two adults talking about a story: she thought it worked, he didn't. But there wasn’t, Oh, it didn't work for us. It was really intricate and detailed about why and where the thing had gone wrong, and just very delicate and elegant. You can see the elegance of language in everything he wrote.

A lot of writers end up editors but not all editors write.

I think it could ruin you as a writer. But there’s a beautiful interview in the Paris Review where he talks about language—I have it noted here. He picks out Eliot's Four Quartets, and he says, “There's something in the Four Quartets about language that doesn't disintegrate. That's what I try to do—write sentences that won't be like sand castles. I've gotten to the point where I seem to recognize a good sentence when I've written it on the typewriter. Often it's surrounded by junk, so I'm extremely careful. If a good sentence occurs in an otherwise boring paragraph, I cut it out, stick it to a sheet of paper and put it in a folder. It's like catching fish in a creek. I pull out a sentence and slip a line through the gills and put it on a chain, and I'm very careful not to mislay it.”

And I’m sure that the attention to sentences and the structure of stories and the shape of language, what language can do or not do—all that attention to other people's sentences over all those years must have been very instructive for him.

What do you think of his craft on a sentence level?

It's beautiful, very elegant, understated. And I also love that he writes with such compression. These two tiny books are absolutely full of dips and tragedy and all of life. When I referred to his modesty before, there's a sort of mature ability to see that great works of great importance don't need to be bloated, 700-page, manly manifestos. There's this great subtlety and understatement, and it seems more important to me right now that we value the quiet, the modest, the implicit, the subtlety of things when our world is so full of noise and brashness and extroversion.

Laila Lalami on Franz Kafka

Why Kafka?

I feel a kind of kinship with him as a writer. His interest in people who are complete outsiders, monsters even—at least to others—I feel connects to my own interests, in the things that I want to explore. His interest in estrangement, in the feeling that you get when you're different from other people, and the incredibly creative ways that he has found of expressing that estrangement is something that I admire. And I think that's why I've kept returning to him and why I now teach him at the university level.

The Metamorphosis tends to be how most people first read him. What else do you suggest?

I feel a certain closeness to The Trial, even though it is very bleak. The protagonist finds himself under trial, he doesn't know why. It could read as speculative fiction, you could read it as historical fiction, or you could read it as a reflection on the present. But there's something in that book that speaks to the incredible injustices that we face every day, and whose sources we don't always know, and from which it's very difficult for us to defend ourselves.

Another story I go back to a lot is "A Hunger Artist," which is about a man who is so committed to his art that he starves himself. It's this wonderful metaphor for the life of the artist and the pressures that every artist is under, and the level of commitment that they have to their art—like how committed really are you to your art?

Most writers I know are desperate to escape a day job so they can commit themselves to writing, but Kafka famously wrote prolifically in his free time between very normal jobs.

Again, this is why I keep returning to that feeling he gives me. He had a job, and that's what he used to pay the bills. He just had a regular job, but then he was committed to his art to a level that is so admirable and unlike any other artist that I can think of. He had very strong feelings about which stories were to be published and which had to be destroyed. We all know that his literary executor didn't listen, and I guess we're lucky that he didn't, but the fact that he had that vision and that commitment and stayed true to it is something that I also find very admirable.

And that work wasn’t appreciated until after he was gone. I feel like his biography should be a lesson to writers.

There definitely is a lesson, particularly for younger writers. When you start out, most writers have just a deep desire to be heard, to have their voice heard by others, and a lot of ambitions can get connected to that and it's very easy to lose track of why you're writing in the first place, which is this desire to tell a story, to create something that's self-contained and beautiful and can be experienced by people who may have nothing in common with you. And he was somebody who never lost track of that.

What do you enjoy about his work on a page level?

What I think is incredible about his work is that it achieves a high level of precision and beauty without being unnecessarily complicated or showy. It's just right. Sentence by sentence, you can see how perfectly attuned he is to the scene. You don’t feel like this is an author trying hard to elevate their prose—this is a writer who has confidence that the prose is exactly how it needs to be. The way he delves into the thoughts and emotions of his characters feels natural. Most of the time, it’s as if you are going through what they’re experiencing.

I find that combination of simplicity and precision to be rare and very difficult to achieve. It's actually really hard to write like that. It’s probably easier to reach for the more complicated or to hide behind elevated syntax or semantics. But with him, the focus remains on the protagonist and their journey, making the prose hit even harder. I really admire that.

You’ve probably thought about this a lot because you teach him—what do you think writers should learn from Kafka?

The number one thing, I think, is commitment to his art. The commitment to producing the very best version of your work before sharing it with the world. There’s so much pressure in today’s world—in our capitalistic system—to constantly put out work. But everything about Kafka suggests the opposite: take your time. Don’t rush to publish. Resist the urge to churn out work just for the sake of production. Make sure what you release is truly worthy of your vision.

And hold on to the parts of your work that seem strange or different. We read Kafka today because he woke up one day and decided to write about a man turning into a bug—and he stuck to that vision, executing it fully. I find that incredibly inspiring. Writers should hold on to what makes them different.