a day ago
So you want to be a writer? Here's some (polite) advice from the best
The persistent allure of Shakespeare and Company, Paris's most mythologised bookshop, has long been its ability to function both as a kind of temple and as a performance space. Shakespeare and Co is associated with both the history of modernism and the Beats: the original shop, founded in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, was the site of the publication of Ulysses, and when George Whitman opened a shop of the same name, at a different location nearby, it became a place of pilgrimage for the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.
Now, under the stewardship of Whitman's daughter, also Sylvia – and certainly in this collection of interviews, edited by the novelist Adam Biles – the shop continues to attract plenty of famous authors and names, who are regularly hosted to do public talks. And talk they most certainly do.
The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews offers 20 conversations with writers who have appeared at the shop over the last decade or so. The names of the novelists, short story writers and non-fiction authors are mostly Anglophone and Anglo-American – George Saunders, Percival Everett, Rachel Cusk, Geoff Dyer are just some – with a few francophone and international presences (Annie Ernaux, Meena Kandasamy) thrown in to interrupt the inexorable drift towards the Anglosphere.
There's a brief introduction by Whitman and a foreword from Biles, the bookshop's literary director and all-round in-house interlocutor. Otherwise, what we're left with is a loose transcript of exchanges – by turns illuminating, meandering, sharp, glib and ruminative – about books, ideas and the writing life. As a document of the current literary moment, it's perhaps uneven, but also rather revealing.
The format is simple. Each chapter reproduces a recorded interview from one of the shop's live events – which is also typically released as a podcast – lightly edited and mercifully short. It's a winning approach. The unguarded setting – a small Parisian bookshop, a live audience, a fellow writer asking questions – often coaxes from the guests a nice, informal exchange of ideas. Writers who can often seem rather verbose and stage-managed – George Saunders, say, or Karl Ove Knausgaard – come across here as lucid and personable.
One of the things that the book demonstrates most clearly is that the idea of the 'writer' has become rather diffuse. Save the venue, no unifying theme or thread really binds the interviews together: we get theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, talking about his book The Order of Time, for example, alongside Reni Eddo-Lodge on Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race.
These days, novelists are also often simultaneously essayists, memoirists, activists and cultural critics. Olivia Laing, for example, reflecting on her book about the curses and blessings of urban life and solitude, The Lonely City, glides effortlessly from discussing art to sex to psychiatry in little more than 10 pages of transcript. Like many of the authors, Laing is intellectually supple, charismatic and finely attuned to the needs of the audience.
These reflections on writing are various, and often fascinating: Marlon James, for example, reveals that after a long day's work he tends to crash and burn 'and cry about my miserable life'; George Saunders talks about his life as an 'aspiring Buddhist', and Leïla Slimani reflects on the challenges of writing about the psychology of children.
At its best, the book presents writers trying to think aloud rather than simply performing thought. Percival Everett is a case in point: a writer who resists the very format of the interview itself. Wry, dry and reluctant to indulge in interpretation or self-revelation, he dispatches many of Biles's questions about his Booker-shortlisted novel James with an easy shrug. Asked about his hopes for his work, he replies, 'Most of the time I just hope that when I'm driving down the freeway the other driver stays on his side of the road.' This refusal is pointed. In a literary culture where authors are often expected to expound upon their work and sum it up into neat little paraphrases, Everett's resistance is a demonstration of integrity.
As such, the collection's tone varies throughout. Some writers approach the interview as a site of intellectual play – Cusk does so brilliantly – while others treat it as a promotional stop over. Colson Whitehead 's chat, for instance, is extraordinarily smooth, with him reciting the origin story of The Underground Railroad in the same press-friendly cadences one suspects he may have used elsewhere. The conversation with Claire-Louise Bennett – the author of Checkout 19 – by contrast, is a brisk, personal and lively exchange, offering more insight per page than most: she's at once frank, funny and revealing.
The idea of 'Paris' as an exclusive home-from-home for the literary elite hovers politely in the background throughout the book. It's rarely discussed, but you can sense the effect the city exerts on the writers, with its subtle invitation to cosmopolitanism and a certain café-theoretic fluency. And even more noticeably – for better or worse – Shakespeare and Company now presents itself not so much as a bohemian curiosity of that city but as a high-end cultural export: a kind of unofficial literary embassy for English-language publishing in France, complete with its own tote bags.
It's notable that few of the writers engage seriously with French literature or culture – save Nobel Prize-winner and memoirist Annie Ernaux, of course, whose conversation, translated by Alice Heathwood, is one of the strongest in the collection. Compared to the other writers, Ernaux is trenchant and unsentimental. She reminds us how rare it is to hear a writer speak directly, without stylised modesty or career-consciousness, about class, gender and politics.
But Ernaux is the exception. Most of the writers here speak in the rather careful language of contemporary publishing, which means that the interviews can tend towards the predictable: 'This was a book where I wanted more than anything else that the book that's in my head comes on the page'; 'I'm a big believer that when I write, I show up to work'; 'my process is very intuitive and very iterative'; 'The voice gives me absolutely everything.'
This is no fault of Biles, who is a genial host rather than a probing interlocutor: he draws writers out but seldom challenges them. The effect is that one finishes the book both entirely satisfied and yet curiously uninformed: this is what literary conversation sounds like when everyone is being terribly well-behaved.
Ultimately, this is both the book's great strength and its weakness. As a time-capsule of early 21st-century literary decorum, it's essential: all of the authors here are smart, likeable, articulate, politically aware, vaguely progressive and professionally successful. But it's also perhaps symptomatic of a literary climate that privileges affability over aesthetic risk. You won't find here the combative energy of, say, a 1960s or 1970s Paris Review interview with Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore or William Gaddis. That kind of personality – prickly, unreconciled, unreconstructed – is either unwelcome or extinct.
This is because literary culture has changed, just as the bookshop has changed: Shakespeare and Company today is no longer the domain of exiles or provocateurs but of visiting authors on European tours, filmed, streamed, and politely applauded. The authors are engaged in reiterating a kind of contract between writer and reader: trust me, I've thought about this; I'll try not to bore you; we're in this together; and, fundamentally, everything is fine. As a performance, this is both pleasing and reassuring. As an insight into the messy, irrational, perverse work of writing, it's incomplete.
If there's one thing missing here, then, it's dissent. Not rudeness or incivility as such – who wants any more of that, in a world of endless online hot-takes, take-downs and click-bait? – but a simple willingness to say what might be even slightly unpalatable or unresolved. This book, for all its charm and clarity, rarely risks that. Then again, perhaps its most eloquent testimony is unintended: that today, even in the heart of literary Paris, the truly novel idea is the one we don't yet quite know how to speak aloud.
★★★☆☆
