Literary Antecedents

Writers -- even unpublished writers toiling in obscurity such as myself -- can always latch onto the influential writers in another scribe's style. The neat thing about getting older is that the writers who influenced you when you were busy gobbling up every written word you could find were also influencing other not-so-unpublished writers at the same time... and now, one can begin to see the influences of the last generation of novelists popping up in the new one.

One of the reasons for my absence here is that I've been reading a truly flooring novel called Everything is Illuminated by a 28-year-old dude named Jonathan Safran Foer. It's actually a pretty quirky book... at least, the parts that aren't about the Holocaust are pretty quirky... but the neat thing is that one of the two narratives that come together to make the fabric of the story is deeply deeply deeply influenced by the work of one of my favorite writers, John Irving. I won't get too far into it, but Foer's decision to give one of his characters a serious physical deformity that the character manages to be almost whimsical (and deviantly sexual) about is a plot device that -- I think -- has been in every one of John's books. At least the ones I've read. It's neat, and it's a great book.

Sadly, I can only stand to read two or three crushingly True Holocaust Stories in a year, so my next reading experience will be pretty different, but that's cool. It's just how I roll.

And yes, you just saw me call John Irving by his first name. I do this with all my favorite writers -- John, Hunter, Toby, Ernie, Nick* -- because, after all, when you read a writer's work, you wind up knowing them a lot better than they'd like to think you do.

*For 20 Buckwalter's Influences Bonus Points, name all the writers in the list. John, Hunter, and Ernie shouldn't be that hard... but Toby and Nick? Who are those guys? (Madame Flamingo doesn't get to answer this one....)