Jonathan Carroll's 15th novel is The Ghost in Love (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG), which will be published in October. His novel The Wooden Sea was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2001. He is the author of such acclaimed novels as White Apples, The Land of Laughs, The Marriage of Sticks and Bones of the Moon. He lives in Vienna, Austria. For more information, please visit jonathancarroll.com.
On your nightstand now:
Memorial by Bruce Wagner. Wagner is funny, bitter and memorable all at the same time. He's the best chronicler of Hollywood since Nathanael West and one of the few writers around whose characters break my heart time after time. When you meet someone at a party who's a Wagner fan, too, you sneak off to a corner with them and jabber happily about his work for hours.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. I didn't read much as a kid, but for some odd reason I was given this book and read it time after time. I wish only that I had bought the theatrical rights to it when I was seven. I could have sold them to Andrew Lloyd Webber years later and made some serious money.
Your top five authors:
James Salter, Robertson Davies, poet Thomas Lux, Elias Canetti, Stefan Zweig. Choosing your five favorite writers is like choosing five favorite anythings that you like a lot. You think and argue and get into mental fistfights with yourselves and in the end settle for a bruised list that your yous only grudgingly agree is a decent but deeply flawed compromise. Under their breath, however, they're all still mumbling writers' names that have been (criminally) left off the list. An hour later you wonder how the hell could I have not named them.
Book you've faked reading:
Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma. College. French literature class. There was a dreamboat in the class who loved the novel. I wanted that girl so much that I was even willing to try to climb Mount Stendhal to win her and show my undying devotion. Little did I know that peak was as treacherous and difficult to ascend as Annapurna.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts. I don't like fat novels. I'm both jealous of any writer who can do that and resentful that they make me carry their phonebooks around for weeks while I finish them. But a few summers ago, when I read Shantaram, I didn't have to carry it anywhere because I sat in my chair for three days reading continuously. It was that wonderful feeling you have every once in a while reading something you can't bear to put down because for that period of time, the world on the pages is more important than the one you live in. Just for that feeling alone I am grateful to the author.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Bonfire of the Vanities (hardcover). I really like Wolfe's work, but that Fred Marcellino cover of New York reflected in a glass coffee table was what made me buy the book. It has got to be one of the greatest jacket illustrations ever. I always loved Marcellino's work, but that was his masterpiece.
Book that changed your life:
"Circus at Dawn," a story from a collection by Thomas Wolfe. I was a terrible high school student and had to go to summer school every year to catch up on the classes I'd failed. One session I took a creative writing class because "English" was the only subject I did reasonably well in. The teacher read us "Circus at Dawn," about kids at the turn of the century watching a traveling circus set up in their rural North Carolina town. Towards the end of the story, all of the circus hands and performers sit down to eat breakfast after setting up the tent and putting the animals away. Wolfe gives one of his beautiful signature descriptions of the food they ate. While the teacher read it to us, I heard this loud drip. I looked down at my desk and saw that I had drooled on it. The writer's description of food had made me drool. I was so astonished that words could do that to me that I thought, man, that's some serious magic.
Favorite line from a book:
Any number of lines from James Salter's work. It is criminal that Salter is not more widely read and appreciated. He is cursed with being labeled "a writer's writer," which means too few people have read his work, despite the very loud praise of writers like John Irving and Susan Sontag. If you haven't read him yet, start with Light Years, which is one of the most beautiful novels I have ever read. If you are anything like me, have a pencil nearby because you'll be marking passages and lines that you know you either have to remember or send to people you love.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Car Thief by Theodore Weesner or A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley. Astonishingly both of these are first novels, but you would never know it. I read them back to back 30 years ago and remember both of them chapter and verse--they're that good.