Adam Moody
of Chronicle Books







Friday 4th December 2020



Q1) The book most influential for you as a young person

Prepare to get upset at me for never being able to choose one of anything!

I was a latecomer to reading. Films were my passion through high school and I even was a film major for my first two years of college before shifting to creative writing. With that said, I went through reading phases at the end of high school and beginning of college. During these phases, I would read constantly for a few months before stopping entirely for extended periods of time.

With that in mind, there were three books I read at the beginning of college that really ignited my passion for reading, and also started to give me an idea of the kind of fiction I was most interested in trying to write myself. These books were White Noise by Don DeLillo, The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth, and Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Very masculine Great Men, energy, I know. I read them all very close together, and with the DeLillo and the Roth I was fascinated by this idea of intellectual, literary types treating their lives as perverse, darkly comical social experiments.

The husband in White Noise is this Hitler studies scholar who is obsessed with death and divides his time between talking with his friend Murray, a media scholar, about the conspiracy theory of contemporary life where every modern convenience is a means to escape thinking about death, and spending his evenings making up death hypotheticals with his wife. For him it is all hypothetical theorizing, but meanwhile his wife is consumed by a genuine terror of death and begins having an affair with the mysterious Mr. Gray to gain access to a drug that numbs the fear of death, and the cycle of her affair and taking the drug becomes its own reality for her and in many ways is preferable to her real life. And all during this there is the Airborne Toxic Event, evacuations, the SIMUVAC (simulated evacuation) which is replacing normal reality with a reality of simulated paranoia. This idea of in the midst of the endless social and environmental chaos that we treating our lives as experiments to escape the endless wave of anxiety that is existence seemed very relevant and…well…still does, haha.

The Roth follows young Nathan Zuckerman as he visits a literary idol, E.I. Lonoff, believed to be a composite of Bernard Malamud and Henry Roth, and meets a mysterious young woman also staying with Lonoff. With this simple setup Roth goes in wildly complex directions. I won’t say too much on the plot because the way Roth experiments with reality vs. lies and fact vs. fiction is what makes the book work so well. Roth uses this less than 200-page book to explore how a budding writer perverts and exploits real life experiences to create fiction and it is incredible and I think about it all the time whenever I consider writing my own fiction and stealing experiences from my life.

The Amis simply is a book made up of everything I love most about fiction: cranky, neurotic literary types, drinking, petty rivalries, hilariously grim self-destruction, and great set pieces used as the setting for comically explosive meltdowns. A perfect pairing with Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe - two of the best black comedy campus novels.

Fast-forward to now, and these are three books that still are perfect indicators of what I want out of fiction, and the type of fiction I would love to rip-off for my own work.

Q2) The book that gets you through hard times

It’s a bit weird saying this book seeing as I’ve only read it once, and only this year as well, but: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. I read this book at the beginning of quarantine, when the whole situation of this year was still at its rawest, and on top of that I had only recently started my current job.

For six days I spent my entire evenings ignoring my partner and reading Sterne’s genius comic inventions, delighting in how at the beginning of the novel’s lifespan, loyally and playfully following in the grand tradition of Don Quixote, here was a writer already subverting everything that was expected from a novel. It’s a book that embraces every possibility of the medium, treating it as means for play and invention. If more writers treated writing as a Hobbyhorse instead of Serious Work, I think we’d get more exciting books.

And for those who haven’t read Tristram Shandy yet, I highly recommend the Penguin Classics edition, and also that you read all of the notes. I tend to be lazy with back of the book notes, I get cranky about having to continually flip to the back and forth, but the cleverness of Sterne’s language, and the complexity of his jokes and literary references are only fully appreciated if given their proper context. This may make it sound like work, but it doesn’t feel like work at all. Come for the plot inventions, and stay for the sneaky parodies of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and the many tributes to Rabelais.

Q3) The book that most disappointed you

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I went into this book expecting to love it, and I found it amazingly tedious. A satire about a cranky over-educated literary type, sounds like it was written just for me. However, I don’t have much patience for cartoonish, silly comedy. I want comedy that deep down takes its characters and subjects seriously, and Dunces read like a concoction of lazy sketch pieces. The parts following Burma Jones were absolute agony to get through, his horribly repetitive dialogue and mannerisms was such sloppy caricature, which was the case for most of the bit characters. Honestly, the only section of the book that I thought worked was Ignatius and Myra’s letters to each other. On the page, Ignatius’ idiocy is replaced by a comically sad delusion which is the only way he works as a character.

Q4) Name a book with either a brilliant opening or a brilliant ending

For a brilliant ending: The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. What brilliantly executed brutality.

For a brilliant opening: Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth. The opening two paragraphs set the tone for this grotesque, melancholy, and gloriously cruel book to a perfection. Also, this book also works for a brilliant ending. Tragedy on a grand scale.

Honorable ending mention Sátántangó by László Krasznahorkai. I’ve heard some people say that they consider this ending too gimmicky, but I thought it worked fantastically. The kind of trick ending that only works in the context of a deeply original vision that embraces dream/nightmare-logic.

Honorable opening mention: Look At Me by Anita Brookner. Hard to explain why this opening is so great as there is little in terms of narrative, but it perfect captures the voice of the narrator, and brilliantly uses the title as a thesis for her thirst for recognition and importance to the point of delusion. Perfectly sets the tone for her complex actions throughout the rest of the book.

Q5) Your favourite character from a novel

The narrator of Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas. Failed writer who decides to embrace his inadequacy by writing a book collecting all of the failed writers, writers who refused to try, writers who just kept having their ideas written by other people before them, writers consumed by impossible projects, etc.

I aspire to eventually make a project out of my own failure.

Honorable mentions: K. from Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle. I too feel helpless outside the safety of my apartment surrounded by my books.

Wassily from the Lydia Davis story “Sketches for a Life of Wassily”, what a gloriously doomed buffoon.

Q6) Next on your 'to read' pile is...

Oh god, I don’t even really have a To Read pile, I have two wooden crates turned into shelves that have as many books as possible crammed into them.

Possible next reads: Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz, Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas, Down Below by Leonora Carrington, A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Kohlhass by Heinrich von Kleist, Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard, Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann.

But most of all, my priority is finally returning to Proust’s The Guermantes Way.

Q7) Your favourite poem

Shamefully, I don’t read a lot of poetry. I tend to prefer narrative poetry. The last two I’ve loved were Eugene Onegin by Pushkin and The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. One of these days I’m going to ask the great book folks on Twitter for more recommendations of great narrative poetry.

Q8) The greatest book you've ever read

Honestly, I think all of my favorite books are the greatest books I’ve ever read, but if I approached this question that way I would never finish answering.

So instead I will keep this simple: Don Quixote. This one book was a primary influence on Tristram Shandy and Jacques the Fatalist, two books that have further influenced most of the contemporary writers I believe are worth reading. No to mention Kafka (okay, I just did, but Kafka should always be mentioned).

But putting aside pretentious literary history reasons: Don Quixote is a 1,000-page book that is never less than entertaining and wonderfully inventive. It is a joy to read, and I read it back when I rarely ever read anything longer than 400 pages. I think about it often, and I believe it the key work of fiction that reveals what the medium can and should do. ●










Adam Moody: Working in Operations at Chronicle Books. Live in Oakland, California. Spending all free time as humanly possible reading. Continuously adding story ideas to my notebooks that I tell myself I will work on, but don’t.
Can be seen talking about books incessantly on Twitter at: @ToTheHappyNone






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