According to a friend in New York, Joshua Ferris has the kind of following usually accorded to new indie bands.  His readings are populated with beautiful college girls asking intelligent questions and sighing delightedly at his answers.  He is not unknown on this side of the pond either; his debut novel, Then We Came to the End, made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic, and since has been loosely grouped in the public imagination with a tribe of similarly young, cool, serious writers, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen and Wells Tower, whose stories appear in the New Yorker and whose writing exhibits a certain wry amusement and quirky subject matter.

But it's not his fault he's good looking, and it would do him a disservice to witter about his geek-chic good looks and disarming charm.  Unlike certain other writers of similar aesthetic good fortune, there is nothing smooth or knowing about Ferris.  He exhibits a natural courtesy and appears to answer honestly, without recourse to the kind of sound bites that will look good in print.  He still seems mildly bemused to be asked about 'writing', and equally baffled to have to talk about his life, but gives a little shrug and answers good-naturedly, lacing his conversation with the dry wit familiar from his writing.

The 35 year old was born in Chicago, where he grew up "dysfunctionally." "I came from a long line of divorcees," he quips, without rancour.  "Both parents have been married four times."  He was "like, nine or something," when he decided he wanted to write.    "My parents read to me a lot.  The same books over and over.  I would always demand the same books," he says.  Growing up, he would write his own versions of Mad Magazine, and pen 'really bad Hitchcock parodies'. 

After graduating from the University of Iowa with a BA in English and philosophy, he got a job in a Chicago advertising agency.  "I knew walking in on the first day that this was where America had been all my life.  My parents were pretty much working-class and all of a sudden I enter in to a world of expense accounts, bonuses, full benefits, projects, conference rooms, bottom lines, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations; all that stuff that's grim.  But then, also, visits to paper mills to find out how sheets of paper are made; a deeper understanding of why it's important for Microsoft to break in to China, and all of a sudden, the larger world - a world so much larger than both my upbringing and my education - came in to view.  And so, I wanted to write about this thing that I had never known existed, and seemed to adequately fit the novelist's ambitions," he says. 

It was while working in advertising that the urge to write really took hold.  He quit his job and moved to California where he enrolled on an MFA program and spent two years reading and writing.  "I never thought I would want to write about advertising because it was such the utterly dull enterprise, "he admits.  He still sounds mildly surprised that this should have formed the subject of his first novel.  "I guess the answer is I needed distance.  I needed to quit, and have a year or two away in order to remember what was actually fun about it and allow myself to be more even-handed with respect to the subjects than I would have been if I'd tried to write it while I was still working," he says.

The result was Then We Came to the End, his sharply funny and highly unusual debut novel about office life.  To outside eyes, Ferris arrived on the literary scene as a fully formed Next Big Thing, in much the same way Zadie Smith did, garnering glowing reviews in every major paper and the kind of buzz publishers dream about.  The novel follows the a group of office workers at a Chicago advertising agency and his characters are instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever worked in an office, drawn with gentle humour without resorting to stock.  Strikingly, it was narrated by a collective 'we': 'We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.' The world of work is largely ignored in literature, at the most serving as wallpaper for more exciting plot elements.  In Ferris' book, work takes centre stage; it is the story. 

His second novel, The Unnamed, which is published this month, marches in an entirely different direction.  The communal point of view in the first book is abandoned in favour of a resolutely singular one, reflecting the increasingly independent and solitary path taken by its protagonist, Tim Farnsworth.  Tim is a wealthy, healthy, good-looking lawyer at the peak of his profession, with a large house, adored wife and difficult teenage daughter.  In the opening pages this is all placed in jeopardy by the onset of a strange walking sickness, undiagnosed, unrecognised by medical science; the 'unnamed' of the title.  Periodically, without warning or reason, Tim's legs force him up and away from whatever he is doing and do not stop walking until exhaustion intervenes and he collapses into sleep wherever he is - a suburban porch, the back of a car park, an abandoned fast food van.  He is powerless to resist the will of his body and frequently finds himself at risk of exposure or at the mercy of whoever finds him.  His wife valiantly tracks him, driving day or night to wherever he arrives, crossing state lines and searching the countryside.  Inevitably this takes its toll on their home life, and when Tim relapses after a period of remission, he makes the decision to stop fighting the unnamed, and keep on walking.

As with Then We Came to the End, large parts of The Unnamed are concerned with work and working life.   "I imagine it will find itself in to every book that I write," he says.  "I think that [work] is this monolith of meaning for so many people, and so often neglected in literature."  He cites Philip Roth as someone who does it well, particularly a long passage in American Pastoral that describes in unashamed detail how to make a glove.  "There was such loving attention to this thing that the characters took so seriously, that all of a sudden they were elevated from characters into real people.  And that leap," he leans forward for emphasis, "that leap is enormous." 

Tim is a partner at a successful legal firm and wholeheartedly loves his job.  It is the interruption to his working life that he finds most distressing when his disease takes hold, and the one corner of his life he fights hardest for.  His job provides a framework to his life, and so much of his sense of self is bound up with his career that without it he starts to unravel.  It is a sentiment uncomfortably familiar in modern life, and one Ferris recognises himself (though, as he admits happily, he hasn't had a 'proper' job since 2001, "so that's nice."). "Aside from how work factors into fiction, it's also this point of self identity and meaning.  If I didn't have it, I don't know what the hell I'd do with myself," he says. "But it's also this way in which we distract ourselves from huge issues."

The Unnamed is a two-tone novel.  Throughout the first half, one is unsure what direction Ferris is taking us in, whether we're heading for comedy or tragedy.  Funnily enough, the office scenes are the weakest aspect of the book, veering at times into parody.  Ferris admits having to work hard to suppress his natural instinct to be funny, but there remains a strange undercurrent of humour; funny in the same way knocking your elbow elicits a laugh, or having your arm twisted just before it starts to really hurt.  As the novel progresses, the writing takes a more serious turn, casting off the final vestiges of humour, and in doing so finally finds its stride.  Here, at last, Ferris emerges as the writer one hoped he could be; serious, engaging; not simply someone with a talent for clever ideas well-executed, but possessing a capacity for proper, grown-up literature.

Ferris now lives in upstate New York with his wife and "squeaky new" baby son, but he still keeps an apartment in the city.  "When that [the country] gets too retiring and catacombish, I have to leave and get down to Brooklyn and feel like I'm still alive." 

I ask him to describe his life for me.  "My life? Right now? That's a really hard question to ask!  Could you answer that question?"  he pauses to think, pulling his legs up on to the sofa, as though settling in for an afternoon of TV.  "I try every day to engage with writing, be it by reading or actually writing.  And the vast majority of days I'm successful, one way or another, and I do that probably to the detriment of everything that would probably be more vivacious."  And is life now the way he would wish it?  "Wow. Could you answer that one?" he volleys again, laughing. "It's not a bad life."  He shakes his head and smiles, then says again, more to himself this time, "I mean, it's not a bad life. "

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The Unnamed is published by Viking.

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I know, I know...this book has been talked about ad nausea. But I just read it, and it's one of those rare books that get in you and stay for a while. The father and son, and their desolate story, resonate long after the reading is done. I loved this book. I forgave the very odd first-person glitch in the middle (Listen to me dishing out the criticism of a book that won the goddamned Pulitzer!!! But I was just not sure why it was there) and sometimes I could see the mechanics of what McCarthy was doing with his writing, but it's the unaffectedness of it that blew my mind. The writing is spare and unaffected and just beautiful. The story, while bleak and very dark, was really a love story - a story about fathers and sons - and by way of love, it had hope in it. Five days later, the book was still rumbling around in the back rooms of my brain. A month later I knew it was stuck in my heart. I highly recommend this beautiful and sad story. I don't know if I want to see the movie. I like the book so much that I don't want to replace my own imagined images, and faces, and landscapes with someone else's imagined movie set, casting decisions and so on.

The Red Book by Carl Gustav Jung

My copy of The Red Book, also known as Liber Novus (Latin for "A New Book"), arrived a week ago and I am in awe. This is a stunning piece of art. The original Red Book is a 205-page manuscript written and illustrated by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung between roughly1914 and 1930. Astonishingly, the book was not published or shown to the public until 2009. And up until 2001, Jung's heirs denied scholars access to the book, which he started writing after a souring of his relationship with Sigmund Freud. This edition of the Red Book has very well reproduced prints of the calligraphic text and contains many illuminations. It weighs in at just over 400 pages, including the translation, and it is NOT available digitally. When I found out it was not available digitally - and really, how could it be? - I had to have it. I'll start reading in the coming weeks. For now, I peruse, caress, and explore these beautiful pages with a joyful heart.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

This book grabbed me from the first pages and pulled me to the wonderfully gratifying ending with ease. I loved everything about this grand circus story.

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Waiting for Columbus is published by Picador. 

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Ponderous is the word that keeps coming up.

1.     Lumbering and laborious in movement. 2.   Without liveliness or wit. 3.  Disproportionately thick or heavy.

Looking this word up today has been a revelation. I'd thought it meant thoughtful - maybe, sometimes a little too thoughtful. But lumbering? Witless! I sat down to work and constantly in my mind was How Not To Be Ponderous. I wrote as dynamic an action scene as I could, which did admittedly end with my two main characters once again in the living room talking quietly. In the evening I went to my usual Monday night circuit training, where we do press ups and squat thrusts to dance remixes of 80s love ballads. This is one of my favourite hours of the week.  It is so good to have your life reduced to forty second intervals of effort while somebody shouts motivating imperatives at you.

There were two press reviews of my novel yesterday, one from The Independent, which said the writing was, yes, ponderous in places, and one from The Observer, which said it was - hear this - captivating. No dilemma, then, about which one to keep. Before bed I stuck The Observer one into my scrapbook. I see this as a process of truth engineering. When I look back at my reviews in 50 years time I'll think nothing bad was ever said against my writing, and in my conviction, this will become, for me, the truth.

Tuesday

I overcame my entire plan-repellent being today and mapped out in detail the last few scenes of my current novel. Now that I know exactly what I have to do, and how close the end is, I'm paralysed. Writing, for me, is a hapless process of discovery of my own characters and plot, and once the mystery is gone it becomes more of a technical exercise. I spent a lot of time investigating the view from my window (not my window, I borrow a room in a friend's house to write in). It's an epic view, with Bath falling away beneath and the Somerset countryside opening out hill upon hill. I looked from the view, back to my screen, back to the view and at some car shenanigans on the street below. At crucial points in the writing process there's always the desire to do anything but write. How can watching cars parallel park be more fascinating than a world I've spent the last year creating?  I put my attention back to the screen. The end is in sight. I have to push on.

Wednesday

I worked, I had raspberry jam on toast, I worked, I had coffee. Actually the writing-to-a-plan approach isn't as bad as I anticipated, now that the first throes of horror and then paralysis are easing. At lunchtime I walked into town and bought an £18 bottle of wine for my partner's birthday present, and, as I flinched, wondered if I'd reached a turning point: Maybe this is adulthood at last? If life's progress can be charted by the amount we're prepared to spend on a bottle of wine, doesn't it reflect a fairly true picture of things?  An exponential progression until about fifty, and then a twenty year plateau before a final slip into regress? I can no longer buy and drink a bottle of £3 fortified wine from Kwik Save; I could no more do that than I could reverse time itself. There is something of physical law about it, utterly inexorable.

Wednesday evenings are for sculpting. This week I'm finishing off a head; we get the clay from the recycled clay bin outside, which is a cold, slimy metre-deep trench of the unknown. You put your hand in, fill up your bucket and hope for the best. Out comes a mix of old clay, rainwater, plaster, cement insects, newspaper - and by some alchemy, it forms new, rich, silky clay that has its own life. The whole process of sculpting is utterly brilliant and absorbing. My head is now finished; it didn't end up resembling the model much at all - just glimpses here and there, an essence sort of pushing through.

(So, if you are somebody who ponders ('thinks about something carefully over a period of time') are you ponderous? That seems a little unfair. Your careful thoughts might be luminously profound. When does one become the other? Is it inevitable?)

Thursday

The clearest and bluest of mornings. I read in bed briefly before getting up -it's The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom at the moment. A tiny volume, about 100 pages, and written in that deeply reflective character-driven way that only European novels seem able to get away with. As somebody who is deeply interested - almost obsessed - with the idea of how to make a novel philosophical without making it irritating, I'm reading him as a form of education. I'd read a review that said his philosophical musings are never heavy-handed, but sneak up on you 'breathtakingly, like angels hidden in abandoned cupboards.' Wow. So I'll read on keenly. The angels I'm not sure about. But this morning he gave a very impressive, and quite long, description of a beetle eating a rat and feeding the regurgitated rat balls to its young.

At lunchtime I did a telephone interview with a magazine; it's an increasingly odd exercise to do publicity for a novel I finished writing over two years ago. Was it Ian McEwan who said that it's like being employed by a former self? And it seems to be a strange truth that the more times you are asked a particular question, the less you know the answer.  The less you know what an answer would even look like. I'm so sorry, I want to say. I really don't know. Ask me something else; ask me who William Herschel is, ask me how Easter is calculated, I still know those things.

Meanwhile, today I embarked on a pruning exercise on my novel; as I did so I felt like I was making sleek something fat and unfit. And then afterwards I had the sinking feeling that I'd accidentally deleted all the important content and left something a little malnourished, and so understated that it communicates only to those with awareness of the subsonic. Thankfully I'd saved the deleted parts in a separate file and maybe I'll revisit them, maybe. Confused, a little disgruntled, I packed up work for the day. The most beautiful sunset out of the window, a blazing strip of orange along the horizon, then every gradation of colour through the coppers and greens, ending in a dome of royal blue, punched with stars. Impossible to feel despondent at the sight of that.

Friday

No work today. I baked a birthday cake. I went for a walk over the fields near my house, and to a meeting for the charity for which I'm a trustee.  In the evening we had twelve friends to our house and played 'peasant wolf', which consisted of us shouting at each other for four hours while drinking Amaretto and eating lactose-free snacks.

Saturday

A slow motion day, consisting of a walk out in the fields and hills (an endearing encounter with some Gloucester Old Spot piglets, some meaningful eye contact with a horse and the sighting of an unfamiliar breed of horned cattle), some contemplative sitting, some focussed eating. Somebody I've never met phoned me to ask about what it was like to be a real writer. Not as good, I imagine, as it would be to be an unreal writer - but it is pretty wonderful even so.  An early night, a deep, tired sleep.

Sunday

 Every couple of months I meet up with my writing group, which formed five years ago when I was doing the Creative Writing MA here in Bath. For five whole years we've stayed intact, the seven of us. We met today in Bristol and workshopped some pieces of writing from our novels in progress. Workshop is the word that's always used for these feedback sessions, and it might seem absurd I suppose, bringing to mind as it does something that involves dremmels and hammers and angle grinders. But maybe that's what makes it the right word; trying to build a novel is a bit like trying to nail together a piece of furniture. It has to support itself, it has to hold weight, it has to be rightly structured and rightly proportioned. In this vein we go at each other's work; after five years together we've grown candid with one another. Yes, I've had entire paragraphs of my work struck through with something like, Nice paragraph - what does it mean? written against it, or simply, BORING.  Today, anyhow, it was all good and fruitful, and we departed and went our separate ways with our spirits renewed, with the feeling that all things are still possible.

This evening at home I went through the few pages of my novel that I'd submitted to the workshop, to see what comments people had written. 'You make me sick and giddy with pleasure' someone had written. She's the one person in the group who endorses every word I write, always vehemently enthusiastic.  'I always hope you are writing,' she's scrawled along the margin. 'I see your fingers trembling over the keys, a lipbitten expression and straining ear: what? What? The last time I thought of you I was on the train passing Bath. "Bless," I said to the main sitting next to me. "Bless her."'

Well, ok, she isn't exactly a representative view, but who can complain? Everybody needs a friend like this. All charges of ponderousness collapse, at least for now, into nothing. I fold the work away with a smile, and with that another week closes.

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The Wilderness is published by Vintage.

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At my kitchen table.

Where do you write?

Obviously sometimes at my kitchen table and sometimes in a shed in the back yard.

How do you write?

a.) It's a mystery to me.

b.) Mostly on a computer, occasionally long hand.

What keeps you writing?

a.) mortgage and a strong wish not to find myself and my husband pushing matching shopping carts along a major highway when we are in our 70's.

b.) a strong drive to tell a good story with the best possible sentences.

Who do you write for?

Myself.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?

I have a couple of friends, both writers, who are wonderful sounding boards and critics.

How do you know if your work is good?

One hopes for the best and revises as much as possible.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

Yes- a now schizophrenic university graduate who recites Shakespeare beautifully while panhandling in front of the local coffee shop.

Which book do you wish you'd written?

I would have to be a different person to write someone else's books and that wouldn't be my preference but I would be very glad to have written both Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy and Philip Pullman His Dark Materials.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?

PD James and Alan Furst and Ruth Rendell are also good. No guilt is necessary or appropriate.

Which writer made you want to write?

I think it is the characters in my head that made me want to write.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?

I admire Junot Diaz and Victor LaValle but my guess is the most exciting author writing today hasn't published yet.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?

Doing all the things that I do when I'm not writing- reading, watching late night TV, taking a walk, going to the cleaners, making dinner. In terms of making a living, I imagined I'd teach or do psychotherapy or tend bar.

What next?

Another novel and possibly a TV show.

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Where the God of Love Hangs Out is published by Granta Books

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            My former student Nina Goss put it like this, "As a moon rocket ascends, different stages of the engine do what they must to accelerate the capsule.  Then each is jettisoned until only the capsule is left with the astronauts on its way to the moon.  In linear fiction, the whole structure is accelerating toward the epiphanic moment, and certainly the parts are necessary for the final experience, but I still feel that I and the writer can jettison the pages leading to the epiphany.  They serve a purpose and then fall into the Pacific Ocean, so I'm left with Gabriel Conroy and his falling faintly, faintly falling, and I'm heading to the moon in the capsule, but the rest of the story has fallen away.  In collage, every fragment is a capsule:  I'm on my way to the moon on every page."

A few of my favorite examples:

            Renata Adler's Speedboat consists of hundreds of discrete, free-standing, seemingly unrelated paragraphs, all registered in a tone of extraordinarily well-modulated irony. Some of the episodes consist of only a couple of sentences; others are five pages long; most are about half a page. The book is an education in Adler's astringent sensibility, her brutal intelligence. I read her scenes not to find out what will happen but to see if I understand yet what, in Adler's view, constitute the crucial thematic elements of a scene. She repeats the schema over and over until she has taught me how to think about a certain nexus of concerns the same way she does: Language, culture, politics, media, travel, technology are all different kinds of "speedboats"--exciting, unpredictable, powerful, and dangerous in their violent velocity. And just when I've grasped it, the book is over: "It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime."

As is Speedboat, George W.S. Trow's Within the Context of No Context is an assemblage of unconnected paragraphs, narrated in a tone of almost fanatical irony, and perhaps best understood as an anthropological autobiography (a term Trow once used to describe his work). In other words, its ostensible accomplishment--a brilliantly original analysis of the underlying grammar of mass culture--is, in a sense, only a way for him to get at his real subject: the world he inhabits (one of absolute irony: no context) and the world his father, a newspaperman, inhabited (one of absolute sentiment: context).

In the book's final paragraph, Trow says of his father, "Certainly, he said, at the end of boyhood, when as a young man I would go on the New Haven railroad to New York City, it would be necessary for me to wear a fedora hat. I have, in fact, worn a fedora hat, but ironically. Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned--not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me."

The first piece in Bernard Cooper's Maps to Anywhere was selected by Annie Dillard as one of the best essays of 1998, but the book as a whole won the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first novel of 1990, while in the foreword to the book Richard Howard calls the chapters "neither fictions nor essays neither autobiographical illuminations nor cultural inventions." The narrator--Howard calls him "the Bernard-figure (like the Marcel-figure, neither character nor symbol)"--is simultaneously the "author" and a fictional creation.

            From mini-section to mini-section and chapter to chapter, Bernard's self-conscious and self-conscious attempts to evoke and discuss his own homosexuality, his brother's death, his father's failing health, his parents' divorce, and southern California kitsch are delicately woven together to form an extremely powerful meditation on the relationship between grief and imagination. "Maps to anywhere" comes to mean: When a self can (though language, memory, research, and invention) project itself anywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self?  The book's final sentences--perfect final sentences particularly important to achieving closure in collage--is an articulation of the melancholy that the narrator has, to a degree, deflected until then: "And I walked and walked to hush the world, leaving silence like spoor."

            Douglas Coupland's Generation X is, as is Maps to Anywhere, set in southern California, but Coupland is fifteen years younger than Cooper, and the texture of their books is extremely different. Graphics, statistics, and mock-sociological definitions compete, as marginalia, with the principal text, which consist of "tales" only loosely connected by the same cast of characters, but very tightly organized around the inability of any of the characters to feel, really, anything. The mixture of nonfiction and fiction--information crowding out imagination--in Generation X effectively embodies the idea that these characters, bombarded by mall culture and media, feel that that have McLives rather than lives.

            As are Speedboat and Within the Context of No Context, Eduardo Galeano's The Book of Embraces, Eduardo Galeano's The Book of Embraces consists of hundreds of extremely short sections; as is Maps to Anywhere, it is an ode to the creative imagination's embrace of everything. A mix of memoir, anecdotes, polemic, parable, fantasy, and Galeano's surreal drawings, the book might at first glance be dismissed as an authorial dumping-ground, but upon more careful inspection, The Book of Embraces  reveals itself to be virtually a geometric proof on the intertwined themes of love, terror, and imagination, perhaps best exemplified in this extraordinary mini-chapter: "Tracey Hill was a child "Tracey Hill was a child in a Connecticut town who amused herself as befitted a child of her age, like any other tender little angel of God in the state of Connecticut or anywhere else on this planet.

            "One day, together with her little school companions, Tracey started throwing lighted matches into an anthill. They all enjoyed this healthy childish diversion. Tracey, however, saw something which the others didn't see or pretended not to, but which paralyzed her and remained forever engraved in her memory: faced with the dangerous fire, the ants split up into pairs and two by two, side by side, pressed close together, they waited for death."

            Brian Fawcett's Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow also blurs fiction and essay. On the top of each page appear parables--some fantastic, others quasi-journalistic--all of which are concerned with media's colonization of North American life (both Fawcett and Coupland are Canadian). On the bottom of each page, meanwhile, runs a book-length footnote about the Cambodian war.  The effect of the bifurcated page is to confront the reader with Fawcett's central motif:  wall-to-wall media represents as thorough a raid on individual memory as the Khmer Rouge.

            In U and I, Nicholson Baker writes, "I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers; the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for seepage-points of passage." This is a useful description not only of Baker's first novel, The Mezzanine, but of all of these books.  Narrative progression is an apparent contradiction of literary collage, which compels instead by thematic orchestration, internal investigation, and the rubbing together of the author-narrator's emotional trouble with cultural cataclysm of some sort.

            No wonder I'm such a fan of the form and of these books in particular: they're all madly in love with their own crises.

***

Where are you right now?  

I'm in the kitchen, which is the only room with an open fire. I wouldn't normally write here, but in the cold weather I quite often work at the kitchen table, after everyone's fed and the kids are in bed.

Where do you write?

I write all over the place. On walks, in the garden, in the kitchen, in my study. If it's a continuing project - something big, like a novel - I try to stick to one place, so I can spread out and then, when I have to stop, I can just leave things as they are. Usually, that's the study. Even then, the kids might go in and pinch a notebook or something and draw in it. I have a good many notebooks with drawings of birds and pigs in them. Of course, somewhere under the drawing in the best idea I ever had, now illegible,

How do you write?

I write on the run quite often. Making notes, in a hasty scrawl, on scraps of paper or notebooks. I work full-time and I have two young sons, so just sitting down and writing can feel like a luxury. I have, in past years, gone away for a month at a time - thanks to retreats like the one on Jura, run by Jura Distillery and the Scottish Book Trust, for example - to get concentrated writing time. I often write at night, by the stove, when everyone else is in bed. I do need solitude to write - everything else is an extra. I once wrote a piece in sub-zero conditions in an unheated hut in the Arctic Circle, snow outside and a lake under ice - I didn't mind, because I was alone.

What keeps you writing?

I'm not sure. When I'm in the middle of something, it's curiosity to see how it will turn out, when I'm not, it's the excitement of the tabula rasa, the blank space where ideas come in spite of me, and I have to see them through. I suppose the other thing is that I'd like to write better. Choose better words. Put them in the right order. It's often at that level.

Who do you write for?

An odd question. I don't think I've given it proper thought. Sometimes, I think, I'm writing for the ghost of someone I used to know. I suppose a possible answer to the question is 'for myself' - but if that's true, it's for my other self, the one who isn't socialised, isn't allowed out in company much, and isn't usually allowed to speak for himself. That one.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?

At a certain stage, maybe. But I'm at my best when I'm on my own. I'd rather let things come than talk about it and maybe have the talk get in the way of that. It's got something to do with spontaneity, or maybe you'd say extemporisation. Time is different when other people are around, and I need time to slow down to really get going - slow down isn't quite right, but it's got to do with that suspended quality being alone gives you. When I've got something together, it goes to a couple of people at my agents', and to my editor.

How do you know if your work is good?

I never think it's good enough. But I know when it's as good as I can make it. That has something to do with the sound of it, if the rhythm is right. If the rhythm is true. You know when things are true by their rhythm. That's the case with people too, but it can take a while to make out the deep, underlying rhythm. When you do, it can be a surprise - or a shock. With a character, it's the opposite - you know them from the inside out, you start with the rhythm, the soul if you like, then you dress them in their street clothes and send them to the corner shop.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

Oh, yes.

Which book do you wish you'd written?

A la recherché du temps perdu at one end of the scale; The Turn of the Screw at the other. I love James and Proust, and would be grateful to write a single sentence that could compare with either of those masters. On the other hand - and I'm sure this is interesting only to me - the book that is inscribed in my blood, the book tattooed on the skin of my heart, is Moby Dick.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?

I love reading rock biographies. The story of the Allman Brothers, that kind of thing. I'm a full-time nerd about stuff like that.

Which writer made you want to write?

I'm not sure it was a writer. Maybe a painter. Chardin, say. Or Caravaggio. People will tell me from time to time that my books are dark, (and worse things) but I want to honour the world around me. Its light and shadow. Its colours. I think of writing as the darkest possible celebration. I see that in Caravaggio - the occasion is sombre, perhaps, but the colours are vibrant. And in Chardin, the commonplace things, the glass, the china bowl, the dead animal. The physicality of things and that underlying rhythm in everything.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?

I'm not sure exciting is what I am after. Don DeLillo renews the world - and language - whenever he puts pen to paper. Hilary Mantel gives me a sense of the justness of things, the right weight of an event or an object, the wonderful materiality of language. Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is as fine as anything I've read in a long time and I go back to it often.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?

If I had even a sliver of talent, I'd be painting. But I haven't. Maybe walking on an island in the Arctic Circle. It's called Kvaloya and it's too long since I was there.

What next?

I'm writing a book now, about looking, and seeing, and superstition, that's set on Kvaloya. After that, a rock biography. Really. Well, sort of.

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Waking Up in Toytown is published by Jonathan Cape.

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