Alexander Maksik / Features / Untitled Books

Alexander Maksik Credit Pascale Brevet.jpg

"Take Richard Price’s Lush Life. I keep seeing that novel in the crime section, which seems so silly. It’s like putting Anna Karenina in the train section."

Photograph: © Pascale Brevet

Alexander Maksik

Alexander Maksik, Provost's Postgraduate Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa is also the recipient of a Truman Capote fellowship. Maksik, described by the New York Times as 'a talented debut novelist with a taste for French existentialism', owes it all to Hemingway, and writes for patient, passionate strangers.

Where are you right now?
I'm on a plane somewhere between Iowa City and New York City.

Where do you write?
At home at my dining room table and in the café at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City.

How do you write?
Usually on a laptop, but sometimes on a typewriter and always with a notebook next to one of those machines.

What keeps you writing?
When I don't write I'm unhappy and very irritable. It feels as if there's something unfinished, as if I've built half of something and left it in the backyard to rot. The only way to feel better is to work. To be more cheerful, what I love about writing is the sense that I'm constructing something from nothing.

Who do you write for?
A patient and passionate stranger. And Mary Louise Parker.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?
Yes. I have a few close friends with whom I discuss nearly everything I'm working on.

How do you know if your work is good?
I never know, and tend to assume it isn't. I always read my work aloud and sometimes I can hear those passages that come closest to what I'm after, but I'm very rarely satisfied. That said, the pleasure of having published You Deserve Nothing comes primarily from the unsolicited responses of purely objective readers. All of this is quite new for me, but I can't imagine ever tiring of those letters. To know that my work has resonated with someone I've never met, and will likely never meet, is the most gratifying experience I've ever had as a writer. More than anything else, that's the purest way to measure the quality of my work.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?
Many, but I'm afraid if I talk about them they'll vanish.

Which book do you wish you'd written?
There are so many. As I Lay Dying, The Sun Also Rises, Invisible Man, all of Chekhov, Madame Bovary, to name a few.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?
There's so much I haven't read, so much I want to read, that I don't have the patience or desire to read bad writing. That said, I'll read anything as long as it's written well. I can't stand the 'literary fiction' classification. Take Richard Price's Lush Life. I keep seeing that novel in the crime section, which seems so silly. It's like putting Anna Karenina in the train section. If by literary fiction we mean that a given author aspires to art, is interested in human beings rather than caricatures, pays attention to language, then it's literary fiction. I think I'm far too critical to read bad writing. No matter how good the story, I just can't get lost in it unless the writer can make a good sentence, and has the discipline to avoid cliché.

I think the fiction section of every bookshop in the world should be divided in two - good writing on one side, bad writing on the other. Then every Saturday night readers would come down, climb into the bookshop cage, and fight about what books go where. It's a business model worth considering. (For more on this, see Laurence Cossé's A Novel Bookstore).

Which writer made you want to write?
Ernest Hemingway. There's just no way around it. I wish I could be more original here. I wish I could say that it was an obscure sixteenth century Mongolian satirist, but it was Hemingway.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?
I can't just give you one. As far as living writers with books out in the world, I very much admire Chris Abani, Mary Gaitskill, Peter Orner, Tim Winton, Claire Messud and JM Coetzee.

But, even more exciting to me are three writers who you've never heard of: Merritt Tierce, Anthony Marra and Ayana Mathis. I promise you'll hear about them soon.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?
A chef. Or that guy with glassy eyes who carries his folding chair to the same place on the same beach at the same time every day.

What next?
You sound like my mother.

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You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik is published by John Murray.
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Tuesday, 4 October, 2011