Peter Mountford: A Young Man's Guide To Greed and Good Intentions
But it sounds as though your second trip to Ecuador wasn’t nearly as exhilarating as your first?
The difficult thing in Ecuador, for me, as it is for Gabriel with Bolivia, was that that initial rush—that experience of falling passionately in love with a country—that’s an experience you can only have once, and it helps if you’re pretty young, too. By the time I returned to Ecuador for my second stint, the bloom was just about off the rose. What was initially exhilarating became very complicated and much less fun once I really started to understand the place better—the politics, the economics.
It was a lot like the end of that gorgeous Alejo Carpentier novel, Los pasos perdidos, in which the protagonist finally leaves the South American country he’s fallen in love with, just briefly, to go back to Europe and tie up some loose ends. But when he returns to the magical tropical country he intended to call home, he finds that all traces of his life there have vanished while he was gone, and the magic is completely lost. But he can’t return home to Europe, anymore, and he is sort of trapped in limbo, between places, between versions of himself. I felt like that for quite a while, too. That was when I started writing fiction in earnest.
Were you trying to recreate that initial rush for yourself? Was writing a form of escapism?
Writing absolutely was and is a form of escapism. I think when I started writing I wanted to recapture that feeling, to re-imagine that emotional space. But that emotion isn’t very appetizing, actually, it’s not very complex or wise, so I had to get some distance from it. Gabriel comes back from his first trip south and is in a swoon and sort of acts like an idiot, much like I did when I came back from my first trip. You know, he’s rhapsodizing about how life in the First World is predicated on a complex series of illusions. That kind of talk is tiresome and, frankly, feels kind of juvenile, so I had to move past it.
Who are some of the writers who people your personal terrain of literary heroes and muses?
Graham Greene, Nabokov, Coetzee, Deborah Eisenberg, and a few of Milan Kundera’s books, namely The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Those are some places I turn when I need juice. Amy Hempel has been very inspiring recently. Each of those writers really changed my understanding of what the written word could do. I should include Denis Johnson, too, based on The Name of The World, which I adored, but I’m not going to because I found Tree of Smoke totally exhausting and impenetrable.
It’s kind of shameful to admit, but I’m a very discriminating reader. I give up on more books than I finish.
Oh, I do that, too. There are so many books, and we have so little time. Eighty-odd years to live, maybe—that’s not enough. What are some examples of problems or shortcomings in a book that might make you give up on it?
I guess it’s often a lack of smartness or thoroughness—I like watching an intelligent mind work through something complicated. A lot of celebrated fiction is very passionate and lyrical, with lots of quivering oak boughs, or whatever, but there’s not a lot of wisdom on display. Or it’s meant to be gripping, so it’s just a scene plus a scene plus a scene plus—and now I’m asleep. If I don’t get my fix of wisdom, I’m a goner. Inauthenticity is also a serious mood-killer. Laziness, when it’s visible, bums me out. Hugely self-conscious experimental writing never, or almost never, does it for me. Solipsism and other kinds of myopia. Not having a sense of humor or an appreciation of the absurdity of the world. I could go on for days.
Do you think we read differently because we’re writers? Sometimes I think of that Barth story, “Lost in the Funhouse”—we’re always noticing the mechanics of a book, which might take away from some of the magic.
Yeah, I loved that recent Geoff Dyer essay about how he’s having such a hard time reading books these days, how he finds himself reading less and less of them. Like, he’s on a flight and he has a copy of some widely celebrated book, but he reaches for the in-flight magazine. It’s definitely not politic to say such a thing, especially if you’re in the business of writing, but frankly I find it very hard to read anything that aspires to art with the same simple curiosity and joy that I once did. I wonder what happened. Was it just the internet and television, as curmudgeonly finger-waggers insist, or does Dyer’s difficulty with that type of writing—does my difficulty with it—have to do with the fact that we spend so much of our time writing and re-writing sentences and so, after all that work, when it comes to reading someone else’s sentences, we find ourselves unable to connect as uninhibitedly as we once did?
David Shields speaks often about how he can’t stand contemporary fiction, and I have to wonder if that’s not just a byproduct of having spent so many years crafting scenes and constructing prose. He’s this master carpenter who’s sighing, wearily, at the woodwork in every building he enters. Is it the woodwork itself, of is his weariness a byproduct of his profession? He will argue that it’s the woodwork, and maybe he’s right, but I’m not convinced.
