Feats of Obscurity

Dear Republic,

No writer has been as versatile and able to switch between genres and styles as Evan S. Connell, and offers us a fresh reflection.

-ROL

FEATS OF OBSCURITY

One of the great pleasures of reading widely as a writer is building a personal canon. It can be a hell of a lot of fun to find books out there in the library of babel that resonate with you and whatever your philosophy of art and life may be. But it takes some guts to wander into the back of beyond. Not everyone is going to have infinite patience with you when, after your third gin rickey, you sweatily implore them to read this life-changing novella by some hermetic jerk who only wrote in Esperanto.

And let’s be honest. Having weird taste doesn’t play well to the algorithm. It’s no accident that the same hot button names turn up time and time again on social media. I know I’m not the only one who finds it really hard to believe that so many people are as passionate as they claim (for good and ill) about David Foster Wallace, Sally Rooney, and Madeline Cash.

But anti-social behavior and bad personal branding aside, reading toward the unknown, I believe, is essential to finding your voice as a writer. It teaches you what you admire and what you detest. And rarely are those things as fixed as you might think. Thank God.

Every interesting writer I’ve known is only a half heartbeat away from a ten minute hip pocket lecture on some writer (living or dead) you’ve never heard of. They develop the eye gleam of a fanatic and tell you how this one book changed everything for them. It’s like the fever a garage band bassist gets when he tells you about this rare B-side of The Cure he tracked down at a seedy record store in Wheeling, West Virginia. You might not be as excited as he is about it, but it sure as hell gives you a warm feeling to behold his joy.

I’ve had a few of these obsessions over the years. Clearly, others have as well. The New York Review of Books imprint seems largely predicated on this hunger to…