Jonathan Evison's Reading List

"I’m just astounded by the scope and magnitude of the novel, and the landscape described. It’s the story of an ailing professor near the end of his life. He’s in a wheelchair and he’s becoming a bitter man. He’s writing his family history, and he goes back generations to the movement west. Meanwhile there is this fore-story going on, which is this great generational battle between himself, an older white male gentleman, and this young, strong-headed, hippy caregiver. It’s just amazing. It’s one of the 20 best American novels ever written. Yes, he’s in north-central California. A lot of it takes place further east of the Sierra Nevada. His home is where they finally settled, but the book moves west. It’s been a while since I’ve read some of these books. I chose them because they still cast a shadow. Totally. It was part of a larger movement culturally that was going on in America at that time. You had the revisionist Westerns in cinema too. A lot of people in the 1960s and 70s were looking at the traditional myths and questioning them. Now, the literary world is so rife with the Southern Gothics, the Cormac McCarthys and the like, I almost feel that to subvert it now you have to go back in the other direction."

"I won’t say this is the book that made me want to be a writer, because I always wanted to be that, but it solidified my insistence on becoming some hopelessly young, starving misfit awash in an urban landscape somewhere, working my ass off, just really throwing my heart out there and getting it kicked around. Ask the Dust is just a really powerful book for me. It’s a chronicle of the immigrant experience in America in the 1930s. Yes, he’s first generation Italian-American, so it’s about that first generation of immigration experience, wanting to outrun the shadow of your ancestors, and truly be American. One of the very powerful ways that that manifests itself in the story is Arturo’s attitude towards the Mexican girl that he’s really in love with. He demeans her, and looks down on her and calls her a dirty Mexican to elevate himself. There’s just something so raw and true about it. He’s quite quixotic, full of fear and arrogance. The prose of the novel is pretty straight ahead, but just so muscular and very 1930s. Yes, Arturo Bandini is a pretty thinly veiled John Fante."

"To me this is the quintessential LA novel. It’s about the film industry in its heyday. What makes it Western is that it’s set in the West, and it’s all about this idea of possibility. It’s about all these people uprooting themselves and the Hollywood dream they were sold. This book is where the name Homer Simpson comes from: He’s an everyman character who moves out from Nebraska. It’s hilarious and macabre, and it’s so modern in its tone and cadence. Just the prose, the style, the observations are very modern for 1939. As a side note, I’m pretty sure Nathanael West was killed [aged 37] in a car accident driving to F Scott Fitzgerald’s funeral. Oh yes. If anything, it’s spread like a rash. There is so much savagery involved in any dream that sells fame, which is something that obviously doesn’t happen to everybody. Hollywood is a tough place. I went there as a young writer in my twenties and optioned a couple of projects, but really got my ass kicked around town and found it to be not a real positive experience. It was a shark tank compared to any other industry I’ve ever worked in, and I’ve worked in radio, literature, in advertising. It’s just so competitive."

"This is the great American novel for me—the humanity, the landscapes, the progressive and political and social ethos of the novel, not to mention the amazing characters. To my mind, with his characters and also because of his huge output, Steinbeck is the American Dickens, at least in term of social consciousness. He started beating the political themes a bit louder than I would have liked toward the end of his days, but what I loved about his earlier novels is how the story of human inequity is totally based on the humans. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s an amazingly powerful story of people trying to reinvent themselves in an environment that was stacked very much against them. In that era, the robber barons had such a hold on the West, they were truly luring people out there with the dream, just so that they could create a workforce that was too big and then hire cheap labour. It’s the story of American labour, too. The themes are just so big. It’s not just about the West, but it’s hard to take it out of the context of the West. I feel exactly the same way. Part of my ambition with West of Here was to do something like that. Probably I failed on a number of levels, but the central question of the novel is, what is our new American idealism? Manifest Destiny didn’t work out, but there’s still that kernel, there’s still that spirit – where do we go now we’ve gone as far west as we can, both figuratively and literally? It’s sort of a call to arms. There are two landscapes in the novel, and they work the opposite of the characters’ hopes. They’re leaving this cracked, scraggly, scorched earth with all these hopes for a brighter future, and they move through this desert and they move into this land of plenty, this Eden, and what’s waiting for them there is completely less than they expected. Intuitively, that’s a really powerful thing working on the reader, this idea that no matter how bright this thing looks, here’s the reality underneath it."

"It’s a bit of an oddball choice. I should start by saying this novel was written in 1967. No. Yes. No. It is and it isn’t. The book is really surreal. At one point one character says to another, “Pardon me, I thought you were a river.” That should give you an idea. Clever usually bugs me, if it’s clever for clever’s sake, if it doesn’t get to something deeper. What distinguishes Brautigan is that, despite this goofy sensibility and his wit, I always feel this clear-eyed moral vision that I can trust. Also, I just connected with his deep appreciation for the landscape – it’s all about trout streams. It’s about urban squalor, too. It’s got a lot of stuff for a thin, wacky book of poetry-prose. I can’t even honestly tell you that. I don’t know. I just know it worked on me. A love of nature and a love of humanity, I guess, those are the elements I carry around with me. The National Parks are a great place to start – Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Olympic National Park. I would recommend doing it off-season, if you can. There’s a reason they were preserved as national parks – pretty much most of the really incredible wonders of the West have been turned into national parks. The Grand Canyon as well. Get off the interstate. Just try to follow the old Route 66, which is all broken up by interstates now. But the little towns off the beaten path, with the little curio shops and wonder caves and pet museums – the kitsch of American roadside attractions is pretty fantastic. I do that stuff with my kid all the time. I love the potato museum in Idaho. There’s really a kind of haunted feel about it, too. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The one for kids, yes. I’m familiar with Radiator Springs. It looks like Monument Valley. Yes, Cascadia, as we call it – the Pacific Northwest in general. If you see Seattle you should see Portland, too. Certainly they have histories as long and as rich as LA and San Francisco. Denver, as well, in a weird way, as a land-locked mountain town on the plateau, is still very Western. They’re just so very different, like the difference between Seattle and Tucson, and yet there is something that ties them together. They’re in the West. They say nobody ever runs East. Pretty much. Yes, and the more rural you get, the more Northwest you get – Alaska being the pinnacle of it – the more eccentric and rugged and idiosyncratic you’ll find people."