Article: There was a time—at least...

There was a time—at least I remember there being one—when certain books had a dangerous charge. They were usually second-hand books found in thrift stores, yard sales, people’s basements, etc.: The Story of O., Steppenwolf, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Sheltering Sky. With their cover art, from the 1960s or 1970s, they enticed the reader with the promise not just of a good story but with mind-alteration. The excitement of reading, it was suggested, was the excitement of entering forbidden, obscure places. Of course, this was all imaginary. It was also part of a marketing strategy based on another era’s values—what had been called the "counterculture." But the feeling I had reading those books, at that time, remains an ideal of what I want a book to provide: risk, sexiness, danger. It was out of a desire for that kind of book that I began a novel about the Rolling Stones, Altamont, the Manson murders, and the occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger. I had no idea if anyone would share my interest in these subjects; it was just the kind of book that I wanted to read.

One of the big turning points in writing Sway was when I saw the Mexican film "Amores Perros." That movie begins with a chase scene that is not introduced or explained—it is just exciting. From there on, the story jumps back and forth in time to cover a wide cast of characters and many interwoven plot lines. I hadn’t thought enough at that point about how to structure Sway, how to give it a narrative drive that would at least partly correspond to the excitement of the subject matter. When I saw "Amores Perros," I saw how to shift things around, and with a relatively easy cut-and-paste job, the novel began to have much more suspense and coherence.

I think a book stands or falls with its ability to do more than just tell a story. Stories can be had easily enough through movies or on TV. What a book can still do better than any other medium—as long as there are people who know how to read—is speak directly to another person’s consciousness, using language that, sentence by sentence, tells them something different from what they expected.