Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Adelle Waldman

Adelle Waldman’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The Village Voice and other publications. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal’s website before turning to fiction.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is her first novel.

From Waldman's Q & A with Maggie Lange at Gawker:

You mentioned Roth and Bellow, but were there any books you were reading at the time that you looked to for a specific voice or structure?

The ones I turned to the most were The Corrections and Revolutionary Road and Goodbye, Columbus, those were ones I read lots of times. Also for me as a person, 19th century writers—George Eliot, Jane Austen. I learned a lot about psychology through those books. They were really smart about how people work and also maybe too about recreating—George Eliot does a good job of showing people that are so different form her. Spending so much time reading those books in my twenties was useful, not so much stylistically, because I can't live in a different time period, I can't write a novel with a omniscient narrator. It seems a little dated and it would be so pretentious and stilted taking that voice. But I definitely felt like I learned so much about people from those books. And Franzen is a great psychological novelist and so is Yates, but I was looking to those for things I couldn't look for in George Eliot like structure and how to...[read on]
Learn more about the book and author at Adelle Waldman's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P..

--Marshal Zeringue