Friday, August 31, 2007

Adam Haslett’s experience

I think Haslett has an uncanny ability to reflect how people really feel in the situations he portrays. In every story I find myself wondering how much of this happened to him in real life. Do you think he is drawing on personal experience for a lot of these stories?
Posted by at

2 comments:

kc said...

I think any writer worth her salt writes largely from experience, but also has deep powers of empathy that make her imagination so vivid that we believe she has lived through things that she hasn't. I read an interview with Haslett where he said his main influence as a writer was Alice Munro, and I could see that immediately, because she is the master of empathy (even the way some of his sentences were phrased — such as the one you liked — seem like something she would write).

He seems to have a lot of experience with mental illness and anguish. He doesn't seem to have very much experience with joy. His stories are so bleak. But maybe that's just this collection. Every story seems to have a suicide or some extremely screwed-up family situation or some hideous thing going on. I don't think he's mastered the quiet interior drama like Munro has. Maybe it's just a personal reaction, but I don't always find his characters very likeable, even though they are well-drawn.

5:28 PM, August 31, 2007
kc said...

When we were reading Munro, I think I commented that I would like to see her write about a healthy, loving relationship (maybe that's basically what Johanna's relationship was in the first story, the more I think about it). Because I started to get this sense that she found something troubling in every relationship — something that never quite makes it to the surface for all the characters equally to behold. She seemed so tightly focused on domestic tension of one kind or another. (I read something interesting by her daughter where she said her mom just really wanted to write, that's all she wanted to do, to be alone and write ... and it was almost like she had done enough living in her young marriage and at some point she just wanted to focus her energy on digesting it and reconstituting it over and over in her stories).

I sort of get the same sense with this writer. He's so talented, but some of hic characters feel so removed from the "known world" — so disconnected from the humanity around them — that it's hard to relate to them or care very deeply about what happens to them.

7:19 PM, August 31, 2007

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)