James Altucher and The Reasons for Reading Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son” Over 200 Times Part Two
The original version of this article was published at Bookshelf Beats. You can read the original version here. If you missed part one of my interview with James Altucher, click here.
“We all grew up trying to be the cool kid and he’s never the cool kid in the book.”
Gino: I like the idea of writing style being it’s own character. When talking about The Old Man and The Sea you made another good point. Sometimes simple, sparse writing resonates in a powerful way. Denis Johnson’s prose and way of writing are pretty minimalist in a lot of places, yet very effective.
James: I think it’s the way he describes things. I’m going to misquote him, but he won’t necessarily say, “The sun is going down.” He’ll say, “The sun has four hours yet to live.” It’s a simple sentence where everything is one syllable, but it’s just a beautiful way of describing the sunset as opposed to, “The sun is going down.” That’s a really great writer, where your eyes can’t glaze over any sentence. Jesus’ Son is worth reading so many times, because every time I read it, I see something I probably glazed over the last time, or I see something in a different way. That fuels my own writing. I ask myself, “Can I do that?” or “Do I have a story inside me to tell that is reminiscent of how he’s telling his story?” Not that I want to copy him or copy his style, it just makes me think about my own writing quite a bit.
Gino: I’m always amazed at how well read you are. I love to read and I feel like I read quite a bit, but your depth and breadth of knowledge about books is crazy to me. Every person you have on your podcast, you’ve read all their books. You’ve read everything by everyone.
James: Well, I love it and also I want to get better. I want to be as good as the guys on my show. I want to always try to improve. I also like the linkages. If I’m going to interview somebody, I want to read their influences. If I were to interview Denis Johnson for instance, which is something I’ve thought about trying to pursue, I’m at an advantage because I know he used to study under Raymond Carver. I’ve read all of Raymond Carver’s books. There’s obvious connections between Raymond Carver and people like Bukowski, Knut Hamsun from the 1800s, Chekhov, and all these guys who have this realist sort of style. Like Jesus’ Son, you don’t know if it’s true or not true. It could be a non-fiction book for all you know.
Gino: I read about your love of Carver, Bukowski and Johnson on your site. There are four or five posts where you talk about various works from each of them and Jesus’ Son keeps coming up again and again. When thinking about your own writing style you said, “I really like fiction writers that have strong autobiographical voices so I can learn from not only their stories but also the strength and quality of their literary voices.” That is a strength in your writing and what you’ve come to be known for. You’re willing to talk about things that most people would be anxious to share with millions of people. Do you think Johnson was influenced your willingness to do that?
James: Oh yeah, absolutely. Whether fiction or non-fiction, I want to do writing that communicates well. I feel whenever I read any of these bland posts like “The One Thing You Shouldn’t Put in Your Resume” or the “10 Traits of a Charismatic Leader”, nobody’s really telling their story. They’re just listing these BS traits that someone else has researched and they’re just describing it. To misquote Truman Capote, “It’s typewriting, it’s not writing.” I want to know if these people experienced this. So when I read Jesus’ Son, you get the sense that Denis Johnson has experienced this and he’s telling it and you learn from it. Now, I border more in to what some people call it motivational or personal improvement, but I don’t like to think of it that way. I still give the bullet points but everything is going to be infused with a story, so readers know I’ve experienced it. Not that Denis Johnson has ever written a personal improvement book, but if he did, I’m sure it would be really great because it will have all these insane experiences he’s been through.
“That’s a really great writer, where your eyes can’t glaze over any sentence.”
Gino: I read a review on Goodreads of Jesus’ Son by Steve Sckenda and he said one of the benefits of this book is it makes you feel empathy towards characters that normally would seem unworthy. Most of us don’t interact day to day with a bunch of heroin addicts, so the book stretches our ability as readers to empathize and connect with different people. Do you think Johnson’s ability to make the reader connect with all sorts of different people has translated into your own writing?
James: Oh absolutely, again, because these are experiences that are happening to me. Lots of times I met somebody who was so big, I was really nervous or intimidated. I don’t act like, “Oh, this is my best friend.” I’ll write about me being nervous and intimidated and scared. Then I think people can connect to those emotions. He does it better, but I think that’s what happens to Denis Johnson’s characters in Jesus’ Son. The narrator is interacting with bad characters in many cases, but often he’s intimidated or scared or impressed by them in some way. That’s something we can all relate to. We all grew up trying to be the cool kid and he’s never the cool kid in the book. I think that’s the reason why we relate to a lot of his experiences. Very few people were the cool kids in there in their class. There was only one and another 200 people weren’t the cool kid.
“Minimalism is when you use words that are the tip of the iceberg. There’s this strong sensation that the actual story is much bigger.”
Gino: Exactly. The narrator is never cool. He’s getting beat up by a truckload of college kids or betraying his friend and being cowardly. He’s always a very down and out kind of guy.
James: Look at the relation between that and like Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver is also never the tough guy. He’s often jealous, often scared about what’s happening in his life because of the characters of his stories. Again, there’s this minimalist of effect. People say minimalist as if it’s like not very expressive. That’s not what minimalism is. Minimalism is when you use words that are the tip of the iceberg. There’s this strong sensation that the actual story is much bigger and you’re just not seeing it. You’re just seeing the words that are on the surface.
“Not that Denis Johnson has ever written a personal improvement book, but if he did, I’m sure it would be really great because it will have all these insane experiences he’s been through.”
Gino: Another thing it seems like you take away from writers like Johnson is the ability to say something shocking or controversial and not lose the reader. I don’t agree with 100% of what you say, but I feel like you can say something that I disagree with and present it in a way that’s very interesting and accessible to me. That’s a useful skill as a writer, saying something edgy or unconventional without having your audience shut down.
“The narrator is interacting with bad characters in many cases, but often he’s intimidated or scared or impressed by them in some way. That’s something we can all relate to.”
James: Right. Look, it’s hard because sometimes we’re all kind stamped out of the same mold. We all went through public education, then college, then our first set of jobs. We’re all stamped out of this mold so it’s hard to break out of that mold. But I think a lot of us have been through enough that we would like to break out of that mold or we can see that there are the other possibilities in the world. So you give permission for the writer to tell you that there are other things going on.
Bukowski says things that I would never in a million years agree with. Yet, he’s telling his own personal story and you can see that he’s troubled and why he’s troubled. That becomes part of the style of the story. He uses very short chapters and you almost feel like this is a guy with a short attention span. It’s most relateable when the actual writing style is an integral part of the book as opposed to just words used to tell a story. I try to make my non-fiction have that kind of writing sense. I’m getting better but I’m always in an effort where I’m learning.
Gino: I think your writing just continues to grow and improve. With all the fiction that you read and the way you write you could definitely pull off a fiction book if you ever feel the bug to write one. That would be really cool.
James: I do occasionally feel the bug. I just write so much non-fiction that it’s hard to have the time. I spend most of my day thinking about non-fiction stuff I could be writing. To write fiction, I would have to take some time off from that. So I haven’t done it yet.
Gino: I wanted to jump back in time a little bit to when you first discovered that the collection was coming out and that the book was coming out. You have the story on your website where you said “ I excitedly told one of my professors when I ran into him in the street that was this was the greatest day in literary history. Within hours of that I was officially thrown out of graduate school.” By the way you worded it, it seems like the release of this book and getting kicked out of grad school were somehow interconnected.
James: I was obsessed with writing fiction and I was in grad school for computer science, so the two didn’t really meet. I didn’t go to any of my classes. All day long I would go to the library and I would either read or write. In the library, there were all these literary journals. That’s how I was able to read all Denis Johnson’s stories. Some appeared in The New Yorker, but some also appeared in these really obscure literary journals. I would read all of them. Then there were like 50 volumes of encyclopedias of literary criticism. I would read a book and then read all the criticism I could find on the book. Then I would try to write 3000 words a day.
This was how I was spending my time my entire last year of graduate school. I was on a scholarship, so I failed all my classes and eventually they just had no choice but to ask me to leave. It was all fine. No one hated me. In fact, I got hired as a programmer by a couple of different professors. The actual professor who wrote the letter throwing me out is one of my closest friends. I just had dinner with him a few weeks ago and this is 23 years later. But that’s how it happened. I was just obsessed with writing fiction.
“I said, ‘This is the best book ever. It will always be the best book ever,’ which still holds true.”
Gino: I had heard a version of that story in one of the podcasts you did with Brian Koppelman, but when I read that passage, I almost took it as you got thrown out of graduate school and then that same day you were reading Jesus’ Son, reflecting on what happened to you. How did the first time reading the book connect with the timeline of getting kicked out of school?
James: I remember it being somewhat warm but I don’t remember the exact day it came out. I bought it the day it came out. Even though it was a small book I think they tried to magnify the thickness by making the hard cover a little thicker. I bought it at the local indie bookstore and then ran into one of my professors who I was actually working for. I think I had just been thrown out of grad school, so now I was working for this guy. I forget the exact timeline. He asked me, “What did you buy?” That’s when I said, “This is the best book ever. It will always be the best book ever,” which still holds true. Like I said most writers would you still agree that this is the best piece of writing. I was about to say work of fiction but this to me is the best piece of writing ever. Of course everybody has an opinion. Some people would disagree but it’s just what I’m saying.
“I was obsessed with writing fiction and I was in grad school for computer science, so the two didn’t really meet.”
Gino: When you talked about the hard cover and the design of the book, it seems like a lot of people feel a connection to the cover art of the first copy of the book they read. Do you still have that original copy?
James: I don’t because I made a conscious effort to be minimalist in my life and so I’ve given away all of my books. It used be Jesus’ Son and a book called Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill, I would carry them around with me from place to place. In the past six months given away almost everything I own. I have a Kindle. Some people say they only like reading on the written page. I can totally respect that, but for me I just don’t like having any belongings. So now I just have Jesus’ Son and my Kindle. Really on my Kindle app on my iPad so that’s how I read it.
“Whether fiction or non-fiction, I want to do writing that communicates well.”
Gino: I read that Quora post that you wrote recently about you and your wife giving away all your stuff. It sounded like a really healthy exercise in purging unnecessary belongings.
James: At that time the one book I didn’t give away was a collection of all of Raymond Carver’s stories because it wasn’t yet available on the Kindle. But May 25th for whatever reason they made all his books available on the Kindle, so I got rid of all my Raymond Carver books. Those were the last books I’ve gotten rid of.
I guess some people have a hard time reading digital. Look, I would probably prefer reading everything in paper but digital is just so much more convenient for me because I travel a lot as well. What am I going to do? Carry 15 books on the plane or have one iPad where I can flip back and forth between different books? So I forced myself to just like Kindle reading. Again, I’ll read the paperback. I have nothing against paperback, I just prefer not having the possessions.
Bookshelf Beats is a website run by Gino Sorcinelli. I interview people about books that change their lives, inspire them, and/or make them think differently. If you enjoyed this article consider subscribing to my Medium publication.
