Nathan Oates is a professor at Seton Hall University, where he teaches creative writing. He has written stories that have appeared in publications including the Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best American Mystery Stories, and Forty Stories. His debut novel, A Flaw in the Design is a psychological thriller about a professor that will have you reading late into the night.
We asked the author to answer our recurring A Life of Books questionnaire so readers can get to know him better.
Is there a book or series that, when you think back, helped define your childhood?
As a kid I was obsessed with The Lord of the Rings, and following that I read anything remotely in the fantasy tradition. Through this obsession I came across Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series. Cooper is a wonderful writer whose books are infused with myth and magic, with complex characters and amazing British settings: Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, and the coast of Wales. Most of all I loved the quiet, kind, anxious boy Will who is the hero of the series, and I saw in him a version of the kid I felt myself to be, or at least the kid I wanted to be.
Would you want any children in your life (yours or relatives’) to read those too? Or what’s your philosophy on what children read?
I have read the entirety of Susan Cooper’s series to both my children, and we’ve listened to the audio books as a family, and a few years ago we took a trip to Wales at least in part because it was the setting of one of the books. So, yes, I’d recommend these books to anyone who reads, from my children to strangers. They are wise and beautiful novels.
Moving to your school years: what book did you read in high school and hated (or skipped reading at all) that you learned you loved later in life?
In early adolescence I read feverishly, obsessively, and almost exclusively the work of Stephen King. My dad, an English professor, after watching me rip through book after book by the same writer, insisted I needed to expand my reading palate and so, after dinner one night, he sat me down with a book of William Faulkner’s stories. He suggested I start with “Spotted Horses,” then read whatever others I wanted. I held the book, flipped open to the story, read the first paragraph, stared with out-of-focus eyes at the page until he wasn’t paying attention, then slipped off to my room and continued reading Needful Things. My refusal was simply stubbornness and father/son competitiveness, but born out of this was my decision that Faulkner was stodgy and pompous, and King was vital and alive.
Later I would learn I was wrong, at least about Faulkner, and would read much of his work and teach his novels and stories in my own classes, but I’ve still never read “Spotted Horses.” My father died just before I began writing my debut novel, and I like the idea of that story he loved still being out there, waiting for me. I’ll read it one day, but not yet.
What about the opposite way? One you loved in your teens, but realized you didn’t love it so much later on?
In college I was briefly fascinated by the work of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. I was intrigued and titillated by their intensely sexual work, which I found radical and exciting, but gradually I began to realize that the violent misogyny swamped whatever else might be at play in Miller’s work. I resisted this, writing a long paper about Tropic of Cancer, but even as I finished that essay I knew I was wrong. Whatever artfulness there was in the work was overwhelmed, for me, by its hatefulness. I know Miller has his defenders, but he’s not a writer I’ll ever be returning to.
Are there any books that you read while writing your debut that helped shape the direction you took your own book?
I read dozens of books while working on my debut but the two writers that were most important to me during the drafting were Vladimir Nabokov and Doris Lessing. I’m interested in the way Nabokov marries an arch literary style with what are fundamentally crime novels. Lolita, Pale Fire, Despair, and others, all center around a crime, or a series of crimes. I love this blending of literary approaches to sentences and structure within a crime plot.
The book I reread the most during the drafting and revisions of my debut was Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child. It’s the best novel I know of about a disturbing child whose arrival destroys a family. There are several scenes in that book that are so vivid I doubt I’ll ever forget them. It’s a masterpiece.
What is a book you’ve read that you thought, Damn, I wish that was mine?
Richard Yates’s debut novel, which is also my favorite of his books, is the masterpiece Revolutionary Road. The sentence by sentence writing is lyrical and immaculate, and the story is riveting, harrowing, and almost perfectly constructed. The novel is an unputdownable work of art.
What have you been reading / do you plan to read during your debut book tour?
I’m currently writing a thriller set in Italy – where we lived for a year when I drafted my debut novel – and so am steeping myself in books set there, especially in Venice. My reading list includes Henry James, Donna Leon, Michael Dibdin, Daphne Du Maurier, Thomas Mann, and others.
I’m also always reading newly published novels and there are so many books coming out this year I can’t wait to read, like Patrick deWitt’s The Librarianist, Catherine Lacey’s The Biography of X, Victor Lavalle’s Lone Women, Emma Cline’s The Guest, Clemence Michallon’s The Quiet Tenant (which I read a galley of and it’s brilliant), and many more.
And, finally, I have to ask… I’m sorry. What’s next? But wait! Only use three words.
Missing child: Italy.