Not long before Adam Haslett graduated from Yale Law School he published his first short-story collection, “You Are Not a Stranger Here,’’ which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. That put an end to his legal ambitions. Haslett, who lived in Wellesley for a time when he was a child, published his second novel this spring, “Imagine Me Gone.’’
BOOKS: What are you reading currently?
HASLETT: I’m in the middle of two things. One is “The Sellout’’ by Paul Beatty, which is one of the funniest books I’ve read in a while. The other is Peter Gay’s biography of Sigmund Freud. I’m about a third of the way through. It’s interesting, but I’m kind of frustrated because he treats psychoanalysis as if it’s fact.
BOOKS: Do you find it hard to find well-written novels that are funny?
HASLETT: It is hard for some reason. “The Woodcutters’’ by Thomas Bernhard, who’s not known for his humor, is so over the top it’s funny. The stuff I find the funniest is where someone commits so far to a premise it becomes absurd. You wind up laughing at the extremity. Alan Bennett is very funny. He wrote “The Lady in the Van,’’ which just became a movie, and “The Uncommon Reader,’’ which is about Queen Elizabeth II starting to avidly read books. Another one of my all-time favorite books is Halldor Laxness’s “Independent People,’’ and some of it is funny in the way folk humor is.
BOOKS: Do you often look for humorous books?
HASLETT: I probably could be accused of searching out things that will bum me out.
BOOKS: What’s one of your favorite bummers?
HASLETT: Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom’’ because of the music and the prose. When people say dark, though, I think they refer to things that happen in the plot. To me that’s the stuff of life. What is dark is when there isn’t any emotional connections. That’s why I’ve never been a J.G. Ballard fan.
BOOKS: What prompted you to pick up the Freud biography?
HASLETT: My new book has a certain amount of scenes with therapists, and it’s something that has always interested me, particularly having been in therapy myself. Over the years I’ve read books like the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Touched with Fire’’ and her memoir “An Unquiet Mind.’’
BOOKS: How do you pick the books you read?
HASLETT: It’s so mood driven. I have been reading short novels. I read Garth Greenwell’s “What Belongs to You,’’ Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier,’’ and Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila.’’
BOOKS: What made you start reading short novels?
HASLETT: For one thing, I’m dyslexic. I’ve always been a slow reader and learned to read later than most kids. With a shorter book, I feel more relaxed and not as aware of their heftiness. I also think the short novel is still what you can call a perfectible form. The really good ones can be a sustained performance from beginning to end.
BOOKS: What is one of the longest books you’ve read?
HASLETT: When I was in Germany working on my book I found this 12-volume set of “Remembrance of Things Past’’ in a library. I thought I’d just read the first volume. Then I just started reading one after the other, but I really parceled it out so that I finished it when I finished writing my novel. My partner was like, “Oh god, when you going to be done with that?’’
BOOKS: Who are some of your favorite living novelists?
HASLETT: The first two who come to mind I realize that I think they are living, but they both died prematurely: Roberto Bolaño and W.G. Sebald. Of the living and breathing, Joy Williams and William Trevor. I love my good friend Paul Harding’s stuff. Honestly, I don’t feel terribly well read with my contemporaries. I had been a hermit working on my book and then went to my bookstore in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. I found five things and put them on the counter, and the bookseller said, “Where have you been?’’ I had picked up the five things that people said you should read over the past three years.
AMY SUTHERLAND
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