Influenced is an interview series featuring authors talking about the works that influenced them.

See our complete list of conversations, including:

Thick Skin, where authors talk about negative reviews, from both critics and readers

Pixelated, the digital, double-blind, lit-inclined author chat

A Bit Contrived, interviews with real authors about improvised books

The Art of Commerce, exploring the intersection of literature and the marketplace

Episode IX: "What is wonderful?"

Published 10/9/16
In this installment, Rebecca Dinerstein talks about the influence of Robert Penn Warren's All the King’s Men.

Today I’m with Rebecca Dinerstein, whose debut, THE SUNLIT NIGHT, came out last year to acclaim across the spectrum, from The New Yorker (“darkly charming”) to Marie Claire (“#1 Vacay Read”). She’s also the author of an English-Norwegian collection of poems, Lofoten, and a former Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow. Rebecca named Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men as a seminal work in her development. When did you first come upon the 40’s classic?

We were assigned ALL THE KING'S MEN in my senior year high school English class: a beloved class called "Great Books." I was 17.

What sort of reader were you in high school?

Emotional—I'd grown up tap dancing more than reading and started turning to literature in high school as a way of understanding how people are, what people feel.

Do you still dance? When did you begin writing?

I still dance! Recently I've been going to "Locking" class (70s hip hop funk) at Broadway Dance Center to study with this incredible choreographer named Ms. Vee. I also go to the adult ballet classes at the Joffrey school where I studied as a kid. Sadly I never tap anymore, even though it was my focus for so long. At least I still have the shoes. I began writing, my mother tells me, in first grade. The topic was "What is wonderful?" and I wrote about my gymnastics team (another thing I've left behind!). I found one dumb way to combine dancing and writing this year at AWP by asking everyone at every booth to dance for two seconds and then stitching it into a master montage: turns out everybody can dance.

I believe in my heart everyone can and wants to dance, but under the right circumstances. I also believe, maybe with more tempered conviction, that anyone can write if given the right tools, and that every person writes toward a question that's unique to them. I think yours, given your debut, could very well be "What is wonderful?" Agree? What would Warren's be?

Wow if my question is ‘What is wonderful?’ I am so so so so so happy. Warren's question is perhaps ‘How can we make the vast smaller?’.

How many times have you read ALL THE KING'S MEN?

Three or four times all the way through, but then I came to memorize certain page numbers (e.g. the page with the web, the page with the great sleep) and I'd turn to those and use those more often than I can count.

How has the book changed as you have? How do you think you've changed as a writer—maybe not since "What is wonderful?" but, perhaps, between your book of poetry and THE SUNLIT NIGHT, and then since then?

Chris Fischbach of Coffee House Press recently asked on Twitter, "Are there books you love that you won't reread for fear of disliking them now?" and my answer was ALL THE KING’S MEN because I hold it in such high esteem and wonder whether I'd now find its grandness irritating or out of touch. Its register is so ambitious and lofty and American and enormous, it was a huge burst of energy to encounter as a 17-year-old that I might not be able to digest at 29! There's a "restored edition" of ATKM that's slightly different in some places, and includes the phrase "what I came subsequently to know"—a phrase my father actually pointed out and which I wound up using as the theme of my senior project in that Great Books class. It's helpful in answering your question: what have I come subsequently to know? That stories need action and obstacles as much as they need flowers and animals, that a character who doesn't WANT something isn't a character, that plot has its merits and that it can be beauty's partner.

That's funny that you say that, because there's been a theme in this series that has been floating in my head but which I haven't been able to fit around words. I think when there's a divide between works that are known for style, and those that are known for plot and other mechanical devices, most of the authors I've interviewed have chosen the latter. I think there's a great reason for that—to be influenced by style can almost be a hindrance, but it's a great advantage to take cues from a writer who has built the proper architecture to let their expression breathe and grow in the right way. Do you think Warren's done that for you? What other writers have you look to for technique and craft?

I looked to Warren for a sense of scale: he wasn't afraid of saying ‘This is our country, This is our history, This is our future, This is what big love looks like, This is big.’ I suppose ultimately that's more on the style side of things than the plot side: Warren's plot structure in ATKM is hard to follow or replicate, it has a huge flashback in the middle, it's a very skillful mess. In grad school I got to read for mechanics in a way I'd never done before (I tend to go for the flowers and animals when left to myself) and I found Michael Chabon hugely helpful on a sentence by sentence level. He chooses the best word every time and settles for nothing less than the most energetic option. George Saunders, Miranda July, Aimee Bender, and Wells Tower also come to mind.

On a more recent note, I've just started reading Rachel Cusk and I think she is probably the finest example of prose we have right now.

OUTLINE is one of my favorite books of all time. Anyway.

I just started TRANSIT, the sequel, and it's maybe even better? Which might not be possible. OUTLINE is just unbelievable.

Back to Warren. In a nutshell (and not without politeness), you said 'it's not plot, dummy, it is style'. So: bigness. Do you think that's a part of your work?

I want it to be, but I think you have to be extremely good at smallness before your book begins to touch bigness. So I take both seriously and hope to get better at both. I practiced smallness (by which I mean detail) over and over again in poetry (I wrote mostly poems in college and in my first book and up until Sunlit Night) and then when I tried writing a novel I had a hard time assembling two hundred pages of detail into something that felt not merely long but big. Big as in coherent, and amounting to something other than itself. The ambition to achieve that is certainly part of my (and probably every writer's?) work, though the bigness rarely arrives.

THE SUNLIT NIGHT is remarkably coherent, and it's surprising to hear you say that, but maybe that's why the plot lent itself so well to someone who sees detail as an entryway into fiction. Do you believe your future writing will be as contained to a place, and sparse in the number of characters?

I've been attached to Norway as a setting, in my recent poems and prose, not because I'm particularly dedicated to place-focused writing as much as because Norway is extremely beautiful. I went there and needed seven years to describe what I'd seen. But now I'm equally eager to discover and describe other landscapes, and also to turn slightly away from landscape altogether. I'd like my future writing (or at least my next novel) to be more focused on the psyche (internal landscape vs. external I guess), on the lust and nerves of my characters. There will likely be more characters, and maybe several settings instead of one / two, but I don't think any of that will change the attention I hope to pay to detail, mood, light, feeling.

Are you working on anything right now?

I'm starting a new novel that I've been thinking about for years.

Why start now? And what of it have you been thinking?

It's time! Sunlit Night took five years of writing and two years of promoting / touring / representing and now it's really time for a whole new story. I've been thinking about this book's major interest, and its architecture. Can't say much more right now because I'm nervous!

Ha, ok—that's understandable. When you're writing, do you read fiction?

Yes! And poetry.

Who are you reading right now, besides Cusk?

I fell in love with Richard Ford this summer, and am now reading Ferrante's upcoming letter collection FRANTUMAGLIA, and just finished and loved Penelope Fitzgerald's classic THE BLUE FLOWER. In general I like musty, moody, classic tales of the heart, you know. MIDDLEMARCH. JANE EYRE. Those are the hands I want to be in while writing and whenever.

I'm going to bypass mentioning the Ferrante news because I find it somewhat surprising that you like Ford. I see a contrast in writing, but of course that doesn't mean you as a reader wouldn't enjoy him. What did you read and what it in did you like?

CANADA and WILDLIFE. Man, can he write. It's some of the cleanest, wisest, and most open-eyed thinking I've seen anywhere. I find it hugely purifying and revelatory and essential.

If someone described THE SUNLIT NIGHT as a musty, moody, classic tale, would you find that agreeable?

Yes but it's not that musty because of all the constant Arctic sunlight! It's ... well-lit and aired-out! Otherwise I'd be honored.

We're nearly out of time, so I'll close by asking you how you think your writing would be different had you not read Warren, and why you'd recommend ATKM to anyone who hasn't given it the proper chance.

My writing would have a weaker belief in what's possible without Warren, a weaker ambition toward describing large feeling. I needed Warren to teach me how much life a book can capture. I'd recommend it as an atlas, a comprehensive universe in itself that will fill you up with humanity! I mean it!

Thanks so much for your time and words, Rebecca.

Thank you, Andrew!