I am aware that it is not a competition. It is not a race to see who is better. The worst thing anyone could do – worst because it is shallow and most definitely silly – would be to disregard something because it is good.
Nicole Krauss, I have found, is a genius. Philip Roth, yes, is another genius. And before them, J K Rowling. And Jodi Picoult, at the right times. Natsuo Kirino too, for Grotesque.
So how do you compete with all that? I ask myself. How do you put yourself in the game when, after reading some extraordinarily profound, poignant and flawless piece of craft, you come away feeling like there is too much you don’t know to even begin writing? And what right, really, do you have to write when there are writers the likes of them?
The answer is, really, not an answer at all. Perhaps it is more a turning away, but I prefer to think of it as an awed sort of acquiescence – the answer is that you don’t compete with them at all.
Instead, the only thing you can do is to learn from them, pick out how they’ve honed their voices into finely tuned instruments, individual as the shape of one’s shoes or cushioned chair, fashioning a brand that rises out of the page to yell ‘This is Nicole Krauss!’ You read and re-read their work, jot down quotes that – at the moment of reading – have you nodding along in breathlessness.
What right do you have, you ask then, to write? Well, that’s easy. There is no right, ever, that has to be earned in the name of art.
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