The Bare Necessities—Matthew F. Jones (A SINGLE SHOT)

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.

Matthew F. Jones is the author of several acclaimed novels and screenplays. His new novel A Single Shot is out now from Mulholland Books and is slated for a film production starring William H. Macy and Forest Whitaker (!). He lives near my neck of the woods in Charlottesville, VA.

Art that inspires me most – through whatever medium, literature, the visual arts, music, etc. – creates for me characters or scenes so affecting I’m drawn to know more about them the way I’m drawn to know more about a new person I meet – or stranger I encounter – who in some way (often indefinable to me) sparks my interest. In the visual arts I find this most in certain photographs (often black-and-white) of people in their everyday surroundings or in the best impressionist paintings that magically ignite my imagination to see a world and story well beyond what is on the canvas. The best blues and bluegrass music (from its pioneers up through today’s masters) moves me in the same way. And though I’m an eclectic reader, the novels I admire most have two common elements; indelible characters whose stories are compelling because of who they are; and a rich evocation of the particular world they live in.

Growing up I loved the fiction of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Dostoyevsky, Bellow among many others. The unifying elements of these authors for me was their ability to drive a story with great characterizations and the way in which their writing didn’t get in the way of itself. Every word in their books was meaningful to the worlds they were creating. They never used words as simple adornment or to demonstrate their own intelligence or adeptness. All these authors had the unique ability to draw me so completely into their fictional worlds that the authors themselves were invisible to me.  Reading them I was never aware of them plying their craft. In their outwardly simple writing styles (though each owned his/her own unique voice) they drew rich, complex pictures that flowed as images rather than as mere words. And, first and foremost, all were great storytellers, not philosophers or belly-button gazers intent on wrapping their stories around particular agendas. Here are four of my favorite authors and/or books, then and now:

Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter Of Our Discontent

Steinbeck was the first author to really turn me on to the world of books.  In his simple, unadorned style, he created worlds at once foreign and knowable to me, worlds populated by people who (though they were from places and a time foreign to me) felt as real to me as the people I encountered in my everyday life growing up on a farm in upstate, New York; people who defied simple categorizations; people who weren’t all good or all bad, all noble or all dastardly, all strong or all weak; people whose motives were sometimes pure and sometimes not; people who sometimes fell prey to their own weaknesses and sometimes managed to rise above them; interesting people who you felt you could never quite entirely know but wanted badly too and thus, like a small child in pursuit of a butterfly to find its home, were compelled to follow, to watch, to listen to. And somewhere in the process of following, watching and listening to them (to George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men, to Tom Joad in The Grapes Of Wrath) you realized you were watching a great story unfold that would define them to you more than the mere fact of your knowing them ever could.

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

Some contemporary critics have found fault with this novel, condemning it as a children’s book with inconsistent narration that vacillates between a child’s and an adult’s voice. Others have mocked the ethical purity and exaggerated idealism of Atticus Finch. I can only say I first read the book as a child and, with its simplistic but no less powerful lessons about inequality, injustice and the nature of humanity, it had on me a tremendous affect that remains with me to this day. Not too long ago, with some trepidation for fear it wouldn’t hold up in my somewhat more (unfortunately) jaded adult mind, I reread To Kill A Mockingbird. Even recognizing in it a few flaws I hadn’t as a kid recognized – and certainly wouldn’t have been at all troubled by if I had – I found the novel as compelling now as I did initially. And that to me marks it a great book. It’s probably the best child narrator’s point of view novel I’ve ever read, yet is no more simply a child’s book than is, say, Portnoy’s Complaint or The Bell Jar. And it is the one book I can think of that specifically influenced me in any way. Reading it as a kid had a lot to do with convincing me I wanted to be a small town lawyer servicing the needs of the people in the town I grew up in. Years later I followed that goal to its fruition. It took a few more years for me to recognize it was the storytelling more than the lawyering in To Kill A Mockingbird I was most drawn to. Read more