At about the same period I also began to read an English novelist called Henry Green, who is semi-forgotten but for me is really a master of the voice in fiction. But Joyce is in the air you breathe, whereas Proust and Green and Salinger stick in my mind as really having moved me a step up, as it were, toward knowing how to handle my own material. You said once, in speaking about Rabbit, Run , that you began the novel with an interest in dramatizing a kind of scared, dodgy approach to life. I imagined him as a former basketball player. As a high school student I saw a lot of basketball and even played a certain amount myself, so the grandeur of being a high school basketball star was very much on my mind as an observed fact of American life.
Rabbits are dodgy, rabbits are sexy, rabbits are nervous, rabbits like grass and vegetables.
I had an image of him that was fairly accessible, and his neural responses, his conversational responses, always seemed to come very readily to me, maybe because they were in many ways quite like my own. Perhaps I haven't read enough novels, but I can't think of one besides Rabbit is Rich that focuses on a father and son in conflict, and is told from the father's point of view. I suppose it is fairly unusual. Most novels are told from the young man's point of view, and are written by authors who probably were that young man not too many years before, so you don't get a very empathetic view towards many fathers. You think of Kafka's father, how he dominates and haunts the Kafka fiction, but you never really get much sense of how the father felt about young Franz.