Don't read widely!

A month and a half, and my novel's only two hundred words thicker.

I've been experimenting, actually; not with my novel, which I dare not touch except in the most conscious of moods, but with my reading: The Language Instinct, American Pastoral, Freedom, some terrible New Yorker stories---the much touted twenty under forty, each of whom are more execrable, more obviously sentimental, more cooperatively continent, than the one before---, some terrible novels by twenty-something American soi-disant talents. My unconscious is full of references to Little League baseball, to pot and cocaine addiction at university, to bombs going off in hushed suburbs, to "creative writing", to the importance of word "Freedom", to, in other words, the world of American letters, replete with its preference for the symbolic to the pithy, its vacant valuing of "simplicity" and "brevity" in "expression", its unashamedly trite imaginings of ethnicity. I have nothing left in me, it seems, for what I have always regarded as belonging to the numinous: what McEwan, through one of his belletrists in Atonement, calls the "crystalline present".

From the further side of the square a lane led on to a still bleaker area. The street lamps flickered into pink as I approached, but nothing else responded. The buildings were grandiose, like cinemas gone dark, the lower windows boarded up and plastered with the posters for rock groups and the dud grins of politicians in the previous year's elections. The names of newspapers, printing works, engineering firms, in forward looking Deco script, could still be read above the padlocked entrance grilles. There was a sense that cacophonous all-night business had been done here, and the city, with a certain unflustered malevolence, had chosen its moment, and stilled it, and reasserted its own dead calm. At the street's end was the long vulgar front of a hotel, the Pilgrimage and Commercial, still with its brass entrance rail and the red and blue badges of motoring clubs. I climbed the steps, among the ghost-throng of arrivals, and peered through the splendid glass doors on to a shadowy half-acre of mud and rubble.

(These, of course, are lines from Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star, a novel which has, over my nearly twenty readings of it, reminded me of everything a work of art might aspire to do.)

Returning to a passage like this after weeks and weeks of American literature is difficult; my mind seems in the interim to have developed a new aesthetic, one that seems to like smaller sentences that say very little or nothing, and which promotes factual rather than moral information. My own style has begun, like Hollinghurst's, to look densely alien, like that of a much older person; my efforts at sentential rhythm archaic; my approach laughably detailed. I'm reminded of, and react reflexively against, Zadie Smith's injunction to mix up one's reading when one is writing a novel:

My writing desk is covered in open novels [...] If your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on David Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying about Nabokov and pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

This is perhaps good advice to writers who think, as she does, that writing should be like "a balanced diet"; but for people like me it is very nearly fatal. As such, American literature is probably good "roughage", but too much of it, and you might not be able to return to your own voice, the one you abandoned a month and a half ago to ill-advisedly become more widely read.