Michael Lewis on the Magic of One-Hit Wonders

Michael Lewis is the award-winning author behind numerous best-sellers, including “Moneyball,” “The Big Short,” and “Going Infinite.” Still, he approaches each new project as if it’s his first, and last. “When I’m at my best as a writer, I’m starting over each time. It’s sort of like it isn’t the writer, it’s the book,” he said. For that reason, he’s drawn to books by authors who never published anything else of note. Lewis joined us recently to discuss a selection of one-hit wonders. His comments have been edited and condensed.

A Confederacy of Dunces

by John Kennedy Toole

This is the story of a quixotic and possibly disturbed self-styled genius living in New Orleans. Walker Percy, who helped get the book published after the author killed himself, wrote the foreword. In it, he says that his heart sank as he began to realize how good the book is—he couldn’t believe it! I had the same feeling. I don’t think I’ve read any book so often. The first time was when I was fourteen, and it was the funniest thing I had ever read. I was just convulsed.

I grew up in New Orleans, so the pleasure came from recognition. I had never seen the world around me described so vividly and correctly. I was used to the city being depicted as generically Southern: people with drawls in white suits. But it really is its own peculiar place. The novel is wild, but it reads as more inventive if you don’t know New Orleans. I found it almost journalistic, and it taught me the power of aggressive observation.

A River Runs Through It

by Norman Maclean

I haven’t cracked this book open in twentysomething years, but I still remember that first line: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” I was either in high school or early college, and it just exploded in my head. The book had a magical property. It was Maclean’s first, and he published it when he was in his seventies. I was just fixated on that: How can a person contain himself for so long and then produce a thing of such beauty?

I started to get this feeling that anybody can write a masterpiece, and you never know who it’s going to be. That ended up being an important thought for me. At the time, it had never occurred to me to become a writer. That changed when I graduated from college, but there was absolutely no indication that writing was something I should do. This book helped me feel slightly liberated, because here was another person who didn’t seem to have a whole lot of indication that writing was something he should do, and it took him a very long time, but, boy, did he do it.

The Leopard

by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

The backdrop for this novel is the nineteenth-century unification of Italy. It’s in the form of a memoir, told from the perspective of a Sicilian nobleman watching as his world collapses around him. I read it when I was a teen-ager, and it occurred to me that this was the type of book my father would write. Old New Orleans, where my ancestors had grown up, was the world crumbling around us. It was happening fast enough that you could see the stones falling off of the sides of buildings, and it was clear that society, as it was structured, was unsustainable.

I also remember thinking, Here’s another old guy who sat down and wrote his only novel, and I’m completely gripped by it. A good metaphor for writing is gold prospecting. You move through the world hoping to stumble upon something valuable, you look and you look, and you never know when or where or who is going to find it. Maclean and Lampedusa were older, but they found it, and it was pure gold.

The Long Ships

by Frans G. Bengtsson

One rainy evening, I wandered into an independent bookstore and asked the owner what I should read. He handed me this book, a Viking saga, and said that I wouldn’t regret it. I had no idea who the author was, and didn’t want to read about Vikings, but I took the instruction. It wasn’t since “A Confederacy of Dunces” that a book has made me laugh so hard. At the same time, it made me feel like I knew more about what it was like to be a Viking than anyone else on earth. If Bengtsson had written it today, HBO would have bought it and insisted that he write five sequels. He was an unbelievably gifted novelist—they just don’t make that many like him—and the fact that he did just one is bizarre and wonderful.

All of these works suggest that there’s a huge accidental quality to really good books. You never know where they’re going to come from, or the form they’re going to take. I love that. The opposite is dreary: the dutiful production of books and the sense that readers know what they’re going to get from you. I just find that soul-destroying.