ESMÉ HOGEVEEN Do you differentiate at all between reading for work and for pleasure? 

PARUL SEHGAL I used to have a rigid rule that for every new book I read, I had to reread a book afterwards, because that’s how you sink into a text and begin accessing your own larger questions. But then, as happens naturally, plans fall apart and reading becomes a process of scrambling that intermixes with life, which also feels correct. Your question reminds me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with my friend Teju Cole. Teju asked, “How do we keep a certain kind of difficulty and openness and richness in the pieces that we write – otherwise, aren’t we compelled to write pieces that are smooth as capital?” I’m still thinking about Teju’s question, about the task of creating pieces that live in magazines, reach people, and do their work – by which I mean responsibly attend to the book that we’re reviewing or the writer that we’re writing about – but that still have some kind of private or personal life. Something in the piece that is just for you, like a secret jewel sewn into the garment that only you know is there. That may be a convoluted way to answer your question, but reading and writing invariably become continuous with life. Sometimes it’s a lovely feeling to reread pieces that seem to be doing one thing, but in which I can see a little bit of my life in the stitching.

EH Does contributing to canonical and canonmaking publications – such as the New York Times and the New Yorker, which may be consulted 10, 20, or 50 years hence – inform your approach to reviewing? 

PS It enters my thinking in two ways. One is that it can be seen as a great gift to enlarge or stretch the notion of the canon. If you’re able to publish in places that have had a narrow or exclusionary sense of the canon, and especially if you have the freedom to select particular books or writers, you can make interventions. Jean Rhys said this wonderful thing about writers being little tributaries that fill a large ocean, and that’s how I think about it. Even though criticism is something that you sit alone at your desk to do, the overall endeavor does feel collaborative. I’m doing it alongside the critics I love, living and dead, and alongside my students and everybody else who contributes to the magazine or newspaper that I’m writing for. Thinking about how a book rubs against our minds and culture always feels collaborative. In the most practical sense, that’s how it feels in my mind and body when I’m writing.

EH It’s funny you mention the body because my next question is about whether embodiment is an interesting or relevant metric for you when reading? 

PS Ian Penman, a critic I love, says you need to have a carnal relationship with language. Of course, reading feels very tactile. I may read in the bath or on the subway, and my children’s doodles decorate some of the pages. The book becomes part of my life and that’s just the physical object – the ideas also loosen and stain everything. Sometimes the embodied elements are not comfortable, but it still feels very necessary.

EH Do you want an embodied relationship to the text? Is experiencing an embodied response the sign of a good book? 

EH Did I freeze? Did you freeze?

EH No worries. When you froze, I thought you were really thinking. I was like, “Wow, I can’t wait to hear what you say!” 

EH Is everything okay? Is there an earthquake?

EH As a critic, when does the moment of assessment happen? Is it throughout the reading process or is it in hindsight, when you go outside with the dog and have that bit of distance? 

PS We all have responses and impressions as we’re reading. I can literally be in the margins quarrelling with or admiring a text, but the real thinking happens when one starts to write. Writing is an instrument of thinking and the action of writing, at least that first draft, is where assessment happens for me. I grew up loving critics like John Leonard, who kept some of that feeling of dramatic discovery in their reviews. There’s something about the act of writing a review that produces clearer thought. The formality and the enforced calm allow me to think in ways that could otherwise feel scattershot or narrowly banded by my own tastes or biases.

EH That’s very relatable, though I’ve heard of people who compose full sentences or paragraphs in their heads for whom writing becomes about transcribing pre-edited thoughts.  

EH That method seems stressful, though, because isn’t it nice to take a walk and not feel obliged to think in perfect syntax? Point form feels important sometimes.

EH Speaking of methodology, what is your relationship to research? 

PS I feel very ethically bound to, as Robert Caro said, “turn every page.” The aim is always to try to understand everything I can, but it does become a time-management issue. In a certain way, research can become its own fabulous procrastination and in some cases you cannot possibly read everything and feel absolutely bulletproof before you write. I think an interesting thing about reviewer journalism is that some of the research is concealed. In a few of my recent pieces, like “What We Learn from the Lives of Critics,” [in December 2023’s New Yorker], I was able to share that I dug into about 82 books for a piece that was only about 2,500 words. Not to present a kind of brocade, as in this is everything I know, but to share a bit about how the piece got made. It’s a kind of thinking that involves rapidly metabolising. But to answer your question more concisely, I research as much as possible and then I run out of time. As review journals, magazines, and sections are drying up, it feels like there’s more pressure to put your arms around as much as you can of the writer’s work and to consider what their reception means or has meant. There was a time when a book could count on 100 reviews. One writes a different review in the context of that kind of critical reception as opposed to writing when there may be only one, three, or five reviews. The context informs my sense of obligation to the reader and the writer. To me, research isn’t about having an intellectual armature for approaching the topic. Sometimes it’s a way of referencing or revealing how a writer or a topic has been misunderstood. Review the book, yes, but let’s actually talk about what this writer or subject has represented or how they’ve been previously understood.

EH In your recent New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Sheila Heti, you called her “ruthlessly contemporary, by which I mean she’s not interested in writing a novel as a nostalgic exercise. She’s constantly trying to figure out new places fiction can go, new ways that we’re using language, new ways that our minds are evolving.” Is surprise – a phenomenon potentially related to newness – something that you value as a reader? 

EH In “What We Learn from the Lives of Critics”, you described the critic’s life as “ruderal”. For you, what are the most glorious and challenging aspects of a ruderal life?