For the New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Mason Spoke with Akhil Sharma about An Obedient Father—a Rewrite of Sharma’s First Novel, 22 Years Later

It is rare, “white-rhino rare,” for any novelist to revisit and revise their published work, writes Wyatt Mason, writer in residence at Bard College and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center. More than two decades after the publication of his first novel, Akhil Sharma joins an exceedingly small cohort of authors to have rewritten their own work with an updated version of An Obedient Father, and in doing so has improved upon the original in meaningful ways, Mason argues. In a wide-ranging conversation with Sharma for the New York Times magazine, Mason explores the novel’s newly reopened history. “It’s not as though the first version of An Obedient Father was ignored,” he writes. “It was excerpted in the New Yorker and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and Sharma received a Whiting Award — career milestones for any writer.” Still, Sharma felt compelled to return to the novel, especially during a period of creative difficulty when he hoped to glean inspiration from his past work, only to realize he was beginning the laborious task of rewriting the entire work. The plot of An Obedient Father touches on issues of sexual abuse and intergenerational trauma, obviously painful subjects for both writer and reader. “I wondered how it felt to relive the suffering of the characters in his first book,” Mason writes, asking Sharma directly about the decision to rewrite a book with such painful content. Sharma offered this explanation: “We are always reliving our life. […] The residue of our days accumulates inside us. Reliving these days is a way of deciding where to put one’s attention, and deciding where to concentrate lets us make peace with what has happened.”

Post Date: 09-13-2022