Matthew Davis' Reading List

Shelf Life: Inside the books that inspired his debut novel Let Me Try Again.

Matthew Davis’ compelling debut has a voice you fall into as easily as the holes of your own self-delusion. A humiliatingly accurate portrait of our so-called modern life, Davis’ prose is blisteringly funny and alive. Ahead, Davis shares the books that helped shape Let Me Try Again.

The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis & Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth 

Cheating here and putting these two together. They’re both coming of age stories that show off the high-energy impatience of first novels. Ross, the narrator of Let Me Try Again, has a bit of Charles Highway in him, although I only read The Rachel Papers after someone told me a story I wrote (featuring an early version of Ross) resembled it. 

The three of these books feature young guys acting pretty terribly, each with fixations on a particular girl, blah, blah, blah. There are obvious comparisons to my book, although I see mine as kind of a response to books like these, which feature certain elements that haven’t exactly aged all that well. 

Roth is kind of a dirty, creepy guy, but I imagine I’m indebted to him as a Jewish literary fiction writer, or whatever, which is what a bunch of the famous authors who blurbed my novel seemed to think. I read Goodbye Columbus while I was about 30 pages into the first draft of Let Me Try Again.

The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

I read this Cynthia Ozick book while I was writing the first draft of my novel. Really Jewish book, lots of yiddish folklore, allusions to Rabbinical Judaism. It’s about this lady Ruth who gets into all sorts of hijinks, makes a golem, runs for mayor, has love, experiences loss — you name it. I love the way she writes, and reading this while writing my book helped me articulate things about my own Jewishness in ways I couldn’t have otherwise.

Despair by Vladimir Nabokov 

I couldn’t do a list like this without putting a Nabokov on it. Pnin is probably a better book, but Despair is just so near to my heart, so clever, so funny, and features a real psycho and conman. I think you can see some of Hermann Karlovich’s boneheaded scheming in Ross’s behavior around the final act. Nabokov is at his best when writing as a madman, and in this book, he delivers the gag brilliantly. It’s so funny, so smart, I can’t think about it without smiling. I love this book, and tell people about it all the time. 

The Broom of The System by David Foster Wallace 

Another great first novel. Hysterical realism and philosophy as fiction at its finest. This is the book that at age 20, made me start taking fiction seriously, made me want to be a reader and a writer. Full of wit, whimsy, clever gags, and quick dialogue. I wish more people would read this book, I think they’d be better writers for it. On Goodreads, someone criticized my book for featuring too many one dimensional secondary characters, and perhaps that’s because I was too young, too impatient, at the time (23) to craft earnest and likable figures that pass through Ross’s life — everything’s exaggerated, everything’s cartoony. I probably got that from this book, and maybe some early Pynchon, which DFW often admitted he was ripping off with Broom. 

White Teeth by Zadie Smith 

I read the description for this book, which mentions it follows the friendship of two unlikely friends (a Bangladeshi and a white Englishman! Wow!) after “the war” and I was like “Oof… sounds so boring,” but I’d just finished Infinite Jest and was hungry for something people said was similar. I was prepared to hate this book, so imagine my surprise when I borrowed it from the New York Public Library on my Kindle and couldn’t help but read the first 90 pages in a single solitary sitting. Compelling, vivid, and compulsively readable. 

What remains most memorable is Smith’s insight into race and religion. Her handling of these in the book is funny, honest, and never annoying. For me, as someone who grew up in a mixed-faith, mixed-race (Jewish, Latinx, Catholic) household, I look back and realize how much more self-conscious I was about my racial and religious identities than other kids at the time. You’ll see some of this in Let Me Try Again, and definitely in White Teeth. 

The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene 

Beautiful Catholic book. A thriller full of cool chase scenes, tear-jerking family drama, and earnest religious reflection. Love this one. It follows a priest  — a sinful, alcoholic priest, a messed up guy who’s full of shame — as he navigates a Mexican setting that was genuinely hostile to Catholics. Whether it was the main intention, it serves as a heartfelt repudiation of Donatism (an early Christian heresy that says you gotta be a “good guy” to retain the powers of the priesthood).

Basically, there’s this guy who has sex and gets drunk all the time but he’s also a Catholic priest; he goes around, risking his safety, baptizing babies, hearing confessions, etc, etc, trying to do the right thing after living a despicable life for years. It’s a tender story of redemption and faith and gets you thinking about how important priests really are, especially in scenes where you see how grateful the faithful Catholics are to encounter a priest willing to help them, even if he's nobody's ideal pastor. I read it a couple months before I started the first draft of my book; it’s probably my favorite Catholic book. 

Kafka’s Letters & Short Stories 

In college, I snuck into the computer lab on the second floor of the NYU Math department building and read The Metamorphosis in one sitting. Blew me away. That something so deeply sad could be so funny, so relatable. There’s really so much to say about Kafka, I have a real fixation and hero worship thing going on with him that I’ll avoid getting too deep into here. His work perfectly captures this sense of Jewish humiliation, this paranoid narcissism — this feeling that the entire universe is conspiring against you for the sole purpose of your annoyance and inconvenience. I tell people a lot about how he was the “original” 20th century Jewish guy, a titan of a predecessor to Roth, Woody Allen, and Larry David. 

In his personal letters, which were made public (he would’ve hated this, part of why it’s so funny to read them. Poor Franz…), of which the Letter to his Father, hits the hardest. We get a great portrait of a scared and neurotic guy. Really sad, but there are a number of intentionally or unintentionally funny moments, even in this letter he wrote to his dad about how mean he (the dad) was. I could go on for hours. Sorry. I like this speech David Foster Wallace gave about him.