Anyway, what counts as a classic changes, doesn’t it? Gertrude Stein wasn’t on the shelf, though she was in the library, filed under Humor. Virginia Woolf wasn’t there either — nor was she on my literature course at the University of Oxford. “Minor,” was the word used. Gendered brain?

Can a great book be badly written? What other criteria can overcome bad prose?

For me, language is everything. I am not all that interested in the story or the characters if the language is floppy. Language is much more than a carrier of information. Language gives the reader the words she or he needs to manage their internal situation. This matters. It’s why I read poetry. Badly written books often make good movies, because the character and story are all that counts. Books that have a distinctive voice and a way with words take longer to read, and they make demands on the reader. I am aware that difficulty — however pleasurable and rewarding — is not in fashion. I don’t want language that is artificial or arcane — just language that says things in such a way that we hear what is being said, and register it in the depths of us. That way it is available for use when we need it. I still learn poems and parts of books so that I have a private library inside me. This may well be because my mother burned all my books just before I sensibly left home. Only what is inside you cannot be taken away by others.

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?

A book I read and reread that no one else I know reads at all is Ted Hughes’s “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being.” I had to get my copy print on demand years ago. It is a reading of all of Shakespeare’s plays with a view to understanding the interior geography of Shakespeare as a writer and as a man. And it is about the rescuing of the Female that happens in the late plays, and why this should be. Reading it is like a very long conversation with an old friend trying to understand something magnificent. It is also, possibly, utterly bonkers.

Your new novel updates “Frankenstein” with modern technology and cultural references. Are there particular challenges to adapting a classic, and who do you think does it especially well?

You ask me about adapting a classic — which “Frankissstein” doesn’t do, though it does try to recreate some of the thinking and working life of Mary Shelley, alongside a contemporary look at A.I. If you are writing the past, you need to invent a language close enough to the past in question, but near enough to us for the reader not to feel like they are reading in translation. The key to any encounter with the past is to understand it before you riff on it. I think of some of my work as cover versions. That’s fun, and it can remake a text for a modern reader, driving back to the original. I thought Kamila Shamsie’s “Home Fire” — a version of “Antigone” for the current world of paranoia, fake politics and terrorism — was so good. I just read Salman Rushdie’s “Quichotte,” a loose remake of “Don Quixote.” It’s a terrific read. As far as I am concerned all writers are working with the classics all the time — whether or not we have read them. Not just story lines but an atmosphere. If you love books you will be soaked in books and what you have read will return as what you have written.