To his fans, Jonathan Lethem is one who always pushes into new avenues of form and genre, of kidnapping kangaroos and scouring the Zendo for a killer, and he is certainly synonymous with New York. With novels like Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude that have so deeply imbibed into their pages the grit of New York City, it is impossible to separate the two. Chronic City, Lethem’s latest novel, returns to New York once more, but this spring he is set to do the unthinkable. Brooklyn will be sure to bemoan turning Lethemless in 2011 when he trades in New York for Los Angeles as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College.
BLACK CLOCK: You have had a long relationship with Black Clock, dating back to the first issue. What was your initial draw to the magazine and what has kept you coming back?
JONATHAN LETHEM: So simple: I’m a fan of Steve Erickson’s, going back to before I’d published fiction myself, and well before I had the luck of becoming his friend as well. Only “fan” puts it too gently: Steve’s accumulating shelf is of the great flares burning out there, lighting up the landscape, and when I heard from him that he wanted me involved in his magazine, I couldn’t imagine saying no. That it turned out to be a really singular and strange and effective publishing adventure wasn’t any kind of surprise. It’s made a great home for some work that might not have fit anywhere else, and a couple of the pieces that were effectively ‘commissioned’ for Black Clock are among my favorite of my recent short works.
Last year you did a series of readings in which you read the entirety of your newest novel, Chronic City, over eight days in New York City. A pretty astonishing task, one that makes my vocal chords ache in sympathy. How did it work out? Is it something you would like to do again?
It was a great one-of-a-kind experience, and I’d never do it again. I made the decision based on several terrific misunderstandings with myself and the actual length of the book.
On your website (http://www.jonathanlethem.com) you have a project running called Promiscuous Stories, where you welcome other artists to lift your stories and lyrics. Art influences art like nothing else can, and I believe it to be a vital part of the creative process. How did you come to the decision to “let go” of some of your work? What sort of response have you gotten?
Well, of course there’s been all variety of results by now, as was pretty much inevitable given the shotgun-blast/messages-in-bottles nature of the internet, and the project itself: good art, bad art, interesting attempts, unfinished works of great intrigue and promise, a few altered careers and opinions. Also, needless to say, loads of people have ignored the whole thing outright, as they were always also welcome to do. A theater troupe in Chicago actually renamed themselves The Plagiarists based on the thing. And there’s a very exciting “anthology film” in the works. But the important thing to say about the kind of letting go that I did on the site is that it isn’t actually an original or particularly unusual gesture. In fact, writers (and other artists) are constantly giving other artists (often filmmakers) “free options” on things all the time, without making a big deal of it. And, conversely, artists of all kinds (including writers) are taking the resources and inspiration and even the plot details they need for their own work from the work of others, without even asking, let alone seeking a formal permission–also without making a big deal of it. What my project consists of is framing these activities so they become visible. Making a big–or at least a medium–deal of it, in order to make a political point that these aren’t shameful or incidental or wayward transmissions, but in fact something to celebrate as central to art practice per se.
You have a strong opinion on “plagiarism;” can you speak a little about that?
I use the word provocatively, trying to nudge people into seeing how few of the “borrowings” they’ve been invited to become incensed about really are worth the name. Palming someone else’s efforts off as your own, covertly and lazily–even this isn’t much of a moral disaster. And most people witch-hunted as plagiarists are doing something much more honest, interesting, worthwhile, and inspiring than that.
Which writers and artists have influenced your work?
Too many to mention. A new one every day. A few go right to the bone of my work: Kafka, Hitchcock, Lewis Carroll.
It seems that everyone I speak to about Lionel in Motherless Brooklyn finds something they identify with in his ticcing. I have caught myself doing Lionel-like tics in my day-to-day life. Did you recognize ticcing as a universal act, something that many could potentially relate to? What inspired this decision on his character?
I’m always looking for metaphors that can serve as a net to catch every meaning that wanders past. Tourette’s, while I was writing that book, became a lens for contemplating zones of myself, areas of human culture, streets of Brooklyn, and aspects of human voicing I was fascinated with trying to bring to the page: insults, jokes, self-revelation in the form Freudian slips, etc. Lionel’s condition certainly also became a kind of weird verbal machine, too, for producing ticcishness in myself and others. He goes on making that impression, a decade later–I guess I got lucky.
Rumor is that Edward Norton is set to adapt, direct and star in Motherless Brooklyn. (An absolutely brilliant choice, I think.) What has been your experience with the adaptation so far? Are there any plans for future adaptations for the big screen or otherwise?
I mostly stay away from the work–or non-work–that goes on when my books enter the film adaptation process. It usually isn’t something I can be particularly helpful with. And the frustrations that go with that work get under my skin very easily. So, I don’t know where the Motherless Brooklyn project stands, or if it stands at all. It might be on its knees. Or taking a nap. Some other books have new dance partners just now: Fortress of Solitude, As She Climbed Across the Table, Gun with Occasional Music and Girl in Landscape. It all sounds very exciting, and it arouses all sorts of silly feelings in the author, but what we’re really contemplating consists of someone else’s–several someones–improbable and mostly excruciating art-attempts. I wish them all well.
Music comes up often in your work. You Don’t Love Me Yet surrounds a band of struggling musicians. In The Fortress of Solitude, life is very nearly dictated by music. You also had the enviable chance to interview Mister Bob Dylan himself. How does music serve your writing?
I use music as an emotional touchstone for my writing (and not only for my writing). I listen to it constantly. At the very least it keeps me still for my work, which is no small thing. At its frequent best it reminds me of who I am and why I bother. I can only hope that a handful of readers are drawn into a projected relationship to one or another of my books anywhere near as rich as my projected relationship with, say, Mister Bob Dylan. It’s actually creepy to talk about these things, but they’re what we all wish for.
The writing of liner notes takes place in both The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City. Is it your secret ambition to be a writer of such notes?
Either that or a philatelist.
Crossing genres is something you often do, moving through genres from work to work and many times merging them in a single work. In some stores your books can be found in general fiction, others mystery or science fiction. What do you think of genre boundaries? Is genre something that you dwell on during the writing process? Is there an area you would like to explore more deeply?
I started out quite naively excited about the idea of “genres,” but by now it seems more like a matter for critics than for writers–and mostly, alas, a matter for critics to mishandle. It’s at least a very confusing term to bring into descriptions of what it is I (consciously) set out to do in my work. I draw tremendous energy from all sorts of what I like to call ‘vernacular culture’–comics, animation, pulp crime and science fiction writing, rock and roll, etc.–and always will, but the sorts of novels I like to read, and write, have always been all over the high-low map, as well as drifting in and out of the publishing categories that most people are talking about when they use the word “genre.” For me, I see genres where others don’t, and vice versa. The “academic satire” (I wrote one in As She Climbed Across the Table) is a form as precise as a sonnet–now, there’s a genre. Whereas what gets jumbled up in the publishing category of SF–dystopias both evocative and pedantic, vicarious power fantasies, grindingly earnest advocacy for space exploration, etc.–doesn’t make any literary-critical sense as a “genre” — it’s more like a tradition, or an “area” (or, prestige-wise, a backwater, which is a wearisome matter to combat, but also to pretend to ignore). So, what do I think of boundaries? Useless. Descriptions, that’s what I like–fresh descriptions more than tired or received ones. But descriptions come after the fact.
It’s no secret that New York is your home. Many of your novels take place in the City, picking up different cliques to center each. Often, the City is much more than a setting, becoming a fully rounded character. As someone who has yet to have the chance to visit the City, can you describe what about New York has served as a muse for you?
Just as we write this, Claremont California is about to be my home. Which may be my best excuse, if there’s any excuse, for dodging your question. I’ve spent so many fictional pages trying to evoke–not encompass–the contradictory and ambivalent force of my ongoing reaction to that place, and to my being “from” that place, that it doesn’t feel good to me to try to come up with some reductive paraphrase. I did so too many times in the past. But you should visit.
Your latest work, Chronic City returns to New York. Can you speak about it and its eclectic cast?
I wanted to make an absurd snapshot of Manhattan in the middle of the “aughts,” and then blow it up and explore it meticulously, lavishly–my first joke about the book was that I wanted to write the book Gogol would have if he’d been commissioned to novelize Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover (the one showing the Upper West Side in the foreground, the midwest and China in the background). The disparity between the grim depth of the historical facts surrounding the way we lived between 9/11 and the economic meltdown, and the amnesiac cartoon thinness of how many of us actually lived in those years. Which sounds very punitive, doesn’t it? But as for the eclectic cast, I loved and love them all. I feel very forgiving towards even the worst of them.
For those aspiring writers, can you discuss your experience with publishing and your journey as a writer so far?
Oh, I’ve been absurdly lucky in my journey, which puts me in no position to help anyone else with theirs. Except I’d say how important it is, from the permanently and in many ways rightly defiant and embattled stance of an artist in a capitalist system, to remember that now, more than ever, the people you’ll meet in publishing are doing what they’re doing out of sheer love. If they were into exploitation, they’d find another career.
What is up next for you?
I’m publishing a tiny book about John Carpenter’s They Live in the Fall. Just barely in time to accredit myself as a “Los Angeles writer,” I hope.
by Rachel Kolb
an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts
