Jonathan Lethem Takes the Long Way Home
Dave Weich, Powells.com
In the four years following the appearance of Jonathan Lethem's first novel, a surreal, futuristic noir called Gun, with Occasional Music, the author covered a tremendous amount of fictional territory: a post-apocalyptic road novel (Amnesia Moon), a hilarious academic parody (As She Climbed across the Table), and a western in outer space (Girl in Landscape). But it wasn't until 1999 and the publication of Motherless Brooklyn, a masterful literary work featuring a young detective with Tourette's syndrome, that a large mainstream audience discovered the charms of Lethem's work. 
Now, four years later, The
Fortress of Solitude introduces readers to Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, two boys, best friends, growing up in 1970s Brooklyn. Dylan is white. Mingus is black. Raised by sullen, single fathers, together and alone the young neighbors awaken to life like loosed animals on the streets. From their unlikely, conflicted friendship Lethem concocts a magical portrait of class and race, art and commerce, confinement and escape.
"Lethem's mock-heroic voice, full of innocence and mischief, perfectly captures the challenges of childhood, the desperation to belong, the acute sensitivity to embarrassment, the unquestioning endurance of adults' absurd behavior," Ron Charles cheered in the Christian Science Monitor. "This is daring stuff, as dazzling for its style as for its politics."
Dave: A steady progression of style and form is evident over the course
of your novel-writing career, from Gun,
with Occasional Music, little by little, to The
Fortress of Solitude.
Jonathan Lethem: I think so, yes.
Dave: Have you always been conscious of it?
Lethem: One thing I could say, which is very specific, is I had this
book in mind, and in some ways was already daring myself to try to write it,
before I thought of Motherless
Brooklyn. Then I got onto this notion of a detective with Tourette's, and
that seemed kind of clever and focused and very write-able, whereas this other
material was foggy and intimidating, so I decided to write the shorter book
first and wait to tackle the other. Seven years ago, when I conceived Motherless
Brooklyn, I pushed what would become The
Fortress of Solitude further down the line.
Of course that had a funny result because a lot of the sentiment about Brooklyn
leaked into Motherless
Brooklyn. It's part of what made that book so special, I think. I expected
to write a book of verbal pyrotechnics about a detective with Tourette's, but
then I set it in Brooklyn, and it was as if I'd tricked myself. A lot of that
autobiographical feeling got in.
But even before that, in manuscripts I began when I was seventeen and eighteen
and just declaring myself a writer, there are traces of scenes that I wanted
to write, impulses I had to create fiction set in a childhood analogous to my
own. It's been distilling for a very long time. At a certain point it became
a conscious process of gathering the tools I needed to make this book.
Dave: Motherless
Brooklyn addressed Brooklyn directly but not in such an openly autobiographical manner.
Lethem: Lionel Essrog,
those pages where he talks about Mad magazine or Prince or just a certain
building or sandwich in New York City that he likes? It seems very banal, but
that was a breakthrough for me. I had never allowed myself to write about real
stuff before. The nature of Lionel's attention span and his garrulousness, his
enthusiasm for stuff, taught me go ahead and write about things I liked. To
stop and write about a Prince song or whatever. And that obviously was something
I needed to free myself to do in a big way in order to write about the cultural
backdrop in this book, all the music and the film and the graffiti.
Dave: Details aside, though, Motherless
Brooklyn is a detective story, so it still relies on many of those familiar styles and
conceits more common to the earlier books. In that sense, it seems more consciously constructed and I don't
mean that as criticism.
Lethem: No, in a neutral sense, I've always been an extremely contrived
writer. My work has been concept-heavy.
Dave: Would you say that it's been more liberating or more constricting
to jettison some of the contrivances?
Lethem: I sometimes use the word "exoskeleton" of plot or concept.
With the first couple books, there was always an exoskeleton of concept, which
I then filled with all sorts of ephemera, emotions, autobiographical feeling,
jokes, and so forth. But first there was always that exoskeleton of plot or
concept: Let's put Philip
K. Dick and Raymond
Chandler together, or Let's put Don
DeLillo and Italo
Calvino together.
I see many senses in which the turning point book for me is Girl
in Landscape. That book does have a very prominent concept that you can name,
and it seems very exaggerated let's do a John
Ford western in space but the way I constructed character and the
way I wrote scenes in that book was much more intuitive and emotional. It was
much more of an exploration. In the first couple chapters, I was daring myself
to be more personal. I was relying on my cleverness and my concept a lot less.
It's much more felt. I knew I was never going back after that.
Motherless
Brooklyn has its own very prominent hook or concept, but the voice was so
much an outpouring of emotion and enthusiasm. It was kind of a crazy Valentine
to Brooklyn and the Tourettic parts of my own personality, the chaotic instinct
for destroying language and reconfiguring it in a vaguely Joycean way. I was
just embracing stuff wildly. It's like a big wet kiss, that book. It's still
a lot more emotional and much freer than the earlier work.
Conversely, I know The
Fortress of Solitude seems so open-structured and so much determined by
emotion and character rather than any exoskeleton of plot, but I see continuity
with my earlier work, ways in which it is controlled, or a study, as well.
I've always been very open about influence not just in confessing it
to others, but between me and myself. I've always been very aware of Oh,
I'm really trying to do some DeLillo here or Here I'm trying to write
a scene that's all Shirley
Jackson. I know when I'm doing it, and I like it. I feel comfortable there.
I wanted to write a longer book, so I thought about long books I loved: Dickens
and James
Baldwin's Another
Country and Call
It Sleep by Henry
Roth; very recent books of Philip
Roth's that grab big chunks of the world and character and place? they give
so much, they present so many characters, and the voice is so emotional and
impassioned. I would look at Of
Human Bondage and Magic
Mountain and try to understand why I love them the way I do. I let myself
think about the way big books are structured, and specifically the way a coming-of-age
novel that seems only to be guided by the story of the characters' emotional
or psychological discoveries nevertheless has its own underlying structure.
Those books can be seen as their own genre.
Dave: And still, when you sat down to write this book, you must have
faced new challenges.
Lethem: The emotion and the passion in my early books is embedded in
metaphor and symbols. It's not allegorical, but it has the flavor of allegory
because everything is embedded with meaning. In The
Fortress of Solitude, I've almost reversed my process completely. I've let
the meaning spill out of every symbol and metaphor and stream around very openly.
I challenged myself to do that by making the book broad and corny, by doing
certain things on the nose. Any time I felt ashamed of a choice, I thought,
It's probably because it's the right choice. For example: awarding Dylan
pretty much my exact address and my exact birthday so that I would be forced
to confront my interest in the cultural material of my childhood. Calling
him Dylan and calling Mingus Mingus it was a way to throw
myself at the material with my arms flung open, without any armor.
Dave: I haven't seen too many reviews of the new book yet, but what
I've read tends to speak of it, in the context of your earlier writing, at least,
as a realist novel. So far, in what I've read, the reviewers have not wanted
to take on Doily's ring.
Lethem: It's true: That's been skirted quite a lot. But of course it's
such a big book. Even the best pieces I've seen about it the pieces I
liked best, I should say, the ones that gratify my own impression of how I wanted
the book to work it's still a blind man and the elephant thing. You could
write about it as a book about the arts; you could write about it as a book
about race or childhood; you could write about the comic books; you could write
about the music. People can only say so much.
Doily's ring has fallen off the table a few times. A few other times it's
been objected to. Those people have said, "This is a terrific book but why did
he have to do that?" Of course, I'm fascinated by that reaction. To me, the
ring is so intrinsic, so knit into what the book is doing in every other sense,
but people who don't like the ring speak of it as though it could be quarantined.
Why did he bother? It's like a series of asides about flying and invisibility
and if he just didn't make those asides I really would have liked this book.
But I think it's deeply structured into the material. It seems that way to me.
Before I had anything else, I saw a cruddy superhero, a bum superhero, leaping
from one side of Nevin Street to the other, and knew I wanted to write about
real Dean Street with a pathetic superhero flying over it. That was as basic
to this book as anything.
Dave: Dylan's constantly getting yoked by the black kids in the neighborhood,
and there's not much Mingus can do about it. They're each subject to much stronger
forces on the street than any one kid can confront. Meanwhile, they're introduced
to this other world of superheroes by the comic books of the day. I loved the
bit about the black superhero who can't speak because his voice could destroy the world?
Lethem: Black Bolt.
Dave: A great reference.
Lethem: It's one of those great twists in the world of comic books:
He's called Black Bolt, but his skin is white he's got a black costume.
That was the trick with some of the Marvel superheroes. Something that was meaningful
to me about them was that they were all kind of black. Spiderman and Black Bolt
and Omega the Unknown are sort of black even though they're white.
The other thing about Marvel superheroes, as opposed to DC, is that when Superman is Superman,
that's who he really is; Clark Kent is a pretense. When he's Superman, he's
fulfilled; he's in his right place. And Batman is really Batman; Bruce Wayne
is the disguise. With the Marvel superheroes, it's the other way: When they
put on their costume, they're pretending. Despite their powers, they have massive
imposter syndrome.
To me those motifs fit together with other things that are so basic to the
book: the sense in childhood of powerlessness alongside fantasies of power;
the sense of helplessness and the inability to take care of even yourself but
at the same time having an enormous yearning to rescue people like your parents
or your best friend who's a year ahead of you in school and who is, in any practical
sense, usually rescuing you. These yearnings that match the feelings
of wanting to be a superhero? Wanting to sing like Al Green when you really
can't sing at all, that's a superpower the ring never offers Dylan, but he'd
probably value it even more highly.
Dave: Race is another difficult subject to address. It's hard to know
where to start.
Lethem: People want to talk about race, but they're dreadfully afraid
of saying something wrong, which is one of the subjects of the book: the suffocation
in silence of certain topics. I couldn't name the awkwardness of my school days
for so long. Really it wasn't until I threw myself at the material and let myself
be helpless in the face of it. But it's about unnamable stuff and it's still
unnamable. The book doesn't solve that problem. It just pokes at it.
Dave: You've written at length about music, in this novel and elsewhere.
Did you ever give music a shot?
Lethem: Well, I'm bad. I was trained as a visual artist. My father
is a painter. I had some facility there. And I inherited a great verbal gift
from my mother. I was a voracious reader. I feel as born to the role of a writer
as you can be. I'm very much in love with language and narrative, but I've never
succeeded in learning a second language. I tried to study music three
or four times, and I couldn't do it. I don't think I have an ear for a second
vocabulary of any kind. I'm too embedded in English in some way. I'm helpless.
I fronted a band in Berkeley briefly, but I was like a mumbling Lou Reed rapper
guy; it was not going anywhere because I can't sing.
Who was it that said, "All art aspires to the condition of music"? It's like
the pure art. I just try to make the prose as musical as I can. That's the only
place I have to live it out.
Dave: When Julie
Orringer was here recently, she was talking about how much she enjoyed The
Fortress of Solitude. One thing she singled out, what impressed her, was
the pacing: "the way he managed to modulate the pace of the novel," she said.
In a book this big, you really need to keep the reader moving.
Lethem: It's a kind of oceanic book: thirty years, so many speaking
parts, so many characters. As much as the task in writing a big book is to allow
myself to be digressive, and to be inclusive where I've been exclusive before,
the art always turns out to be one of omission: skipping the transitions, figuring
out what's inessential.
I don't actually commit a lot of material that I later cut. I'm good at stopping
and not writing the bad parts. That's a talent I've developed. But there's enormous
omission in the book, and I think that's what you and Julie are getting at.
But that's also the way memory focuses, and I think it's the benefit of waiting
as long as I did to write this book: the aspects that were autobiographical,
the autobiographical battery at the heart of this book, that material distilled
through time; inessential things were dropping away while my embrace of the
essential moments was growing more and more fierce over the years.
Dave: There's an interesting exchange posted on the McSweeney's web
site in which you and Dave
Eggers you discuss the role of the critic. To what degree should criticism
be entertainment, itself? Is a critic obliged to provide a detached, even-handed
view of a book?
Lethem: It's hard to talk about the responsibilities or the ethos of
critics because I think it's constantly shifting, depending where you're writing
and what you're treating and the parameters you set up within the piece of criticism.
You can claim certain responsibilities or abdicate them competently within a
piece. What's sometimes upsetting is when someone doesn't set any context or
try to reach for any parameters and just goes off. I haven't read that exchange
with Dave in a long time, but I'm sure that's some of what we're thinking about:
context.
Dave: After editing Da
Capo Best Music Writing 2002, how would you compare criticism of music to
criticism of books?
Lethem: The fundamental difference, which is a strength and like quicksand
at the same time, is that criticism of other art forms is nevertheless conducted
in the medium of prose. Criticism of prose is also conducted in the medium of
prose, of course, so it's closer to its subject intrinsically. More often, the practitioner
of one will be the practitioner of the other.
People have made great careers, Updike
and others, both as literary critics and novelists or essayists. People are invited
to do that, and it's potentially very rich, potentially as important and rewarding
as Randall
Jarrell or Edmund
Wilson. But it's also treacherous. It gets people into situations where
suddenly they have bad faith within their own community or their motives get
mixed up. But real criticism can't be responsible to the feelings of
the creators, so it's contentious in any medium. It has a margin where it's
going to be dangerous and unpleasant and risky and uncomfortable. Anyone
can sense when a piece is in bad faith, whether it's reviewing a book or a movie
or a piece of music, and that's very different than the necessity for harsh
criticism.
Dave: Elsewhere in that conversation, you get to talking about Bob
Dylan and the contingent of people who really just wish he'd go away and
stop recording.
Lethem: Right, the problem of people resisting the generosity of artists.
That same instinct is the one that causes people to pigeonhole books. It's a
safety instinct. You need to be able to think about the world clearly, so you
put things in boxes. Or you need to make it stop, make it shut up. There
can't really be two hundred great living novelists. That's too many. I can't
read that many, so I'm not going to accept that it's possible. There's only
going to be three. For my interest to thrive in the marketplace of literature,
I need to believe that the stuff I'm not getting to is less interesting than
the stuff I am getting to.
Dave: Somewhere I read that you once started figuring out mathematically
how many books you might have time to read in the rest of your life. The idea
depressed you. So how do you choose the books you read? Probably some are written
by friends, but otherwise?
Lethem: I do read friends because I get curious. It becomes a social
act sometimes, but I fight that; I don't want it to be obligatory and reciprocal.
Nevertheless, I meet people, and I start to wonder what their work is about.
But I read a lot of dead people and a lot of out-of-print stuff. I make a point
of meandering off the track of the contemporary, but also off the track of the
in-print and canonical.
What I want to do is reproduce the primacy of the reading act that was so
precious to me when I was younger, when I was discovering my own excitement
about books. Then, I had no sense of what the buzz was or what people were talking
about or what was meant to be great. I began browsing my mother's bookshelves
and trying to fathom those books from very early on. I migrated through books
in this completely personal, instinctive, interested way. Every book I read
was exactly as important to me as any other. It was a consuming curiosity, a
totally private and personal relationship. That it might be Joyce
or Kafka
and the larger world had put them in the most stellar pantheon, or that it might
be J.
B. Priestley, a guy who had mostly been nudged off the shelf already by
the seventies when I happened to read a lot of his stuff none of that mattered.
It was always pure and vital to me. I seek that. Also, it's fun to end up the
champion of a Don
Carpenter or Russell
Greenan or Dawn
Powell, to discover that secret essence.
In a funny way, you know less about unfamous books. You don't necessarily
have to read Ulysses
to know its meaning in the culture because you can absorb that inferentially.
So in a way, if you read Flann
O'Brien instead of Joyce, you know Joyce and Flan O'Brien. You can absorb
often from writers of lesser reputations the meaning of the larger ones. I try
to indulge a furtiveness and a cult quality in my reading because it brings
me back to the secret love.
Dave: One of my favorite pieces in the Best
Music Writing collection, aside from the two from The
Onion, which are hilarious, was The Strokes thread you pulled off the Internet.
Lethem: I got such a headache doing that.
Dave: A headache, how?
Lethem: I don't know how to put this. Online communities are so defiantly
proud of their marginality and so ashamed of any aspiration to graduate into
some other place in the culture. Very randomly, I dove into that enormous world,
and I grabbed something from the very erudite, very interesting conversation
that was going on. What was in my hand was very elegant, and I threw it onto
the page. But the writers I happened to grab were, I think, subjected within
that community to a kind of authenticity test. Are you going to let them
put you in this book? Are you going to refuse or are you going to do it but
hold your nose and make a big public stink that Da Capo and Lethem are corrupt
and the only real discourse is our private one?
It's something I wrote about in The
Fortress of Solitude when I wrote about the science fiction community. Dylan
muses on its similarity to going to the South by Southwest music conference:
the self-marginalizing fetish where communities will punish others but also
themselves for aspiring to speak to a larger community.
Dave: Abraham pretty much insults the community that's chosen to honor
him, but they like him for it. They applaud him.
Lethem: Well, he's flaying himself, first and foremost. He does insult
the community, but he does it in the form of self-deprecation. They're identifying
with that kind of "you can't fire me, I quit" posture. Knowing that you're making
a joke of your yearning makes it something to brandish. And Abraham is very
complicit: He went to the convention.
Dave: Dylan goes to Vermont for college, but soon leaves school, as you did. It's such a strange, passing moment in his life. It seems on the surface fleeting and unconnected, but it isn't.
Lethem: The book is, I think, like a series of glimpses. It's like
you're walking on the beach and looking into tidal pools in a reef. There are
so many fragile attempts at bohemian utopia that are damaged in various ways.
The college is not so different in its own way from South by Southwest, again,
or from the hippy communes on Dean Street or the ghost of racial utopia at the
end of the Civil Rights era or the congregation of uptight young men who go
to listen to Stan Brakhage talk and end up insulting each other because they
all get defensive. It's another attempt at community. In the case of Camden
College in the book, that community is damaged by money and elitism, but it
still has its own beauty in the passing attempt to realize the American dream
of a classless, egalitarian community.
Dave: In the book's third section, we meet Dylan as an adult. Suddenly
our view of him changes dramatically.
Lethem: A lot of readers kind of hate Dylan when he comes back, when
they meet him as an adult, and they don't know whether I meant them to. I sort
of did. I hope then he redeems himself a little somewhat? enough?
but it's kind of a shock-cut in the book.
Like anything else, it's more exciting for me when people say what they're
thinking, but they can't always do that because they rightly sense that I identify with
Dylan a lot. They don't feel good about not liking him when he argues with Abby
and when his soul is so pinched about Mingus. They're afraid that means they
don't like me.
Jonathan Lethem
visited Powell's City of Books on September 23, 2003.
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