The Collapsing Frontier

PM's Outspoken Authors #30

by Jonathan Lethem

Having stormed mainstream literature from the outskirts, Lethem
has won a readership both wide and deep, all of whom appreciate his
literary excellence, his mordant but compassionate humor, and the
cultish attentiveness of his SF origins. He has earned the right to tread anywhere, and his many admirers are ready to follow.
This collection compiles his intensely personal takes on the most
interesting and deplorable topics in post-postmodern America. It moves
from original new fiction to insights on popular culture, cult and
canonical authors, and problematic people.
“David Bowman and
the Furry-Girl School of American Fiction” is a personal true adventure,
as Lethem tries (with the help of a seeming expert) to elbow his way
into literary respectability. “The Collapsing Frontier” is a brand-new fictional journey into an ominous unmapped realm. “Calvino’s 'Lightness' and the Feral Child of History” is an intimate encounter with a literary legend, where Calvino’s Italy and Lethem’s Brooklyn meet cute. In “On Lem-ness” and “Snowden in the Labyrinth” he
explores courage, art, and the search for truth, with wildly different
results. A bibliography is also provided as well as our usual Outspoken
Interview.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

169 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 19, 2024

About the author

Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer.

His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.

In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rec. by: Dan Trefethen
Rec. for: Avid readers

The Collapsing Frontier Plus... is a fantastic little book, much richer than its compact and slender frame would indicate—as I think the number, variety, and quality of the quotes I found to include in this review confirm. This is entry #30 in PM Press' "Outspoken Authors" series, bringing together a satisfying number and range of short pieces by Jonathan Lethem. And, it was published just this year on my birthday, which is a neat coincidence.

David Bowman and the Furry-Girl School of American Fiction

The book begins with a heartfelt eulogy, masquerading as the Introduction to a posthumously-published novel that now I really want to read—(David Bowman's Big Bang was not brought out until 2019, seven years after Bowman's death).

Living writers, now that we've gotten a close look at them, are pretty embarrassing. Famous authors of the past? Mostly blowhards. Posthumously celebrated writers, on the other hand, all seem to walk under the grace of Kafka's umbrella, with Melville and Emily Dickinson.
—p.2

Snowden in the Labyrinth

A sympathetic review of Edward Snowden's Permanent Record. Early on, Lethem highlights Snowden's comparison of the intelligence community and the bros of Silicon Valley:

Both are entrenched and unelected powers that pride themselves on maintaining absolute secrecy about their developments. Both believe they have the solutions for everything, which they never hesitate to unilaterally impose. Above all, they both believe that these solutions are inherently apolitical, because they're based on data.
—Quoted on p.33

Later, Lethem notes significant differences between more old-school whistleblowers like the late Daniel Ellsberg and Snowden's more déclassé upbringing and attitude towards outlets like the august New York Times, including this passage from Snowden's book (which I am eliding even more than Lethem did)...

Whenever I thought about contacting the Times, I found myself hesitating. While the paper had shown some willingness to displease the US government with its WikiLeaks reporting, I couldn't stop reminding myself of its earlier conduct involving an important article on the government's warrantless wiretapping program by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen. {...} the paper's editor-in-chief, Bill Keller, ran the article past the government, as part of a courtesy process... If the Times, or any paper, did something similar to me... it would be tantamount to turning me in before any revelations were brought before the public.
—Quoted on pp.37-38

In Lethem's own words (well, mostly):

Snowden's bitterness at the loss of his childhood playground is also his warning to us: the famous New Yorker cartoon—"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog"—has been exposed as naïve. Snowden wants us to understand that, unless you employ three-layer encryption, they even know your breed.
—p.45

The Collapsing Frontier

A self-referential (but never self-reverential) metafiction, invoking the SF author R.A. Lafferty and a wandering Winnebago... a good one to read on Indigenous Peoples' Day.

"Rooms Full of Old Books Are Immortal Enough for Me"

This one is an interview, conducted by the late Terry Bisson, in which Lethem displays a becoming modesty:

Compared to most artists of any kind, I've been showered with attention. I'm absurdly lucky.
—p.67

My Year of Reading Lemmishly

Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem was born in 1921. Lethem's lengthy encomium to Lem on the occasion of what would have been his 100th birthday in 2021 divides his work into five distinct stages, the first of which is as a "hard SF" writer.

As a science-fiction writer himself, though (Lethem mentions that he was a member of the SFWA—the Science Fiction Writers of America—in the 1990s, until he let his membership lapse), Lethem seems to have a fairly low received opinion of this subgenre,

{...} exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke, SF's sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where the fascination with technology and the future went to get mashed up with American exceptionalist ideology: technocratic triumphalism, Manifest Destiny, Libertarian survivalist bullshit. Hard SF fueled both the Cold War-era space race and, soon after, Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" dream. As Adam Curtis showed in the BBC series Pandora's Box, the notion of defensive missiles in space was essentially whispered into the cowboy actor's ear by two leading conservative hard-SF writers of the '80s, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
—p.81

Lethem would much rather call this first Lem of his an extrapolationist:

Lem belongs in that company of SF writers—Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Kim Stanley Robinson, a few others—who practiced intentional extrapolation with regular and sustained success.
—p.82

The other four Lems? Well, you'd have to read the essay. It's hard to argue with this formulation, though:

From another of his letters to Kandel: "Lem's Three Laws proclaim: 1) nobody reads anything; 2) if they read, they don't understand anything; 3) if they read and understand, they instantly forget."
—p.96

Calvino's "Lightness" and the Feral Child of History
"Gowanus" seems like a ridiculous made-up word to me—no self-respecting SF writer would use it as the title of a novel, or as the name of the capital planet of a star-spanning galactic empire. But Jonathan Lethem is from Gowanus, a "feral child" of that lost Imperial planet... which is actually a neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City.

This essay is, I think, the most significant and insightful piece in The Collapsing Frontier Plus...—at least, it's the one from which I drew the most and longest quotes.

"{...} to live in peace and freedom is a frail kind of good fortune that might be taken from me in an instant."
—p.123, Italo Calvino, from an essay called "By Way of an Autobiography"

"The war was here, the war he had declared, and he was in a car with his generals; he had a new uniform.... And as though it were some sort of game, he sought only the complicity of other people—not too much to ask—so much so that people were tempted to allow him it, in order not to spoil his party; in fact one almost felt a sting of remorse at knowing that we were more adult than he was, in not wanting to play his game."
—p.125, from Calvino's autobiographical essay "Into the War"

Lethem knows; later on that same page he says, in his own voice,

This raises the specter of our current Gorgon, but I'll leave him unnamed, for a little while yet.
—p.125, as written in late 2016

I came of age in a country at war and under the shadow of a paranoiac administration, one famous for an enemies list which, if it had been thorough, would certainly have included not only my parents but practically every adult I'd ever met.
—p.126

Lethem was born just one year after I was, so this passage resonates with me (although my own parents were not by any means likely to have been on that infamous list...).

Of course the arrangements of home and family were always tenuous, etched in gossamer, tinted in nostalgia even as they occurred, like my parents' worn gatefold copy of Sgt. Pepper, which was missing its cardboard cut-out Beatle dolls. That band you're grooving to? The one that models the perfect gestalt of endearing human types, working in selfless harmony? They already broke up, man.
—p.128

This is where Lethem names the Gorgon, in words that are somehow relevant again:

{...} I must now endure explaining to my own children that they're not wrong to judge Donald Trump not only as a bully and a villain but as a cartoon of a bully and a villain, one not nearly as compelling or persuasive as Voldemort or Sauron, and to assure them that, no, we weren't wrong to be laughing at him for a year; we were only wrong to believe that we could laugh him away. In the words of Alfred Polgar, "The situation is hopeless but not serious."
—p.132

Towards the end of this essay, Lethem quotes a joke, as related by the Slovenian philosopher-comedian-king Slavoj Žižek, but originating in East Germany back when that entity was a Soviet satellite:

A German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is false."
After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink:
"Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, movie theaters show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing unavailable is red ink."
—pp.132-133

In Mugwump Four

The concluding piece in The Collapsing Frontier Plus... is an entertaining speculation on the allure of virtual "realities" (that in reality are anything but)...

The sky above my house was the color of a "404 page not found" error message.
—p.142

Lethem both references and subverts Gibson—Neuromancer's famous opening line was realistic, back when TVs displayed staticky "snow" when they had no signal. Lethem's metaphor is inherently (and, I'm sure, intentionally) nonsensical: a 404 error has no color until it's displayed—and even then it's dependent on the viewer's browser's settings.

Secret Bibliography

While the content in The Collapsing Frontier Plus... ends with "In Mugwump Four," the Secret Bibliography at the book's end also deserves a look... these aren't the books in Lethem's formal canon, but rather items that he wrote in obscurity, pieces that figured in his development as a writer, perhaps, but that aren't necessarily on sale at your local bookstore. These entries are worth your attention, anyway.

About the Author

This is the entirety of the "About the Author" page:

https://jonathanlethem.com

'Nuff said, as the saying goes.

[Ryan Berger · Rating 5 out of 5]

When the cashier at a PM Press bookstore twisted my arm (great salesmanship, to be clear!) to grab this $28 collection of essays despite knowing that several of the pieces were available online for free (though I hadn't yet read them, assuming I'd get to them at some point)-- I thought I'd smile politely and look back after I was finished reading this collection with a decent amount of satisfaction but mostly regret for having spent the money on what's ultimately a collector's item.

I'm happy to report I'm incredibly grateful to have this on my shelf in physical form because I will be revisiting these pieces often both for pleasure and to understand the mind of one of our premier essayists.

Lethem is a humongous talent. I've dove face-first into his fiction and finding more to like all the time, but so far it's been his nonfiction that leaves me the most emotionally charged, intellectually nourished, perspective widened and heart seasoned. This volume is no different. Nearly every piece would be the crown jewel in most collections. His tribute to a complicated, eccentric author is nuanced and evocative, his review of Snowden's autobiography frightfully chilling, his survey of Stanislaw Lem's career comprehensive and illuminating, and his meditations on Italo Calvino and the artist's task a towering feat of conceptualizing.

I'd also wager this contains the greatest story I've ever read about the inescapable whirlpool that is life on the internet.

A phenomenal collection and now a cherished addition to my library. Another savvy purchase by yours truly.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lethem is a literary author with genre roots. He read a lot of science fiction and fantasy as a kid, and when he got older he was reading Borges, Calvino, and Kafka. This book has a number of essays and fiction pieces that illuminate his background and thinking.

There are essays extolling the authors R.A. Lafferty and Stanislaw Lem. The piece about Calvino also references Calvino's writing about Milan Kundera, another author from an Iron Curtain country whose hopes were crushed.

Lethem has a Jewish background but was not raised in the faith, but knows that won't matter when the jackboots come marching down the street; he talks about his Jewish grandmother (the one who was skeptical about buying him some Lem books at an American Library Association convention).

These PM Press short books are great for providing a sense of an author: A little fiction, a few essays, and an interview. For anyone curious about an author, they're a great way to get an introduction.

[Michael Reilly]

This is the most recent volume in PM's Outspoken Authors series. These are short 100 t0 150-page paperback collections of short stories, essays, interviews, and random pieces from a science fiction/speculative writer who has interesting things to say.

This one is by Jonathan Lethem. He has made a conscious effort to avoid a category. He has written some novels and stories on classic science fiction themes. He has written detective stories and stories with detective pieces. He has written social realism and novels with huge blends of reality and nonreality. He is self-consciously trying out everything to get to the story he wants to tell.

This book starts with Lethem telling us about his complicated relationship with David Bowman. Bowman was an American writer. They met in 1995 when Bowman was doing a book tour for a new book and Lethem was a clerk in a bookstore on the tour. They became friends and supported each other's writing.

Gradually it became clear that Bowman was an amazingly difficult person to get along with. He picked fights, he pouted, he was overly sensitive. As time went by the friendship withered. Bowman's writing seemed to dry up and his markets stopped publishing him. He kept insisting that he was working in his big book. He died of a brain hemorrhage in 2012.

The end of the essay has a wonderful turn that raises a pile of questions. The whole piece is a painfully truthful story about the difficulty of friendship, the impossibility of knowing another person and the pain of unfair regrets.

The rest of the pieces explore different parts of Lethem's interest. He reviews Edward Snowden's autobiography and ruminates on the pervasiveness of electronic surveillance and electronic involvement in our lives. There is an interview of Lethem and a good piece on the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. His description of the "five Lems" is a very helpful way of looking at Lem's wide output. The piece on Italo Calvino didn't do much for me and the two stories are pretty slight.

These books are a good length for getting a sense of an author. Several of them lead to me finding new authors who I added to my must-read list.

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the essays on people like Lem and Snowden more than his (fantastic) stories, but most of all I was interested in the autobiographical parts in the Bowen and Calvino stories, and of course his interview. Unfortunately, this is an author I always propose to delve into and then get distracted, let's see if this is the one.

Mi sono piaciuti piú i saggi su persone come Lem e Snowden che i suoi racconti (fantastici), ma piú di tutto mi hanno interessato le parti autobiografiche nelle storie di Bowen, Calvino e ovviamente la sua intervista. Purtroppo questo é un autore che mi ripropongo sempre di approfondire e poi mi lascio distrarre, vediamo se questa é la volta buona.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lethem is one of those authors who is very hit or miss for me -- the stuff of his I like, I like a lot, but about 2/3 of his books just never land for me. His influences and interests often generally line up with mine, and so I was excited to discover this small collection of essays, two pieces of fiction, and an interview. It's part of the "Outspoken Authors" series, which has a ton of interesting writers on its list.

The volume opens with his introduction to David Bowman's posthumously published novel The Big Bang, which is less about the book, but more about Bowman and Lethem's strange friendship with him. Despite being about an author I was only very faintly aware of, it's completely compelling. Next up is his review (originally published in the New York Review of Books) of Edward Snowden's memoir. Again, despite the subject being a book I have no interest in, the review is full of compelling ideas and connections. "The Collapsing Frontier" is a metatextual semi-autobiographical story/essay, working off the 1966 short story "Narrow Valley" by R.A. Lafferty. Engrossing while I was reading it, but liable to send one down all manner of Wikipedia rabbit holes.

Next comes a break in which Lethem is interviewed by Terry Bisson -- it's short but again, quite good -- providing a good sense of Lethem's own voice. This is followed by two lengthy essays, the first is a typology of the works of the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem (most famous for the book that became the film Solaris), and originally ran in the London Review of Books. The second is a reworking of two talks Lethem gave in the wake of the 2016 elections, about Calvino and touching upon the role of art and writing in a world gone mad. The volume concludes with "In Mugwump Four" a parable masquerading as short story about the lure of unreal domains. All in all, worth checking out if you are familiar with Lethem and his work.

[Nick Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cosmic! What a refreshing combination of ideas, facts, soulful recollections, people, and books. All written with a fantastically human pen. I feel so changed by the ideas presented and the vast amount of realities ahead of us seem compounded upon now. Beautifully put together, so much to voyage with. Great great read

[Rick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is minor work by Lethem. I have certainly enjoyed many of his novels but his short stories can be annoyingly opaque. This book collects two Lethem stories that did not really cut it and a handful of essays generally but not entirely about other writers. Lethem is a skilled and eclectic reader and enthusiast; the essays leave you curious to explore the writers he discusses

[Sherrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little bag of treats for Lethem fans - a handful of witty essays (I liked the one about his eccentric fellow writer, David Bowman, the most) and a few sci-fi short stories. A breezy, easy going afternoon read. PS I did end up bookmarking a bunch of random novels from NYRB Classics rec'd by Lethem, so it's also a good resource for MORE afternoon reading.

[David Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A modest little collection of stray stories and essays, many about fellow writers, as well as a book review and a fun, witty Q&A. In CD packaging terms, it could have been titled The Inessential Jonathan Lethem. But if you like him already, enough to be curious what he has to say about Stanislaw Lem and Italo Calvino, as I was, it's worth reading.

[Brad Wojak · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of essays and short pieces. As always, Lethem brings a lot to mull over. It is always great to get new work from them.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great little collection of essays, interviews and short stories. The essays about Stanislaw Lem and Edward Snowden were particularly excellent.

[Giovanni Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gen Mugwump.

[Donald Bullard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lethemish

Look, pleasure reading can be a real trick. Lethem kept me engaged in a good way, although the last work was a curious change of pace. It is inspiring for the care of the reviews. Unique. I will reapproach later.

[Corey Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

this one's for the real hardcore Lethem-heads (Leth-heads?), ok!!

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short collection of half a dozen I think pieces from the New Yorker and elsewhere. Long pieces on Lem and Calvino are the cernterpieces.

[John Fetzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of articles/ essays on books and authors. Interesting and entertaining. A variety of writers and genres.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The story gives respect and reverence to those who came before it, which ought to be everyone, even you, reader, since the story does not yet and may never exist" (Lethem 53).

Jonathan Lethem is one of my favorite authors. In this collection of short works, he has written two short stories "In Mugwump Four" and "The Collapsing Frontier"- both stories that center on strange, surreal worlds and the specter of grief always present.

Professor Lethem is also an excellent writer of criticism and reflection. He writes two personal essays about writers David Bowman, "David Bowman and the Furry Girl School of American Fiction" and Stanislaw Lem in "My Year of Reading Lemmishly". He always writes about of his friendships with those who have influenced his work, and those whose work have pushed him into writing without further boundaries.

What I always love about his work is when he writes about grief. He writes about his mother's passing in "Calvino's Lightness and the Feral Child of History" and of his own upbringing that shaped his most enduring fiction. I've seem to have read almost all of his work, and the shadow of grief is always ever present, it's almost as if he's always processing- and it never ends.

I am always a little sad whenever I finish any work written by him.