Conversations With Jonathan Lethem

by Jaime Clarke (Editor), Jaime Clarke (Editor), Jonathan Lethem

"Conversations with Jonathan Lethem" collects fourteen interviews, conducted over a decade and a half, with the Brooklyn-born author of such novels as "Girl in Landscape," "Motherless Brooklyn," "The Fortress of Solitude," "Chronic City," and many others. Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award, Lethem (b. 1964) covers a wide range of subjects, from what it means to incorporate genre into literature, to the impact of the death of his mother on his life and work, to his being a permanent "sophomore on leave" from Bennington College, as well as his flight from Brooklyn to California and its lasting effect on his fiction. Lethem also reveals the many literary and pop culture influences that have informed his writing life.

Readers will find Lethem as charming and generous and intelligent as his work. His examination of what it means to live a creative life will reverberate and enlighten scholars and fans alike. His thoughts on science fiction, intellectual property, literary realism, genre, movies, and rock 'n' roll are articulated with elan throughout the collection, as are his comments on his own development as a craftsman."

191 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2011

About the author

Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been a Lethem fan for more than half my life. He's not just a favorite writer; he's been a huge influence on my thinking about literature, genre, the creative commons... He's also a great interview subject: eloquent, knowledgeable, and generous. Yet this collection of conversations with him is a bit of a mixed bag.

The good: editor Jaime Clarke includes both the usual suspects as well as some terrific interviews that have been difficult to find anywhere else: one with Shelley Jackson (Lethem's ex-wife and a superb writer) in the obscure journal Paradoxa, one with The Missouri Review that was never made available online, and this nifty one with Brian Berger in Stop Smiling (http://www.whowalkinbrooklyn.com/?p=2137).

The bad: Clarke's introduction is negligible, and he gives short shrift to Lethem's early (pre-Motherless Brooklyn) work. I'd have liked to see Lethem's interviews from Locus and The SF Site included, as well as this Alt-X interview with Alexander Laurence from the start of Lethem's career: (http://www.altx.com/int2/jonathan.let...)

The problematic: Clarke does what I don't think any editor of this series of books has done, and includes transcripts of Michael Silverblatt's KCRW interview show Bookworm. Four of them, in fact. I've been addicted to Bookworm since I was a senior in high school, but I'm not sure if including those interviews was a wholly successful strategy. Silverblatt's vertiginous and arcane questions don't work so well in print. Worse, whoever transcribed the interviews made a number of unforced errors:

p. 26, the unintelligible word is "Sukkot."
p. 26, it's "A.E. van Vogt Slan narrative", not "A.E. van Vogt slam narrative"
p. 29, Silverblatt quotes the Chandler epigraph to Gun, with Occasional Music, and the transcriber treats the quote as if it's part of Silverblatt's own speech.
p. 69, the unintelligible word is "art."
p. 73, the unintelligible character name is "Robert Woolfolk."
p. 74, the unintelligible word is "Ringolevio."
p. 142, the character wears a Big Star shirt, not a "big star" shirt, and it's Alex Chilton, not "Alex Chiltern."

That's a whole lot of hair-splitting for what is, all things considered, a pretty phenomenal collection of conversations with one of America's most engaging writers. But the snow is piled up 5 feet outside my house, so what else am I gonna do.

[Brent Woo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A searing, non-stop masterclass of how to talk about books, how to talk about influence, how to talk about genre/sf/lit, how to talk about autobiography. Most of the interviewers know his work and references and influences well, and they have paragraph-long turns brimming with insight from both sides. He interviews with Shelley Jackson, his ex-wife, and he throws a tantrum. Lydia Millet outshines Lethem with her perspectives on influence-slash-plagiarism. You probably will want to have read Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude before (I haven't...) to get the most out of the majority of the interviews spent on these large novels.

Some influences he names: Kafka, Borges, Calvino (this trio always came together); Dick, DeLillo, Barthelme, Kerouac, Phillip Roth, Graham Greene. Dick and DeLillo he mentions over and over and over. Bob Dylan also.

There's no writing advice, save for cursory answers to a couple questions about his process. There's actually very little "relationship" autobiography—he's been married three times, yet it doesn't come up a lot—rather he talks about living in Brooklyn and reading and working in used bookstores.

Some talk about the book You Don't Love Me Yet was interesting, about the relation between aging and pop culture:

The complainer is a kind of stand-in for any forty-something who still identifies in some way when they glance at people in their twenties. But I think the truth is that my post-collegiate life is an exotic time, a very distant time. Whereas in FORTRESS when I contemplate childhood itself, I am really trying to bridge an almost interstellar gulf.

He has an intense hatred for genre elitism. Don't look down at SF, and don't elevate 'literary fiction' more than need be. Labels like "realism" even have little meaning.

it’s the same illogic as racism: a seeming need for people to feel better about themselves by having something that’s beneath them. … also the self-willed exile of the minority population for “outsider identity” or “subcultural credibility”

the argument that there is a hierarchy… is not a literary-crticial operation. It’s a class operation. In that system of allusions, of unspoken castes and quarantines, mimetic fiction is associated with properity … when “realism” is esteemed over other kinds of literary methods, you’re no longer in a literary-critical conversation; you’ve entered a displaced conversation about class.

Don't call him magic realist.

those cute magical-realist methods — how I despise that term... this notion that I push again and again — metaphor and symbol and linguistic experiment are not so very different from a “fantastic element” or a magical intrusion on the lives of the characters in the story

He puts superheroes and comic books in his novels. Don't shame "low-brow" references in an attempt to be pure:

131. What are we hankering for? … If we chide the writer who makes reference to low-brow material, roll back to TS Eliot. Forget Joyce. ... the bogus nostalgia for pure as opposed to impure literature … is a discomfort with literature itself. A discomfort with writing. A discomfort with the kinds of exuberance, with relevance.

Why we need fiction

So memory is just a series of rehearsals, for a show that never goes on. … We just need to constantly understand how much we’re awash in our own subjective, fantastical consciousness. This is why people are so interested in stories, even if they distrust them … it’s how we understand ourselves.

Lots of time spent thinking about the role of autobiography in literature. Obviously some writers can tell fantastic stories that have nothing to do with their lives, and on the other hand some write a thinly concealed autobiography marketed as a novel. Lethem tells us to pay attention to that:

125. In P Roth this tension [of whether or not something is autobiographical] often stands in place of traditional plot mechanics for generating readerly fervor. You’re always having to thnk, “This might be real. But it might not be. He could be fooling me.” In FORTRESS I switched not only to honest autobiographical methods but as well to manipulative autobiographical chimeras

I'll stop. I wrote 14 pages of notes and quotes while reading this, and I'll be studying them for a long time to come. Just great.

[David Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The existence of these "conversations" books is kind of a wonder, and they have their pleasures. They also have their frustrations: The same ground is covered in interview after interview, and some of the interrogators are easy to lose patience with. Regardless, Lethem's responses are thoughtful, intelligent and offhandedly witty. Although the most recent conversation is from 2010, this is still useful for admirers. Also, the story of his onetime California vanity plate (SQUALOR) is a scream.