MacArthur "genius grant" recipient and novelist Jonathan Lethem ignores the boundary between literary fiction and "lower" pop-culture or genre work, drawing inspiration from Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, and comics. Lethem stayed mostly in science-fiction territory in early novels like Gun, With Occasional Music, and found wider success with 1999's National Book Critic's Circle Award-winning Motherless Brooklyn, about a Tourette's-afflicted private eye. He drew on his Brooklyn childhood for 2003's The Fortress Of Solitude, both a detailed reminiscence of the 1970s and a literary superhero tale. His new You Don't Love Me Yet follows the romantic entanglements and unexpected success of a nameless young L.A. band. The A.V. Club recently talked with Lethem about kangaroos, the importance of escaping the familiar, and the question of who really owns an idea.
The A.V. Club: You recently had an interesting discussion with cosmologist Janna Levin in Seed magazine, where you noted that there's always an element to your writing that bridges the realistic and the fantastic or metaphorical. It seems noteworthy that You Don't Love Me Yet has elements that feel surreal, but very little that literally could not have happened in reality.
Jonathan Lethem: It's sort of there, in a strange way, in the surrealism or the fabulation at the level of emotion and metaphor, and inside the sentences and inside the characters, rather than being a world that isn't literally possible. One of the things I've been exploring is this question of where the magic is located. And for me, the reason that it makes sense that everything I've written has had this collision of the prosaic textures—the everyday, recognizable, intimate detail—with something impossible, is because the basic implement of writing fiction is kind of poisoned by magic in that way. It's got metaphor, it's got craziness in it. Words and sentences themselves don't behave. Which is why I always think the idea of "realism" is a very weird one, because this synthetic, kind of magical implement doesn't really want to be used [in that way]. It's not a camera taking a photograph. The same kind of collision that I'm interested in is already inherent in the language. Words are little embedded metaphors in themselves, and so there's really no way to take some sort of scientific survey of what everyday life is like, as if we could agree on that in the first place.
AVC: And no art form can ever capture reality perfectly. Even if you could duplicate something down to its molecules, it would still not be the real thing.
JL: Right. And you've totally intimidated me by bringing in that conversation with Janna Levin, because not only didn't I understand what she was saying a lot of the time in that interview, but I didn't understand what I was saying. I just got so brilliantly abstracted into the idea of a conversation about scientific metaphors that I felt like one of my own characters from As She Climbed Across The Table. Like a professor brilliantly bullshitting in front of a roomful of graduate students, and leaving them all totally stymied. But what you just said gives me a way in that is much, much simpler. And that is to say, I actually find myself completely uninterested in the question of realism. And when you talk about the other arts, it suddenly can become easy to understand how beside the point that question might be. When you admire, say, a song by the Talking Heads, is it because in some way it's realistic? Or when you respond to a really great painting, is it any more interesting to judge whether it approaches the optical quality of a photograph? Or is it about what it makes you feel? And there's kind of another realism, which is the realism of response. Do you feel real while you're reading the pages? Does it make you encounter yourself? And that operation can be attempted by every means that language has available. And a sort of microscopic, fine-grain description of everyday life isn't disqualified, but it's merely one tool among so many amazing possible implements. And why exclude metaphor? Why exclude fantasy?
AVC: Having said that, there is a case to be made that your work has been moving, from your early novels to now, toward less overtly fantastical and science-fictional elements.
JL: You know, I will disagree with that. Let's put You Don't Love Me Yet aside for just a moment, because I think you're talking about the arc going from Gun, With Occasional Music to something like The Fortress Of Solitude. The funny thing is, in The Fortress Of Solitude, I used the most embarrassingly blatant piece of fantasy I could think of. A magic ring that lets you fly is a howling, howling piece of fantasy. But what's been true for me is that I've learned to do a more extreme or more vivid version of a kind of conflation of materials that I like. The fantasy is more utterly itself, and in that book, the use of traditional mimetic description is more complete, more realized. And so I was looking to smash the two things together in an even more jagged and disconcerting way. And I think if you look at some of the reactions to that book, where half of the book is completely resisted, I have to claim a kind of success. I don't think that describes any kind of reducing of the element of fantasy; I think I've made it more obtrusive, actually.
And as for the first question—I'm kind of circling around to You Don't Love Me Yet—well, what about Motherless Brooklyn? This is a book where no one even kidnaps a kangaroo. The level of the fantastical is completely linguistic in that book. It's all about a neurological kind of surrealism. And everything that takes place—I don't know if you want to compete between the hapless rock band and the hapless Buddhists and detectives in Motherless Brooklyn, but that book is certainly not fooling around with any science-fiction elements. What's exciting to me is to always locate the juxtaposition at some other level or levels in the book, and reinvent this combination that fascinates me so much, and see how I can then resolve the disruption. Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.
AVC: You Don't Love Me Yet is set in Los Angeles, which is a change from Fortress Of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, both very much books about New York.
JL: Of course, I had a bunch of novels set more-or-less in California and the west before the two big Brooklyn books. There's a kind of expectation—an understandable one—that I would want to climb inside this kind of authority that I've gained with the two Brooklyn books as a kind of "Faulkner of Dean Street," and just set up shop there. You know, why would I want to throw off that special power that I seem to have derived from all of my local provenance, my street cred? But it's very inhibiting, for me anyway, to settle into any stance of bogus authority. I think it really was crucial for me to remain kind of a marginal operator in some ways. Being the laureate of Brooklyn wasn't a fate I wanted to completely settle into any more than being whatever else I've been offered: "the postmodern science-fiction writer" or "the quirky detective writer." I had options to follow up other things I've done too, and kind of shook them off. Los Angeles is a place that really fascinated me, but I hope the book doesn't seem to claim to be incisive about L.A. in any important way. I'm using it, really, as a kind of non-setting, for a book that has more of that sort of enchanted, magical-forest quality. It takes place in a contemporary city that sort of melts away and becomes Shakespeare's forest, where lovers swap identities. I was diverted by a curiosity about L.A., and that itself seemed to be a good stance to be in. Rather than relying on all of this really dubious authority about place, I was happy to be a pretender again. It seemed important.
AVC: Los Angeles seems like a perfect choice if you want a real place that's also a non-setting.
JL: [Laughs.] Well, I'm happy to have you say it, but a lot of people might not agree.
AVC: I don't mean it as a slam, just that Los Angeles has been so mythologized by Hollywood that it sort of feels unreal, like a construct, to those of us that don't live there.
JL: My sense of that setting extends from my sense of those characters, and they come out of my feeling about a certain time in my life when I was living in Berkeley, in San Francisco—but I was really living in that sort of sketchy bohemia of the mind. And if I somehow plopped out of my college years into Williamsburg or Silver Lake, my milieu wouldn't have honestly been all that different. That's not to say that L.A. is a disposable city, but that there's a certain kind of skittish, detached quality to the way these characters live. They never read a newspaper. They're not curious about the gentrification of Echo Park and Silver Lake. They're just not achieving a lot of traction with their real city. So it wouldn't have made sense for there to be long asides where I suddenly analyze the racial politics of East L.A. But yeah, it's easy to misunderstand, because I seem to be a very serious writer about setting, at least in The Fortress Of Solitude, and so people are disconcerted. And I guess I can't blame them. We live in kind of a non-fiction, very literal-minded time. And the things that art does that are irresponsible or have no grounding in sociology or research are very hard to ratify. People want, even in fictional books, storytellers to flash their credentials a lot. By picking L.A. as my setting, where I'm a blatant tourist, I was being a little bit flippant. I was saying, "If this story works, it's not going to be because you are going to learn something about Los Angeles. This isn't a non-fiction book in disguise, it's a piece of enchantment. Take it on that level or leave it."
AVC: So you wanted a place that didn't really have a lot of distinct associations for you.
JL: Yeah. And this is all really just about me looking for an opportunity to work in a way that was going to be surprising to myself. Anything people enjoy, I have to enjoy it first. [Laughs.] But there's a real value in being kind of an amateur. And I felt it was almost urgent for me to reconnect with my feelings of not knowing what I was doing. If I'd written another Brooklyn book right now, I'd have been relying on this kind of grave authority that everyone's awfully eager to honor me with. But an artist is a fugitive a lot of the time—I mean, there's that great Joyce quote about "silence, exile, and cunning"—and I needed to be capricious. What I like best in any of my books, and I like it a lot in this one, are the things I am learning to do as I do them. And writing about these characters and letting go of Brooklyn, parents and children, and the extensive, explicit pop-culture references that characterize the last couple of novels—working in this unexpected way meant I was learning something. I was inventing something on the fly. And it's that game of not knowing what you're doing that, for me, is where the real energy comes from. When I wrote The Fortress Of Solitude, I was blatantly attempting something I didn't know how to do, and every day I had to learn how to write it to make the scenes I wanted to make. And that's how I felt with this one, which is why I see continuities that other people don't.
AVC: Even though it's less directly autobiographical than The Fortress Of Solitude, there are certainly things in You Don't Love Me Yet that seem like they resonate with your own life.
JL: Like the front cover? [Laughs.]
AVC: Like your photo on the front cover, exactly.
JL: It's a confession, too. It's always that. The thing about that question that's always so hard to answer is that the answer's always "Yes, completely" and "Well, no, but not in the ways you're thinking." I'm everywhere in the books. I'm distributed very thoroughly. There are bits of my vanity in Matthew, and my kind of angry awkwardness in Bedwin. I relate enormously to Lucinda. She's a very, very intimate character for me. And in a way, also the complainer; you can even see him as a kind of author surrogate. It's the fortysomething guy who's come along to screw up the lives of these hapless, innocent twentysomethings. And so he's kind of a stand-in for me, for the borderline vulgar impulse to write about people younger than myself. But it could have been a more autobiographical book than it was if I'd given into the impulse to put it in the Bay Area, which is where I was in my 20s. But after all the Brooklyn stuff, I wanted to dodge excavating personal material directly. And so by kind of flipping it to L.A., where I'd be disconcerted out of those habits in relationship to place and setting and a certain time in my own life, I loosened up some of that stuff. I projected the autobiographical feeling more. You know, it is more sublimated.
AVC: In that case, why put yourself on the cover?
JL: Well, it was a joke that turned into a plan. I kept expecting it to be vetoed by some corporate mind somewhere. It's kind of amazing to me that it made it through. I showed the picture to my publisher, because I thought it could be the author photo. I didn't think it would be on the front jacket. But I think it's very funny. What I love about the photograph is how painful my pretensions are, and how unavoidable it is. So it's a way of confessing that I'm not making fun of anyone. Or if I am, most of all, [I'm] making fun of myself. But there's something so poignant and personal to me about that period of self-invention in your 20s when you are kind of a pretentious fool by definition. And never more so than if you're trying, as I was, to become an artist of some kind. It's so compelling to me to think about how much of a pretender I had to be. You announce yourself to the world before you've accomplished anything, and no one cares, and you sort of have to stake out this attitude and try out this profile before anyone cares, and there's something so tender about that. So I'm very fond of the photograph the way I'm fond of those characters. But I also think it's just really funny. I like the kind of Fear Of Music aspect of that photograph. [Laughs.] The way I'm not quite touching the guitar. Like I want to be seen with one, but I wouldn't dare to pick it up.
AVC: What was your musical background back then?
JL: I'm hopeless. I've said this for a while, because people asked about the music in Fortress, that I think if I could play music, my relationship to it as a writer would be so different. For me, music is sort of the art that I can't incorporate into my person the way I want to. I still love books. I feel very holy about books and films. But narrative arts, I kind of do them. I have domesticated those impulses, and I think about how stories work, and the magic is decanted a little bit. But music still sort of hangs up there in the sky for me as this thing that moves me so much, but I can't really make it. It's like a car I can't drive.
AVC: Visual art has always been very important for you.
JL: Being an art student for so long, as well as growing up with my dad's painting—and the habits of museum-going and gallery-going that just went with my father being a fine artist—I still think in those terms a lot. When I think of formal issues, like the ones I was blundering around with with you when we first got started, you know, the whole question of the coexistence within one frame of observed and imagined elements, it's such a natural impulse. And yet people are always questioning in my writing, "Why is Dean Street realistic, and why does the magic ring really work? How can you put those things in the same frame?" Well, when I think about painting, I understand where that assumption comes from for me. Because it seems to me that there are so many great painters—from Edvard Munch to American pop artists—who just don't recognize this division. Mimetic elements and fantastical ones pretty much always coexist in the visual arts. So I'm different from a lot of writers I meet, in that I kind of washed out as a student. I didn't spend a lot of time writing papers. I certainly never wrote a thesis or a dissertation. And I also never worked as a journalist in any real way. I didn't do magazine work or write book reviews or other kinds of non-fiction. So I didn't have this essay-writing background where I switched from writing a lot of non-fiction to stories and novels. I switched from making paintings and sculpture to trying to make stories and novels. Only much later did I ever attempt to write essays or non-fiction. So I don't feel this sort of connection that others do to the academic or journalistic use of words. I think of them more as the other kind of paints and canvas I picked up. The pictures I wanted to make turned out to be story-pictures. They needed to take place in time and language, and so I started to use words and sentences instead of pigments on canvas.
AVC: As you're writing, do you tend to have a pretty solid idea of what things or characters look like?
JL: [Laughs.] Well, now I'll contradict myself bizarrely. This is a really weird area for me, because I never know, and very rarely say, as much as people want me to about how, for instance, characters look. I kept forgetting what Lucinda's hair color was. And this sounds really sketchy, like I really haven't done my job in some way. But for me, there's nothing there but what's on the page, and despite the visual-arts background, I don't think I'm actually that oriented to visual description in my work. And The Fortress Of Solitude might be an exception in this, but for me, when I was a reader only, I was a very fast, voracious one. I would skeletonize the books that I read, and the things I skipped are the things I now skip as a writer. I wasn't really very patient with long evocations of clouds and trees and buildings and landscape, nor did I pause over elaborate descriptions of the facial characteristics or clothing styles of the characters. I always wanted to know what they were doing and saying. And also what the mysterious big idea of the book was, what the metaphors were. So I would rush to those things, and I would be very cursory as I read the descriptive stuff. So now I don't have, in some ways, the tools or instincts of a visually descriptive writer. I sometimes surprise and please myself with a visual description, but I still think that if you analyzed the books and did some sort of ratio measurement of how much language I devote to dialogue, I think I'm very, very parsimonious about description.
I really devote a lot of my wordage, just to look at it in kind of a zero-sum way, to other stuff. But I've often been told that I'm a visual writer. It's interesting to me, because what I think they mean is, well, one really obvious thing is that I go around talking about being an art student all the time, so they say, "Well, he was an art student. He must be a very visual writer." The other thing is that, I think, sometimes visualization in writing works by a kind of homeopathic process. The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like—or what some artist has decided the character really looks like—because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences. And so I think that I invite the reader to do the same thing. And I suspect that if people, when they say that I'm a visual writer—if they mean anything other than just that I go around talking about having been a painter—what they mean is, in fact, weirdly the opposite, that I deny description and force them to do a lot of visualization, so they have a visual experience as they're going. That I create situations that demand visualization.
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