AVC: The new novel demands that readers invent their own idea of what the music sounds like. When I was reading it, just because I know you like Talking Heads, I imagined that your band sounds kind of like Talking Heads.
JL: [Laughs.] This is a great example of the stuff that people think I should know that I don't know. I only know what's on the page, you know? And I've been running into this in a very funny and specific kind of way right now, because I'm inviting some bands to make some of the songs that are mentioned in the book into real songs, and they all want to know what I think it sounds like. And I don't really have an answer for them. The descriptions on the page and the fragments of lyrics on the page are exactly as far as I ever got. Not being a musician, it probably isn't a good idea for me to go any further than that. But this gets into that mysterious realm of "Where does an artist's authority come from?" And people can be quite infuriated if you suggest that you're not writing about something that has a secret reality hiding behind it somewhere. "Oh, the answer is they sound like Talking Heads," or "Oh, here, let me play this example for you, this is what the real band sounded like." I'm evoking emotions and imaginings in my readers by manipulating language. There's no other name for what I do. It isn't that there's a kind of hidden reality behind it, it's that language is this weird drug that you can transmit feeling and suggestion from one person to another with, if you use it artfully. And I hope I've done that, so that everyone will come away with a sense of what the music might sound like, but of course everyone's sense would be slightly different.
I think Talking Heads are a good point of reference, just because they have that awkward, nerdy, art-school quality. Intellectuals yearning to be funky, the early Talking Heads. And bottom line, they've got gender diversity. [Laughs.] I was thinking of a lot of bands with, you know, boys and girls. Like The Go-Betweens, and in a weird way, Fleetwood Mac, for being a band with exes in it. But also—it is kind of a perverse game to play, but I was very careful about not nailing down exactly when this book takes place. You can kind of isolate it to some time in the early '90s, and I was thinking of a lot of bands that were sort of famous to me in that period, but didn't get famous to very many other people. Like Glass Eye and Big Dipper and a band called Christmas, from Boston. Bands that were probably like the kind of musician I would have been if I'd ever been able to be one: a little bit nerdy and erring on the clever side, but with that awkward sincerity—when that breaks through the intellectualisms the way it does in Talking Heads or Arcade Fire, it can be very exciting.
AVC: You were talking about things that don't have names, and that's a technique you use over and over in the novel—the band doesn't have a name. And you often refer to the characters not by name, but by their positions in the band.
JL: "The bassist" or "the lead singer." Yeah, I like things that don't have a set name. In Fortress Of Solitude, every character had at least two names. There was your name, the nickname that Mingus gave you, your graffiti name… In this way, I'm thinking very much about masks and roles, people trying on different selves. And since this is a book about that weird, hapless, middle-20s period in life, it's not even that these characters have an abundance of possible names, but they don't really find any that they're comfortable with. Their names seem to slip away from them a lot, which speaks to the slipshod identities of that pretentious period of self-invention, I think is the right way to put it. You're trying on faces, like I am on the front jacket of the book, and then you're immediately embarrassed and you discard them.
AVC: The title of You Don't Love Me Yet comes from songs by, respectively, Roky Erickson and The Vulgar Boatmen, which you quote for the epigraph of the novel.
JL: It was just kind of dumb luck. I have this very aggrieved history with titles—I never have them until the last possible second. Every one of the books, with the sole exception of Girl In Landscape, had some really bad working title that held until almost the last minute, and then my publisher forced me to do better. I could go down the list and tell you what the bad alternate title is for every novel I've written—and in some ways, because I've lived with those alternates for so long, they feel like the real, secret name of the book. But they're bad enough that I mostly don't want to confess them. This book was going to be called Monster Eyes. I just thought, "Oh, of course, it could only be called Monster Eyes." And then the clunkiness of that was pointed out to me by enough people that I grudgingly let go of it. "You Don't Love Me Yet" isn't my phrase, but for a book about appropriated language and the way things can be repurposed, it seemed okay. And, it's a beautifully passive-aggressive title. [Laughs.] Especially with my mug on the cover, and the words "love me" highlighted in red. It's like, "But you're gonna! I hope!" And of course it has the added bonus that it brings to mind not just one, but two irresistible pop songs. I think that is my favorite Roky Erickson song, and it's one of those incredibly versatile songs; all the covers are really good. I really am always happy when I hear someone covering "You Don't Love Me Yet" by Roky Erickson. And then there's this great Vulgar Boatmen track, which has nothing to do with the Roky Erickson, and is maybe my favorite Vulgar Boatmen song. That this had so many sweet associations just made it feel very lucky to me to put it on the book.
AVC: Speaking of appropriating language, you've been doing a lot lately with public-domain issues, like the essay you wrote for Harpers drawn from other people's writing. There's the Promiscuous Materials Project, which grants other artists the right to adapt some of your shorter work for a dollar, and you're also offering to give away the film rights to You Don't Love Me Yet to someone willing to let the movie go into the public domain in five years.
JL: A lot of people would say, "Who are you to assume anyone cares, or wants to use this stuff?" [Laughs.] But it's a fun realm to dabble in. I'm getting to make what feels to me like provocative yet inoffensive gestures toward a freer culture or healthier public domain. And there's something very fun about giving stuff away.
AVC: The question of who owns an idea comes up in You Don't Love Me Yet—Bedwin is nominally the songwriter of the band, but Lucinda gives him lyrics from someone else. Later, they're asked who writes the material, and three people give three different answers, all sort of wrong and sort of right.
JL: One of the things I like to think about, as I did in the Harper's essay in a kind of serious way: The image of the artist is sustained by this great myth of iconoclastic individual genius. A lot of great stuff is made up by individual iconoclastic geniuses, and that's fine, but a lot of other stuff comes burbling out of collective culture. That gets invented one way and then used an entirely different way, and different people work on it, and you end up with this sort of puzzle. If you admire certain kinds of artifacts, especially pop artifacts that are made kind of collectively or out of a mingled corporate impulse, modified by someone trying to make something actually artistic peculiar… What do you have then? Who is it that you're admiring? What are you exalting when you think that an ABBA song is really good? Or when you have to admit that you really love a certain action movie? Pop music has always feasted on appropriating bits of garbage language from the culture, things that were just floating around. There's all these great soul songs that use advertising jingles—you know, things like "Stop! In The Name Of Love," or "I'd Rather Fight Than Switch." Or Buddy Holly grabbing the line "That'll Be The Day" from The Searchers. So whose line is that? And how do we feel about it? And this goes, of course, to the accusations that are always being levied against Bob Dylan… Another really great example is how you are supposed to feel if you think The Monkees' "I'm A Believer" is a really great song, and it makes you feel something when it's on the radio. Is it an embarrassing problem that [the song] was made almost cynically, and certainly wasn't made by the people whose voices you're singing along with? The instruments are all played by other people, and the song was written in the Brill Building. I like those conundrums, and I wanted to fool around with something like that.
AVC: Since you brought up Bob Dylan, what was it like to interview him for Rolling Stone?
JL: This is a funny thing: As a writer, I came out of that experience vowing that the only thing that mattered in writing the piece was, I was going to exactly try to put on the page what it was like to be with him, even if it was at the expense of some great quotes from him, or of making people think that I was an amateurish music writer, because I was putting too much of myself in the piece. I would answer that question in the piece, and I would talk about being in the room, and how surprising and mercurial and generous he seemed. So I did my damnedest to do that, and, of course, the result is that everyone who reads it, their first question is "What was it really like?" [Laughs.] That itself is one of Dylan's interesting dilemmas, and what I sensed very strongly is that the more he tries to say, "Hey! Here's what I think," the more people say, "Yeah, but what do you really think?" The more he tries to expose his secrets, the more secretive he somehow seems. Personally, [the interview] was, you know, beautiful! I loved it! [Laughs.] I was treated very kindly by someone who I think is sort of a Shakespeare. As titanic a creative figure as we could be lucky enough to have walking around on Earth at the same time as ourselves. And he wasn't in any way impatient with me. So no complaints.
AVC: Dylan's persona has a lot of resonance with what you're working with lately.
JL: Also in terms of this question of the exaggeration of the idea of purer originality, because who could better illuminate the chimera, the bogus notion of absolute originality, than someone like Dylan, who… Every single piece of material that he offers us has evidence of its sources. He's a total composite, in a certain sense, and yet, how could his work ever have existed, if he himself didn't give it that singular voice and bring together the sources in one place the way he does? There's no question that he's an explosively creative figure, and yet you can always talk about his debts. Pointing arrows of lineages and connections and sources; he's almost a museum of sources, his body of work. And the two things coexist absolutely. I think it can be a great incitement to letting go of the anxieties about influence, and instead accepting it as the beautifully impure state of creativity itself.
AVC: How difficult was it to get your novels accepted as "literary" fiction because of the genres you were working in?
JL: Well, I stopped thinking about that a while ago. The great thing is that at a certain point, you realize there's no door marked "Literature" that you are on one side of and knocking on, and then you're simply admitted, and they give you a T-shirt with a big "L" on it. The world of the arts is gloriously chaotic and subjective, and there are people who probably thought I was doing something worthwhile right at the start. There are probably people who will never be interested at all. And it doesn't actually prevent me from writing the way I like to write, and as it's turned out, having the incredible luck of being read. I mean, I'm taken seriously enough. You only need to be taken a little bit seriously. [Laughs.] The rest of it is not only not in your control, and not only doesn't matter, it probably doesn't even exist.
AVC: Do you think that with your own work's reception, and things like Michael Chabon winning the Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay, with all its comic-book elements, that genre fiction is becoming more critically accepted by the mainstream?
JL: Well, I've always felt gleeful to point out the places where pop culture or genre has been embraced, either consciously or kind of helplessly by highbrow culture, but the divisions don't really make as much sense as they seem to. If we were waiting for Michael Chabon to legitimize cartoonishness in fiction, then what about the way Donald Barthelme was the New Yorker's favorite writer in the '70s? Or that Thomas Pynchon won the National Book Award with his resolutely cartoonish style? It's sort of a revolution that's always happening and is never finished. It's a false image of progress in the arts. The idea that, for us who embrace these motifs, and I certainly do embrace them, that there's kind of a war to be fought and maybe we're winning it. Or—oh no!—we might be losing it. I don't really think it works that way. I just think that the people who are excited about things like this have a lot to be excited about. [Laughs.]
AVC: Are you still working on a new version of Omega The Unknown for Marvel Comics?
JL: Yes! I'm the slowest comic-book writer on Earth. I'm medium-fast by novel-writing standards, but by comic-book-writing standards, I think I might be William Gaddis. Which isn't to say I'm writing The Recognitions of comic books. I'm writing a very quirky, kind of an emo comic book—that's what I've concluded about it. One of the interesting things is that, you know, I fool around with words all the time, but I'm realizing as I do this that [comics] is not really a word-medium. The most important thing about writing a comic book is giving the artist some really cool shit to draw. So I'm just doing my very best to give [artist and collaborator] Farel Dalrymple amazingly challenging and weird and tender and strange scenes to bring to life.
AVC: What is your approach to reinventing the character?
JL: I think the simplest thing to say is that—and this wasn't a plan I had in advance—I feel that I've ended up doing to traditional Marvel comics, what, in some ways, I did to dystopian science fiction in Amnesia Moon. The normal thought about comic books is that to make them "better," they need to be made more intense, or more realistic, or more violent, or more adult, or darker. It's pretty much synonymous with the claim of importance for a comic book now that it's dark. But I don't think that, for me anyway, there's any useful direction in darkening Omega The Unknown, or the superhero image generally. I think it's been darkened plenty. [Laughs.] So I'm just making it a little looser and sweeter and spacier and more introspective. Just making it a little quieter in some ways. But it's terribly important to say that it also really is a reinterpretation of an incredible story by the original creators, by Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes, and I'm depending on it in all sorts of ways. Part of the pleasure of this work is manipulating pre-existing materials that are magically charged for me. It was a big influence on The Fortress Of Solitude; the elements that it drew into one place really helped me dream up that book.
AVC: This is the second book you've written where kangaroos are a prominent part of the story, the first being Gun, With Occasional Music, with its genetically engineered, intelligent kangaroo thugs.
JL: I don't know if I have anything better than a tongue-in-cheek response to that. It was a little bit of an in-joke for me, that I owed a debt to the kangaroos because I'd gotten them so flagrantly wrong in Gun, With Occasional Music. The male kangaroo in that book has a pouch, and I felt like I'd always owed them a correction.
AVC: It's funny that you think of that as a flaw, considering they can also talk and shoot guns.
JL: [Laughs.] Well, I'm a realist, you know… You Don't Love Me Yet was a book that was very open to serendipitous influence. I didn't know the zoo was going to be a part of the book at all. I was waylaid during one of my research jaunts. I got this great invitation from a guy who was billed as the mayor of Silver Lake [the L.A. neighborhood where much of the book's action takes place], this hipster maven, and he was going to drive me around Silver Lake and talk to me about what it meant to him. And he suddenly understandably grew very self-conscious about this assignment, and he realized how uncool it was to be the official mayor of Silver Lake— you know, to be it was to not be it. And so he took me to the zoo instead. It was this weird usurpation of my day of research, but then the zoo became this sort of half-willing presence in the book, and it got more and more interesting to me. Part of the pleasure of abandoning some of my tools and habits and opening myself up to chance, and the liberating qualities of being an amateur again, was that I could let things kind of intrude into the book. Once I noticed that the L.A. kangaroos did look a little bit, you know, despondent, I backed into this echo of Gun, With Occasional Music that amused me, and I could afford to be amused by it. There was no reason to resist it.
AVC: Does that kind of serendipity happen a lot when you're writing?
JL: Well, it can. More in certain contexts than in others. You know, when I talk about wanting to make sure I don't, you know, let any kind of bogus authority settle over me. You know, one of the tricks to Fortress Of Solitude—I'm so immensely proud of that book—I was in a weird way doing, like, a collective oral history of the place I grew up in, and that entails a kind of dutifulness. You know? I hope the book doesn't feel dutiful, but I certainly felt that I'd taken up a meaningful representation, in a way. And I was skirting that with the kind of book that I conceived next. And that creates an open structure that is very permissive, if a kangaroo or a friend wishing for a cameo appears before my eyes. I think in that sense, I was trying to make the book itself replicate the issues that the characters are facing. They're at that point in their lives where everything is possible and impossible. The book itself, I think, is sort of like hipsters in their 20s, trying to figure out what to be. I hope it has some of the sweet haplessness of the kinds of lives that I'm writing about.
AVC: What is your typical workday like, when you're in the middle of writing a novel? Do you write every day?
JL: Yeah, that's it. That's the only thing I really worry about. I try to write every day. I don't beat myself up about word counts, or how many hours are ticking by on the clock before I'm allowed to go and do something else. I just try to keep a hand in and work every single day, even if there are other demands or I'm on a book tour or have the flu or something, because then I keep my unconscious engaged with the book. Then I'm always a little bit writing, no matter what else I'm doing.
AVC: What do you do when you get stuck?
JL: I may sound like some sort of lunatic optimist here, but I don't really ever think of it as "stuck." I just have a tolerance for waiting, and acceptance that there are times of hesitation and waiting and confusion. That is writing. You know, a novel is an enormous compilation of problems solved, and once you accept that that's what the work consists of, you also have to accept that there are times when you haven't solved them yet.
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