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Interview with Jonathan Lethem Booth Volume 3 Issue 4 Article 3 4-15-2011 Interview with Jonathan Lethem Alex Mattingly Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/booth Recommended Citation Mattingly, Alex (2011) "Interview with Jonathan Lethem," Booth: Vol. 3 : Iss. 4 , Article 3. Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/booth/vol3/iss4/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Booth by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Interview with Jonathan Lethem Abstract The work of Jonathan Lethem could fill a bookshelf. His novels include Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn and, most recently, Chronic City. Lethem has also penned two collections of nonfiction, three collections of short stories, and the graphic novel Omega the Unknown. In 2005 Lethem was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2011 he will begin his tenure as the Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College. Lethem recently spoke at Butler University as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers series, after which he sat down to speak with Booth's Alex Mattingly. Keywords interview, author, writing This article is available in Booth: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/booth/vol3/iss4/3 Booth Journal Mattingly: Interview with Jonathan Lethem ABOUT ARCHIVES CONTESTS PRINT SUBMIT April 15, 2011 Interview with Jonathan Lethem The work of Jonathan Lethem could fill a bookshelf. His novels include Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn and, most recently, Chronic City. Lethem has also penned two collections of nonfiction, three collections of short-stories, and the graphic novel Omega the Unknown. In 2005 Lethem was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2011 he will begin his tenure as the Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College. Lethem recently spoke at Butler University as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers series, after which he sat down to speak with Booth‘s Alex Mattingly. Published by Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2011 1 http://booth.butler.edu/page/3/[5/4/2011 11:32:55 PM] Booth Journal Booth, Vol. 3 [2011], Iss. 4, Art. 3 AM: When you were starting out, looking for places to publish, did you have an idea of what kind of writer you wanted to be? JL: I did, but that idea changed constantly based on something new I’d learn about myself from writing, or something new I’d glimpse about the world of publishing. So yes, I had what I felt was a strong idea, but it was a very mercurial one at the same time. What I really had was a strong impulse to assume the role of the writer in some way, and I was waiting for the world to say yes to that. When my first novel was published, it was a bit of a Rorschach test. Some people thought it was a postmodern pastiche, some people thought it was an out-and-out dystopian novel, and some people were sure it was a crime novel, because it introduced a detective and because there were clues in the book and a solution at the end, They were sure I was going to write about that detective over and over again. So I got in this business of gratifying and also disappointing expectations very early on. It was great fun to try on these different roles. For me, it was exciting to keep messing with expectations. I like being slippery and problematic. AM: Amnesia Moon, your second novel, which was sort of a strange collection of dystopian fantasies, was very different from Gun, With Occasional Music. I read somewhere that it actually began from several short stories you’d written. JL: It was partly a salvage operation. I had these failed short stories that began to relate themselves in my mind. They all exhibited these same impulses – I felt compelled to destroy the world again and again. I started to wonder, what am I trying to accomplish here? Why do I want to imagine everything in ruins? And I thought that maybe these unfulfilled apocalyptic stories could themselves be put in relation to one another, where the question that was interesting to me was, why do I keep doing this? It was about characters who are dreaming the world into destruction, and why they feel they have to do that. It’s a very homely construction, and I wonder sometimes how it would strike me if I reread it. Some of my earliest published writing ended up engulfed in that book – there’s stuff https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/booth/vol3/iss4/3 2 http://booth.butler.edu/page/3/[5/4/2011 11:32:55 PM] Booth Journal Mattingly: Interview with Jonathan Lethem written by an eighteen year old in there. The fact that it’s still in print and sitting among my other books is almost an act of impersonation. It’s like a kid in a Halloween costume. On stilts. AM: You’ve described Chronic City as a dystopian novel as well. JL: It’s the kind of book I was trying to write when I wrote Amnesia Moon, but which I didn’t have any of the equipment to do. It’s the kind of book I once thought I would always be writing, consisting of characters enmeshed in reality meltdowns and paranoid deconstructions of everyday life. I loved that so much when I first encountered writers doing it, I valorized it so totally that my dream was to be that kind of writer exclusively. Of course, I turned out to have all sorts of other agendas that snuck up on me, but in Chronic City it’s like I got back to the primary job, my initial assignment. AM: Do you see any of that with the book you’re working on now? You’ve described it as being set against the collapse of the ideals of Communism, and it seems that the characters must be dealing with their own private dystopias. JL: It’s there but in a totally different kind of way in my thinking about the real life political nightmare of the American Left in the twentieth-century, which is a kind of paranoid dystopia that was enacted. Half the communist cells in America consisted of three real communists and two FBI agents leading the charge. Half the communist activity that was detectable in America, at a certain point, was probably created by FBI agents. It is its own insane game of masquerade and paranoia, but also with this unbelievably powerful core of human learning and despair of wanting to transform the world and having that spirit crushed so utterly in so many ways. It’s not so different, but it’s sourced in personal memory for me and in factual research into the era, the fifties and sixties. But in a certain way, helplessly, it’s the same kind of project again. AM: Can you talk about your approach for a collaborative piece like Omega the Unknown, or the book with Carter Schultz, Kafka Americana? JL: With both those projects, the conditions of their creation were so Published by Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2011 3 http://booth.butler.edu/page/3/[5/4/2011 11:32:55 PM] Booth Journal Booth, Vol. 3 [2011], Iss. 4, Art. 3 specific . with Carter, we had been thinking and talking about this joke that became much more than a joke, that there was something about Franz Kafka and Frank Capra, apart from their names, that was in dialogue and needed to be unearthed. So we drew this idea out of the air between us, and if we were going to do it justice it would have to be a piece of genuine collaborative writing. Of course, it also had a reflexivity in it, because it was a collaboration about the idea of collaboration between two sensibilities. We were two writers with different strengths and different leanings, writing about two artists with different strengths and different leanings. The hope was that maybe we could be the antidote to the other’s weaknesses rather than cancelling out each other’s strengths. But I just can’t imagine those exact circumstances coming about around any other thing. Omega the Unknown was collaborative too, but in some ways much more awkward and in slow motion. It was actually an involuntary collaboration, imposed on the other creator, Steve Gerber. It also came at a time when I was thinking a lot about intertextuality and multiple-authored works, and how, while the art form I’d chosen didn’t have a particularly strong tradition of collaboration, there were other art forms like pop music or Hollywood film or the superhero comic book that were fundamentally collaborative. So I was excited about that. I wanted to see if I could enter into this position, be the writer of a comic book who could never claim for a minute that everything on the page was my responsibility or origination, and instead celebrate this weird, bastard form. AM: Did you approach Marvel with an interest in the character, or did they approach you? JL: They invited me to do something with some character of theirs. I think they were expecting me to pick Spider-Man or somebody famous, the idea being that anyone given the keys to the castle of their intellectual property would want to choose one of these mighty pieces of property. But instead it was like I came in and ignored all the treasure and instead noticed this ashtray that someone’s twelve-year-old made in school and said, “I want that!” One of the guys I talked to in the initial meeting didn’t even remember the character.
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