Conversations with Jonathan Lethem

Jonathan Lethem and Lydia Millet

149 Jonathan Lethem and Lydia Millet Lydia Millet/2008 This interview was commissioned by and first published in Bomb Magazine, Issue 103, Spring 2008, pp. 30–35. Copyright © Bomb Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors . All rights reserved. The Bomb Archive can be viewed at www.bombsite.com. Lethem, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his fifth novel Motherless Brooklyn, grew up in Brooklyn and Kansas City and trained as a painter before turning to writing in his early twenties. Recently he’s offered some of his short stories for free to filmmakers and others who wish to adapt them, through his own version of the open-source movement, which he calls the Promiscuous Materials project. He also recently married for the third time and in May 2007 had a baby son, Everett. His most recent novel is You Don’t Love Me Yet, out in paperback from Doubleday. Like Lethem, Lydia Millet has a young child—two in fact; a four-year-old girl and a boy born a few months ago. She is the author of six novels, the latest of which, How the Dead Dream, was published by Counterpoint in January and is planned as the first in a trilogy. Millet, who won the PEN USA Award for Fiction for her early book My Happy Life, grew up in Toronto and now lives in the Arizona desert where she writes and works for her husband ’s endangered species group, the Center for Biological Diversity. Jonathan Lethem: I was thinking I’d like to begin by asking you what you’re reading at the moment. I’m reading Darkmans, by Nicola Barker. I would give you a brilliant, extensive impression of it if I weren’t completely exhausted from putting the baby to bed. We’ve lit a fire and The Princess Bride is on television, so my brilliant extensiveness will have to wait for my next email. Still—what are you reading? Lydia Millet: I’m an ADD kind of reader. I usually have a few books going at once. But like you, I have a baby, and mine is only three weeks old. So read- 150 CONVERSATIONS WITH JONATHAN LETHEM ing time is at a minimum and all there is for me right now is Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, a Christmas present, which is both nonfiction and a bestseller. Both abnormal for me. But I’m caught up in it. It’s fun. Who wouldn’t like to know what the world would look like after a highly selective apocalypse limited to homo sapiens? The premise, if you don’t already know it, is: how would the earth fare if you snapped your fingers and all the people were instantly gone? Raptured off skyward, or spontaneously combusted? Of course our fall is more likely to be a long plummet, but it’s still a great conceit. Plus, did you know that a tire is one giant single molecule? That’s what Mr. Goodyear and his vulcanization gave us. I mean a whole tire, one molecule . You could have knocked me over with a feather. JL: I’ve been eager to get my hands on that Weisman book. Am I right that it projects its human absence onto the island of Manhattan, or was that just a delightful dream I had—or an old Twilight Zone episode I am generously crediting in recollection to my dreamlife? As it happens, I’m working on a novel about a version of Manhattan invaded by weird harbingers of animal life—specifically, an out-of-control tiger (I warned you I was predating on your extinction-of-species beat, didn’t I?). The recent news from the San Francisco zoo weirdly trumped—or, if you prefer, as I do, to think of it in terms of Robert’s Rules of Order, “seconded”—my motif. I’ll be trying to get my mind around that one-giant-molecule notion as I drive into town on the recently and irregularly plowed Maine roads on my four molecules today, in order to send this email from the signal at the library. And yes, like you, I usually have too many books going at once, and I’m always vowing to simplify, to unify. As I am with projects. It always appears that I am on the verge of knocking out the last few extracurricular assignments—reviews, essays, stories for anthologies (or written interviews . . . )—and becoming...