Conversations with Jonathan Lethem

“If Dean Street Could Talk”: Jonathan Lethem

158 “If Dean Street Could Talk”: Jonathan Lethem Brian Berger/2009 This interview originally ran in Stop Smiling, Issue 38 (2009), the third annual“20 Interviews” edition. Jonathan Lethem isn’t just any Brooklyn writer—he grew up there, on Dean Street, between Bond and Nevins specifically. This is well known, of course, and this geographical fact defined the forty-five-year-old’s most celebrated work, the Tourettec tour-Detective-force Motherless Brooklyn (1999), and its follow-up, which can be briefly described as the autobiography of a place, The Fortress of Solitude (2003). That place is so-called Boerum Hill, a sixties real estate fiction primarily designed to obscure the area’s race- and classriven history. That this history—and, indeed, even in an era of hyper-gentri fication, its multilayered, multiethnic residential and industrial reality— remains little known despite Lethem’s testimony is puzzling. It makes you wonder what people like about the guy anyway. In many cases, even in Lethem’s hometown, it’s Motherless’ funk-loving hero, Lionel Essrog, they love, which is fair enough. The freighted life and times of Lionel’s creator is his business. Likewise, if some believe that Motherless made its author an “overnight” success, Lethem is an uncomplaining beneficiary, albeit a self-aware one disinclined to heed public expectations. Motherless was in fact Lethem’s fifth novel, with a short story collection in tow, and its author hardly the first Brooklynite to assay either Dean Street or Boerum Hill. He was preceded by, among others: bank robber and twotime memoirist Willie Sutton; Diggers non-leader and Ringolevio (1972) author Emmett Grogan; Spike Lee, who filmed his 1994 adaptation of Richard Price’s Clockers in the nearby Gowanus Houses, the same projects Mos Def shouts-out in his Black on Both Sides anthem, “Brooklyn” (1999). Even Lionel Essrog has a popular precedent in Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman’s bond- BRIAN BERGER / 2009 159 age-loving, Gravesend-residing character in The French Connection (1971); that Lionel is a private detective and Popeye a cop matters not. Or maybe it does, a little bit. William Friedkin’s The French Connection was based on actual events, the film an adaptation—sometimes faithful, sometimes dramatically heightened—of journalist Robin Moore’s 1969 book of the same title. It’s a process—the assessment and expression of overlapping realities—Lethem is very familiar with, both in his own work and that of the numerous artists he is a generous admirer of. First in a writing studio overlooking the Gowanus Canal, then in the apartment Lethem shares with his wife, writer and filmmaker Amy Barrett, their young son Everett and a Jack Russell terrier, Maisey, we discussed some of those influences. Stop Smiling: I see you have Nathanael West on your desk—what’s going on there? Jonathan Lethem: That’s my work right now, I’m going to write a new introduction to West’s Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust. So that’s a pretty exciting assignment. I devoured West when I was a teenager, so it’s a good way to reacquaint myself with what feels like a very strong influence. But in fact, the details, I barely remember them—that paradox of things I ingested at a very early point become hugely formative but by now are totally unfamiliar. SS: I wouldn’t compare you to Day of the Locust protagonist Tod Hackett, but it seems some people were rooting for your last novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007), to fail. Did you sense that also? JL: Yes. As of Fortress of Solitude, I was a traditionally grandiose, emotionally sincere American novelist; with You Don’t Love Me Yet it appears I’m writing a thin, frothy romantic novel set in the wrong city. That was something I willed into being—I was ready to throw off any sense that I was going to write sprawling social novels set in Brooklyn and become the Brooklyn Faulkner. Neither Motherless nor Fortress exactly fits that description, but the accumulated image of the two books seemed to project that. I don’t know if it would have been easy or hard for someone else to follow through with it, but it was totally out of the question for me. And really, for anyone who had even glanced at the earlier work that’d be obvious. But there were a lot of people—and an important critical framework—which...