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An Interview with Jonathan Lethem
- University Press of Mississippi
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24 An Interview with Jonathan Lethem Michael Silverblatt/1999 From Bookworm, KCRW-FM, November 18, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by KCRW-FM. Reprinted by permission. Silverblatt: Hello, and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblatt and today my guest is Jonathan Lethem. He’s the author most recently of Motherless Brooklyn, a book from Doubleday, and in, well, the first book was called Gun, with Occasional Music, followed by Amnesia Moon, then a book of short stories, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, As She Climbed Across the Table, and Girl in Landscape. Now, he writes my favorite kind of book, which is a sort of fantasy containing elements of science fiction, mystery , but not locatable in any genre, almost as if smearing or bringing into hyperspace the best effects in all of these books without much caring about their simplified morals or their easy solutions. And so Motherless Brooklyn is, like his previous book, a book it seems to me about parents, although it takes the form of a detective novel in a way with a detective with Tourette’s syndrome, and I wanted to start by asking you about orphans and parenting . Lethem: Well, I feel that you’ve sort of nailed me. I think I’ve written about fathers and sons obsessively. And it’s taken various forms . . . and there are generic echoes for me. I think Orson Welles’s films are some sort of deep structural analogue where there’s always the sort of the Kane figure and the reporter chasing him, the sort of remote father or mysterious father or grandiose father, sometimes an evil father, and a son who’s trying to define himself in opposition or just struggle to separate the useful or pleasant parts of his inheritance from the odious ones. And sometimes I think I push into a larger family structure and talk about siblinghood a bit or motherhood a bit. But this new book is certainly absolutely a fathers-and-sons book, again. And I come to this material helplessly. It’s not something I understood that MICHAEL SILVERBLAT T / 1999 25 I was getting at until I’d already committed three books that had that theme in common. Silverblatt: It’s fascinating to me because Freud talked about the family romance and the family fantasy. And it has interested me that the books I’ve been caring about in this fantastic arena that are not genre bound are often ways of presenting an elaborate, beautiful, mesmerizing surface in order to explore a fantasy having to do with re-parenting or ghostly, ghastly figures of parents in a gallery who appear in this inexplicable pattern, almost as if the books were the result of a free association that occurs in narrative. Lethem: You’re making me think of the book previous to this one, Girl in Landscape, which I wrote partly with the phrase, just the two words, family romance as a kind of mantra for the feeling I wanted to get into it. And there’s an underlying thinking about Henry James ghost stories where there’s that uncertainty about characters who are transubstantiating out of the ghost realm into the psychological realm. And the intensity of projection onto a remaining parent when one parent is missing, the extrapolation of the ghost limb of a missing parent. And I do think that there are truisms that can be fertile—the old one that I’m always hearing and agreeing with and disagreeing with is that all novels are mysteries. But I also think all novels are Bildungsromans. They’re all sagas of adolescence disguised in various ways. The second novel I wrote, Amnesia Moon, is about a man ostensibly in his thirties, but it’s absolutely an x-ray of a kind of teenage search for self among the tattered remnants of adult identities. And I think that in some ways the new book is a confession or an uncloaking of that theme. I go back to the adolescence as the kind of key to the story. Silverblatt: Well, let me restructure this then. What we have here in these last two books, the newest book is Motherless Brooklyn, the earlier one is Girl in Landscape. One book is a science fiction Western. The other is a putative detective novel whose hero is an orphan with Tourette’s syndrome who is discovering in fact that his tic, his vocal tic, is a way...