Conversations with Jonathan Lethem

“Involuntary Deconstructionism”: Paradoxa Interview with Jonathan Lethem

32 “Involuntary Deconstructionism”: Paradoxa Interview with Jonathan Lethem Shelley Jackson/2001 From Paradoxa no. 16,“Dark Alleys of Noir,”edited by Jack O’Connell, 2002, ISBN: 1-92951210 -4. More information about this and other Paradoxa titles can be found at www.para doxa.com. Reprinted with permission. Jonathan Lethem has snuck up on the literary establishment from the underside . His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, was part science fiction, part hardboiled detective novel; later books have paid due to other reaches of what is called genre writing, while dodging easy labels themselves. This shifty behavior could be a publicist’s nightmare, but Jonathan has made a name for himself. Apparently he is easy to spot behind his masks. He earned his mainstream stripes with last year’s Motherless Brooklyn, a crime novel (but also, as he points out below, “a Bildungsroman, a family romance, a coming-of-age story . . . a ‘geek’ novel”) about a detective with Tourette’s syndrome, which won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. It would be underhanded to pretend the ordinary interviewer-subject relations obtain here. Jonathan and I have known each other for a long time, and our writerly beginnings are all snarled up together. Consequently, this is an interview straining to become a conversation, and partly succeeding, though perhaps at the cost of some of the traditional virtues of interviews. Maybe it would be best to think of this interview on noir as a particularly noir interview: an interrogation in which it is not always clear who is under examination. Shelley Jackson: Do you think there is something particularly “noir” about Motherless Brooklyn? Offhand, I don’t find the genre an especially useful ref- SHELLEY JACKSON / 2001 33 erence, probably because I mostly think of noir in literal terms of black and white. The way those movies look—the plotless drama of light on objects. And I don’t think about your writing in visual terms. But I suppose the noir connection has more to do with a sense of “degraded world” and faulty morals on all sides . . . and a “hero” with a problem? Jonathan Lethem: There are many answers to that. First, impulsively, the visual stuff—you’re absolutely right that I’m a less visual writer than you, a less visual writer than most, and a less visual writer than I’m often taken to be. Early on it was a constant surprise to be taken that way. The percentage of actual visual description in my work is unusually low—especially taken literally, as a sort of word-count per page of how I spend my writerly capital . Instead I tell stories in dialogue and reaction, in emotional descriptions and actions—stage plays or screenplays filled out everywhere with subjective response and counter-response, and speculation and concept, almost anything but visual information. And in fact what visual description—faces, rooms, clothing, landscape—is actually present in the published work has often been wrenched out of me by frustrated editors who say, “I can’t see anything!”—a recurring passage in my editorial relationships. But I’ve come to see that the unusual environments my characters are forced to move through and their powerfully confused responses to those environments create an implicit visual level. I force visualization on the reader, and he then credits me with the work that he’s done himself. Even in Girl in Landscape , which is openly a book about the desert, I don’t so much describe the place as name it and its features again and again, until I’ve stacked up a big self-contradicting pile of nouns: pillars, rusty pipes, ruins, wreckage, pylons, monoliths, spires, smashed furniture. People get angry at me because I can’t confirm their impressions of what an Archbuilder looks like! I ought to say “if I knew I’d tell you,” but a more honest response would be “if I knew I wouldn’t have been interested in writing about them,” or “if either you or I knew I would have failed”—because keeping you in an irritated state of unreality is the point. SJ: Wait a minute. Before you go on, tell me what you mean by “keeping the reader in an irritated state of unreality.” JL: Nothing more original or elaborate than that I’m just fond enough of metafictional moves to want to tease at them constantly, without quite committing overt metafiction. And of unreliable narration to tease at...