Conversations with Jonathan Lethem

An Interview with Jonathan Lethem

69 An Interview with Jonathan Lethem Michael Silverblatt/2003 From Bookworm, KCRW-FM, December 4, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by KCRW-FM. Reprinted by permission. Silverblatt: From KCRW Santa Monica I’m Michael Silverblatt and this is Bookworm. Today I’m happy to have as my guest Jonathan Lethem, whose new book The Fortress of Solitude has recently been published by Doubleday . It’s a big novel. It’s his biggest book I think to date. Lethem: Yeah. Twice as long as anything before. Silverblatt: Wow. Lethem: They’ve disguised it with nice thin sheets of paper but it’s double the length. Silverblatt: I want to find a way to go through this book, since a lot of people are talking about it but it seems to me that they’re missing a lot of things. In the final pages of the book Jonathan talks about a kind of happier place. The book has been about neighborhoods, neighborhoods in Brooklyn , racialisms. The hero of the book has been one of three white children in his public school class. His parents live in that neighborhood of Brooklyn, Gowanus, by choice. They feel they’re carrying on the good fight, the old fight, the integration fight. And the boy to some extent in very complicated ways is both the victim and the beneficiary of their liberalism. But by the end of the book, having taken us through many different enclaves in which race, gender, all kinds of questions get subjected to an eye that wants to see both sides of the picture, we come to the kind of art that does not have an interest in sociology or race or gender. It’s typified on the one hand by the kind of experimental filmmaking that Stan Brakhage was doing and the boy, Dylan’s, father is himself that kind of filmmaker, and the kind of music that Eno was trying to make during the [unintelligible] rock days. In other 70 CONVERSATIONS WITH JONATHAN LETHEM words, something that could appeal to popular culture conceivably but was not of or made from popular culture. Stuff that people called the ivory tower if they weren’t talking about the academy but about the sacred precincts of art. And this book seems to be the book in which you investigate as far as you have away from the hermetic. Lethem: Yeah. It’s very interesting to try to pursue that thread because I think there is an argument with myself about what my writing has been for in the book. This image of the main character’s father, Abraham, is a filmmaker kind of in the Brakhage mould and he’s painting on celluloid in this very absolute and super-essential and hermetic way. By temperament he’s a hermetic guy. I was thinking about Rothko at the end of his life, painting endless black and gray canvases, purifying color out of his pictures and obsessed with this image that had reached a kind of limit for him, where he couldn’t purify his art any further. Then he sort of reached an apotheosis of despair having done it. All of this of course happening in a studio on the Bowery, in the middle of New York City. A place I grew up, right around the time I was born into this city full of artists and full of sociology and full of life that I’m now finding myself drawn to depict in this book. So yeah, you’re right, my earlier books are in a funny way I’ve been seen as someone working with—I love Stanislaw Lem’s description of the junk stratum [laughter], working with pop culture junk and fooling around with it. But in fact my experiment was always pretty— Silverblatt: You were an aesthete. [laughter] Lethem: Yeah, a pretty hermetic one. And in this book I kind of blab all of a sudden that I’m from this place that was intensely sociological and that I’m enormously confused about it, and stimulated, to have come from Brooklyn in the 1970s. So there’s Abraham all through the book trying to pretend that he’s not in that place. Like Rothko painting on the Bowery. And the kid, Abraham’s son Dylan, is stuck on the street and in public schools. He doesn’t have the opportunity to purify or distill his experience into that kind of hermetic response. He’s for better or worse stuck...