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The Missouri Review 29.1 (2006) 116-134


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A Conversation with Jonathan Lethem

James Schiff


Click for larger view		 Jonathan Lethem
[Begin Page 118]

INTERVIEWER: In your new collection of essays, The Disappointment Artist, you write about your artistic influences and also about your parents and their larger circle of friends. In contrast to most of your literary contemporaries, you spent your childhood among painters, musicians and writers. I'm curious if you can remember a moment or an experience in which it became clear to you that you wanted to write fiction.

LETHEM: Yeah, I had an unusual head start as an artist, generally, which is that I grew up in a painter's household. My father was and still is a painter, and a lot of my parents' friends were his students or colleagues, and so this activity—specifically, going into the studio every day and trying to make paintings—seemed normal to me. It was just everyday, and something that I could aspire to, but it wasn't esoteric; it wasn't a remote possibility; it was something very everyday and available. I can't remember a time when I didn't think I was going to be an artist of some kind. At the beginning, I thought I would paint too, and this was different, I learned, from the way most writers or artists grow up. They're usually in families where even if making art is regarded as an interesting possibility, it's somewhat esoteric, seen as impractical or unlikely. For me, it was inevitable. In fact, it would have been very strange, I think, for my parents if I hadn't been creative in some way. My brother grew up to be a graphic designer, and my sister's a photographer, so I fell the farthest from the tree by switching to writing. But even that was in the ballpark because my parents were very literate. My father's painting is very narratively based, full of symbols and at times even language—some of his styles include words on the canvas.

My mother was a big reader and a great talker, very dynamic. You've mentioned my talent for recall—well, she was famous for her memory, and memory is a real novelist's gift. I think it's the most important natural gift I inherited, her capacity for recall—not in a photographic sense, not a pure, scientifically accurate recall, but a recall that centers on an interest in emotional situations, conversations, language, affect, people's styles. She was socially brilliant: a great talker, raconteur and joke-teller. I grew up in a house full of anecdotes and descriptions of friends—everyone had a nickname. We'd savor how different friends of the family or relatives were great characters. We shared an instinctive narrative curiosity. I think if my mother had lived, she might have turned out a writer. Certainly a lot of her friends thought of her as a kind of proto-writer, even though she didn't write anything. But she was so verbal and so interested in stories that people expected she would [End Page 118] do that. Too, her books were available to me, and her love of reading was imparted to me very early on. I grew up in a house where writing was a very accessible ambition to latch on to.

The mysterious thing, harder to locate, is when I sensed that I was not going to paint. Because that was the first thing I was doing, and it was the obvious role to play: the art prodigy. I'd inherited some of my father's raw gifts. I had a good eye; I could draw in a way that impressed grownups. And when you're a kid, anything you do that gets attention, you do more of. So I was eager to draw and paint, and I enjoyed it. But it never meant as much to me as the relationship I felt to the books I was reading. The inkling that I might tell stories or...

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