FEATURE
Interview with Jonathan Lethem
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In its "Classics" series, the New York Review of Books reissues brilliant but neglected works from forgotten writers. Each lost classic is published with an introduction by an accomplished contemporary author. But Jonathan Lethem got more than he bargained for when the NYRB asked him to write the introduction to Malcolm Braly's brilliant and searing prison novel On the Yard. The book's portrayal of prison life had a profound effect on Lethem's own novel-in-progress, The Fortress of Solitude. Boldtype editor Toby Warner talks with Lethem about how this influence took shape, how he uses his obsessions, and why he's not setting his next novel in Brooklyn. |
BT: How did you first encounter Malcolm Braly's work?
JL: Well, I hadn't read Malcolm Braly when the NYRB asked me to write the introduction to the reissue of On the Yard. I had seen his name a couple of times, but I didn't have a fix on the fact that he was an incarcerated novelist. I think they were groping for someone associated with crime fiction. They certainly had no way of knowing that I was two years into the writing of a book that culminated in a long prison sequence.
BT: So it was really just a happy coincidence for both of you.
JL: Yeah, I wasn't really looking for interruptions in my work at that point, but it was obvious that I needed to take the hint that someone was offering me. So I stopped work, took the assignment, and then the book just blew me away. I don't think there's anything to compare it with. Obviously there are great writers who've touched on this kind of material, but none of them had Braly's extended experience inside, on top of his novelistic gifts. He has a memoir that overlaps with some of the material in the novel, but it really doesn't account for how he was able to get into so many prisoners' heads. It's uncanny — you feel him distributing properties, inclinations, and parts of himself into different characters. That's typical of the greatest of novelists, but in this milieu, he's working with such a narrow set of human circumstances and yet he creates so many different types and absolutely persuasive responses to these situations.
BT: What kind of influence did the book have on your work?
JL: It spurred me to realize how deep I had to go into the minds of the prisoners. It made me understand their psychology in a way no one else had — not even the sources that I had relied on. Braly's characters do some of hardest, most unforgiving self-examination and yet they all also have a myth of innocence, some shred of vanity that's never relinquished. That was crucially enlightening. It makes me think of the Bob Dylan song, "I Shall Be Released." In the first two stanzas, that character is protesting his innocence and then in the third stanza he looks around the prison and observes that every man in the place is crying out that he was framed. And then you suddenly realize that you haven't learned, necessarily, who in that song is innocent.
BT: It tells you more about the condition than the individual person.
JL: Right, exactly. As honest as certain people had been with me, I had also listened quite gullibly to people's own prison myths, even as they mixed in some of the most revealing information. I was drawn into a kind of complicity: "I've got someone's ear, I'm gonna build my self-justifying story here." So I thought a lot about the narrative instinct. That's something Braly gets so right, the way that prison turns people into storytellers
BT: Did you try to incorporate his knowledge of prison, or was it more his narrative approach?
JL: Well, it made me think about the nature of community inside prisons in a different way. I'd been so focused on my two main characters. Braly forced me to consider the lives of the other characters in the prison and how you weren't alone in there. It helped me understand that inside there was another version — however involuntary — of community. It got me thinking about the relationship of the prison to the neighborhood that the characters had come from. The idea that there's a kind of transplanted society, or recapitulated society inside. Braly also just made me braver about writing about the intensity of the yearning, the kind of dreaming consciousness of the characters in prison. If anything, he kept me away from being too anthropological or documentary about it. I did visit prison, but there's very little that you can do to make yourself credible with that material. You basically have to make a novelist's leap into the unknown. Braly himself had done it. To say what he knew about San Quentin, he had to finally forget about the documentary and sociological accounts and instead become a novelist. In the memoir, he said that he was writing above his head when he wrote On the Yard. You can feel him marveling at what he can say. That's one of the things that makes the novel so beautiful. It's always so moving when you can see a writer uncovering their capacities and some of that feeling of discovery ends up on the page.
BT: So how far were you into The Fortress of Solitude when you started reading On the Yard?
JL: I was somewhere deep into the first section, I hadn't crossed the big dividing line of that book that's set out by the liner note, but I was certainly well into the planning and visualization of the second section. Actually, I had spent weeks or months writing the ending of the first section, where Mingus commits the crime that sends him into the juvenile reform system, so symbolically I was at exactly the right point — the moment when my characters were about enter that world. I was probably more than a year from writing the scenes that would really depend so much on Braly's influence.
BT: It's interesting that you started writing the introduction to On the Yard when your own book was just at that juncture where you separate it in half with a liner note. It seems like there's a considerable overlap between introductions and liner notes.
JL: Absolutely. That's a great observation. I've done very little work in the realm of music journalism. I actually hadn't written a liner note for a piece of music when I wrote that. It's funny. Because the character Dylan Ebdus invites comparisons to me and my own life, I've made that confusion irresistible. People are always ascribing to me some gigantic career as a music writer. But the only practice I had for writing that liner note was what I'd just done for On the Yard. I'd never thought of it before, but that's really true. That was probably my point of reference, unconsciously.
BT: Are there any other lost classics that you'd like to see reissued? Any authors in particular?
JL: Well, Malcolm Braly and few other exceptions aside, I think NYRB is a little more focused on European and international stuff. For my money, there are a few great out of print American novelists of the last 50 years or so that could be very exciting discoveries for readers. Don Carpenter is a particular favorite of mine. His first novel, Hard Rain Falling, might be my candidate for the other best prison novel in American literature. I can think of a few others. McDonald Harris, as well. But really, NYRB has done an incredible thing and it's so healthy. It's a constant reminder of what riches there are just behind the canon, and just behind the list of what's in print. I've been buying or snagging as many freebies as I can, but I haven't even read a third of their shelf. I do feel, for the first time, that there are as many old books being pulled back into print as there should be. They've really willed that into being a part of the landscape.
BT: You've just come out with a short book of essays, The Disappointment Artist, in which you discuss your passion for various films, books, and comics. You confess that you saw Star Wars 21 times when it came out, for instance, and extol the works of Philip K. Dick. Do you consider yourself an obsessive? What kind of effect has that temperament had on you?
JL: Well, the book is a kind of microscope that I use to study the nature of obsession. I isolate and heighten those parts of myself — not to say that I was falsifying anything — but I locate them, tickle them, and explore them. I tried to put every appetite and fannish impulse that I've got under this microscope of obsession, and say, "where is the compulsive aspect and what drives it." Of course, by the end, the objects and the artifacts fall away and it's about an obsessive temperament in a larger world, even the world of family. But, you know, I do love most of the writing, film, and music mentioned in the book quite sincerely, even when I catch myself using it as a prop.
BT: And that's where your essays end up, with you embracing the obsessions that have nourished you.
JL: Yeah, you might as well let yourself obsess. You don't need to somehow be ashamed of this emotional urgency that drives you to the things you love, because they're worth loving.
BT: Also in The Disappointment Artist, you make a comparison between the cartoonist R. Crumb and his brother Charles Crumb, who first got Robert into comics but was ultimately unable to overcome his own passion for them. When do you think obsessions cross that line between being resources you can use in your work, and becoming the things that consume you?
JL: Well, you get glimpses of Charles Crumbs' own artwork in Terry Zwigoff's documentary Crumb. It's quite hallucinatory and brilliant, but the simplest way to describe the difference between him and his brother is that Charles lost interest in making his art viable for communication with any other consciousness except his own. As beautifully obsessive as Robert Crumb is, his willful self-indulgence is almost the hallmark of a certain kind of genius — Picasso, you might say, or Bob Dylan. He seems disinterested in where anyone else would want him to go, but in fact, it's all communication. R. Crumb is trying to make you see what's inside his head, and I think Charles Crumb — I should be clear that I'm just guessing, I don't want to seem like some kind of pompous pop psychologist speculating about other people's immensely complex lives — but it seems like he lost interest very quickly in having anyone else get it. The missing gene was the impulse to exhibit, to show off.
BT: What are you working on now and what other writers are you drawing on?
JL: I'm writing a new novel. I've relinquished a lot of the methods and the strategies of my last few years of work. The Fortress of Solitude and those essays are so deeply committed to memory. There's a kind of responsibility in those books — responsibility to material that comes from my own experience or other people's experience, responsibility to descriptions of places or times that I want to get right, and put into some sort of time capsule. I decided that it was time to get free of that sense of dutifulness or responsibility, and instead just fool around, play, and risk irrelevance by trying to do a piece of pure storytelling. So, I'm writing a romantic comedy about a failed rock band. And it's set in Los Angeles, a place I'm merely curious about. I'm sure I'll get it wrong in a million different ways, but it's not a real Los Angeles at all. It's more like a proscenium arch for the little play I want to put on. The characters are kind of daft, and, I hope, lovable — because the book will be inexcusable if they're not. I've been drawing on Iris Murdoch a lot. I've been looking at the way she manages to write novels that have contemporary settings and nominally realistic situations but with a Midsummer Night's Dream spell of enchantment, or almost like a Commedia dell'Arte quality that makes them very theatrical, ridiculous, and timeless.
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