Cross-country travel | Jonathan Lethem, Gabriel Winslow-Yost

“Charles Portis is unusual,” writes Jonathan Lethem in our June 20 issue. He is “shrouded in a permanent veneer of obscurity and frequently touted for revival – ‘America’s most celebrated forgotten novelist,’ as the writer Mark Dunbar quipped.” On the occasion of a new edition of Portis’s works at the Library of America, Lethem examines the entire career of this brilliant, hilarious but modest and often overlooked novelist, from his slim debut, Norwood (1966) through his most successful book, True determination (1968) to his last masterpiece, Gringos (1991). All of them are, as Lethem puts it, driven by Portis’ “fixated attention to how the world loses its meaning.”

Lethem himself is more than just a little oddball: he is a writer who has jumped between genres and styles over the past thirty years, over the course of thirteen novels, five short story collections, two novellas, and a variety of essays, songs, and anthologies. His books mix noir and dystopian science fiction (as in his 1994 debut, Pistol, with occasional music) or Bildungsroman and magical realism (The Fortress of Solitude) or strange new versions of the historical novel (Dissident Gardens) or crime novels (Motherless Brooklyn). His latest book, Brooklyn crime thrilleris pretty much what it claims to be.

A few days ago I emailed Lethem to ask him about Portis, science fiction, literary influences, and the joys of road trips.

Gabriel Winslow Yost: I believe you’re driving across the country right now, which seems like the perfect time to talk about Charles Portis. As you write in your essay, one of the most striking features of several of his characters is their “preoccupation with maintaining cars.” Do you ever experience similar feelings while driving?

Jonathan Lethem: I’m writing to you from Redstart Roasters coffee shop in Pittsburgh on the fourth day of the drive, with two nights left until I land in Maine. Our schedule is relatively relaxed today between Pittsburgh and the Catskills, and we’ll probably stop to check out a few book barns along the way.

It’s funny that you’re asking me to connect all the cars and driving in Portis to my own experience; such an obvious thought, and yet it would never have occurred to me. I grew up in New York City, the only place in the U.S. where, I think, you don’t grow up wanting to drive, and as a platform for mating and other coming-of-age rituals. My mother, who was from Queens, never drove. Of my three siblings, one doesn’t drive, the other drives only sporadically. I didn’t have a license until I was 25. And yet now I’ve driven crisscrossing the country so many times that I’ve lost track. I’m kind of addicted to it. This engrossingly boring road movie that always ends with a completely predictable surprise: I’m on the other side of the country! How did I do it? It helps that I have wonderful cousins ​​in the Midwest to visit.

Even before I ever drove a car, I was somehow connected to this resonance of the road trip, through the archetypes in literature and cinema, just as I had been interested in the desert in the West before I even got there. That was Portis’ fault, but also Two-lane asphalt road And Vanishing point And Meandering. I was writing stories about traveling across the country before I even had a driver’s license, although I did have my epic hitchhiking trip to fall back on.

But I still don’t identify with the car the way Portis does, and certainly not with its repair. I can’t do more than jump-start the engine or change the tires, and even those things only under duress. There’s a whole other level to his work, the glorification of the mechanic who makes repairs on the fly with tie-wire and tape, which roots Portis in a milieu where many people possess or envy those skills.

You mention that Portis was the first science fiction writer to be taken seriously, even though his works were decidedly un-science fiction. Why do you think he found so many fans in the science fiction world, at a time when most of his works were out of print?

There is a specific reason why Portis has made himself so popular with science fiction writers, and this is his fourth novel, Master of Atlantis. The characters in this book form a group not unlike the ufologists, dianeticists, and hollow earth theorists who mingled with the fans and writers of science fiction for most of the 20th century. Portis showers them with gentle skepticism, making them at once familiar and silly and heartbreaking—it’s an amazing feat.

For science fiction writers, enjoying Portis’s affectionate exposure was a form of “narcissism of small otherness,” since they were so often crowded with total and sincere cranks at their professional convocations and in the letters-to-the-editor columns of their fanzines. One of the greatest social conflicts in the history of science fiction concerned whether or not to continue publishing Richard Shaver’s novels in pulp magazines after it became clear that Shaver, writing about an evil parallel race of humans living in the hollow Earth, was not just touting his stories as revealed fact but claiming them as testimonies from direct personal experience inside our planet. Portis’s precise, sensitive, and ironic way of telling such legacies made the serious writers of the genre feel welcome.

Apart from that, Portis is an irresistible author. Who wouldn’t call him their favorite?

Do you think Portis had a big influence on your own writing? Or did you consciously follow his example in any of your books? I remember thinking: The wild detective had a pleasant Portis-like tone.

I’m tempted to read this question as a kind of speed trap. I’ve been merrily cruising along the highway of flattering implicit comparison, and you’ve just tricked me into an explicit self-comparison with one of the funniest writers of all time and a complete attempt at narrative “naturalism.” Sure, I’d like to think that The wild detective And Amnesia Moonmy two “Roadmovie” books, both of them drink a sip from the Portis mug here and there. My wild child in Girl in landscape has a bit of Mattie Ross about it. And some of the Chronic City Conspiracies could be discovered via his Master of AtlantisBut as we speak, I have already driven onto the shoulder of this metaphor and can see in the rearview mirror the policeman strolling past me, scribbling to remove the ink from his ballpoint pen.

Portis is now safe in the Library of America, but who’s next? Who is currently the most underrated author who needs to be added to the veneration list?

You mean it’s our fault? Samuel R. Delany, Samuel R. Delany, Samuel R. Delany.