Writer’s Room: Jonathan Lethem

July 16, 2024

Jonathan Lethem’s work cannot be categorized. His nearly 30 books, spectacularly diverse, defy rules, and his passionate, ever-changing engagement with culture drives his work as much as his desire to tell stories. Perhaps Lethem’s most intellectually insightful work is The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfiction etc.a defense of artistic appropriation, an opposition to the overbearing copyright regime. It approaches literary fatherhood from a different angle than the critic Harold Bloom’s theory of fear of influence, which foregrounds the quasi-Oedipal struggle of writers to overcome their authorial forebears. In Lethem’s books, however, his beloved father, the 91-year-old painter Richard Brown Lethem, appears repeatedly, and his latest, Cellophane Stones: A Life in Visual Culturean intimate collection of his art writing, full of luminous, strange fugues, divided into six sections, is no exception.

Lethem speaks to me from a room in a coastal farmhouse in Maine, sipping from a sky-blue coffee mug. The walls are lined with books and artwork. During the school year, Lethem teaches at Pomona College. He begins The Disappointment Artist: Essays“I learned to think by watching my father paint.” After following his father’s career path, Lethem dropped out of art school; early in his writing career he was skeptical of claims that he was a painterly novelist. Yet in his latest book, one can observe how Lethem’s mind still resonates at the frequencies of his childhood, including his father’s early art. As companion material to his dissertation, Richard Brown had Lethem paint a canvas in the style of the surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, replacing de Chirico’s objects with Midwestern iconography. Interestingly, like de Chirico, Lethem suffered from Alice in Wonderland syndrome during childhood, a neurological disorder in which objects are perceived as smaller or larger than they are.

What to see in Cellophane stoneswhich is full of striking color reproductions, are unusual reflections on personally significant works of art. In his youth, Lethem never engaged in art criticism, although he avidly read rock and film reviews. His art criticism takes radically different forms here, including translating the visual into narrative. He explains to me the origins of certain pieces: “Every time I was asked to write about art, I would tell the person who asked me, I’ll write you something fictional instead. So the book is much more closely related to my short stories… It’s all written in this weird kind of ‘get in the artist’s skin and use their style or react to their stylistics.'”

These intense reveries sometimes contrast with the fabulism of Italo Calvino and then race back into the appealingly pop-bizarre. One surrealist method he sometimes uses, Lethem says, is to write down dreams after waking up. His short story “Traveler Home” was born from a dream and responds to Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz’ Traveller CLXIII at nighta color photograph of figures in a miniature snowy setting. Another work, “The Collector,” a hallucinatory variation on a Fred Tomaselli painting, describes a collector of pennies and shells (a numismatist, like Lethem’s uncle) whose collected objects take on mysterious resonances.

Certain autobiographical writings—anecdotes, correspondences, reflections, memories, poems—based on empirical reality touch on books as art objects. A brief recollection of a letter from the artist of the fantastic Sylvie Selig. An essay on Disney hyperartifacts. In “Objectified Books,” a recollection of the artist Alexander Munn, who designed the cover of Amnesia Moongets into a discussion about the covers of Lethem’s first three novels, which featured trompe-l’œil faces.

Lethem sees books and art as “machines for producing experiences.” His transition from painter to writer, he admits, was incomplete. “You have made that transition, which is in a way wonderful, because you move from the dilemma of the artist who has to let a rich person buy his only object and then put it in a horrible, ugly, secret house that you know he bought to match his sofa and you don’t approve of where his money came from – to the task of creating something that anyone with $20 can own.” While mass production seems to be a positive thing, he notes, it also causes the aura of the substance of the book to become “strange, implicit and hidden.” With books, the author says, “you no longer have the primal object.”

He tells a vivid anecdote about a book of his that was transformed into an art object through political action. He had a signed copy of Chronic City to the open-air library of Occupy Wall Street. When the police destroyed the camp, they confiscated everything, including the books. Later, the copy in custody was released and returned to him – transformed.

Even before Lethem left art school, he had begun putting words to canvas, unsatisfied with images alone. He began with what he now calls a “novel zero,” which is unpublished, emulating Philip K. Dick. Lethem is looking ahead. “I wanted to work with time, the way a narrative carries time, and I wanted to work with characters and language.” Unconnected with what was happening in New York and needing a “more eccentric kind of involvement,” he fled to the Bay Area in the 1980s. It was too late to meet Dick. He followed a familiar “model of freedom and self” – that of the Beats who fled New York. “I was a Bay Area writer before I became a Brooklyn writer.”

He says: “I’ve created a strange dual nature for myself. I really belong to both places, the West Coast and New York City. But it also ultimately corresponds to my two careers as a writer. One is something like the genre type of outsider artist who is very Californian.” His California novels are heavily inspired by science fiction and crime novels.

As a Californian writer, Lethem continues, he is portrayed as a “termite man.” Cellophane stoneshe writes an article called “Termite Tracks: On Manny Farber’s Art Writing.” It is based on an essay by the painter and film critic Farber called “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” in which he argues for what the critic calls termite art, a “beetle-like immersion in a small space without meaning or purpose… the feeling that everything is expendable, that you can chop it up and throw it in a different arrangement without destroying it,” rather than white elephant masterpieces. Farber’s theory is that “a curious thing about termite tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it is always moving forward, eating its own boundaries.”

The first boundaries that Lethem tried to break were supposedly fixed literary genres. But what he did with the Cellophane stones is another way of crossing boundaries. He explains, “I try to mentally connect with the artist and their process, or what I imagine their process to be. By definition, I’m trapped in my own head. So these are also confessional pieces about how I work. I use myself as a lens into someone else’s art-making process – a very strange process! I try to literally break down the boundary between me and that person.”

The goal of “genre,” in my opinion, is to support the capitalist marketing project. What does Lethem think of the removal of boundaries as a political act? He says, “It is inherently political because genres, among other things they do to order reality – everyone likes categories, they help them think, don’t they? – mimic hierarchies, caste systems and class structures that we in our society famously like to pretend don’t exist.”

Lethem’s first foray into the genre, with science fiction, was seen as a “subliterary activity” and met with anxious resistance. “Sometimes it even resembled aversion… Why do you make me think about this gross stuff that I’m embarrassed about, like spaceships?” It is a privilege to live long, he continues, to see the culture embrace science fiction.

I remind Lethem that he’s respectable now. “I stumbled into it. And I keep trying to get out of it,” he says immediately. “I think it would be great if I ended up being as strange in everyone’s eyes as I started out. And then it’ll be like: Did you know that he was actually respectable in the middle of those two points? That’ll be a fascinating puzzle.”

Lethem grew up as a leftist in a left-wing family that valued art highly. He felt the tension between egalitarian principles and high art’s notion of the primacy of the creator. He believes that his work comes from a “social matrix of influence and other voices” and that he has always written in “resistance to the myth of the solitary Promethean hero image of the artist.” His work favors dialogue with other books and people – writing “texts” with others.

“It’s politically important to be other people,” he says. When he found the books that meant so much to him, it wasn’t because they underlined who he already was or what he already knew. “I wanted to be thrown out of myself into these other realities, experiences, selves, voices. So if that’s what I was looking for, then it’s natural that I also try to convey it and participate in it as an artist, right?” What he describes seems to be an ecstasy that goes beyond that of the mystics: being transported into a rapture that makes you narrate the sources, represent them in the fourth dimension of time.

“You speak to me at a time when I feel very very “I have been lucky as a writer,” Lethem reflects. While he writes Brooklyn crime thrillerwhich I think is one of the best novels of the last decade, he felt able to invite more “disruption, disobedience” and the feedback of what he had learned from his more disreputable activities and art writings than he had in other novels. “At this point,” he says, “I feel absolute freedom to do what I want.”•

Join Venita Blackburn on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific Time as she sits down with CBC anchor John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom call Here.