This morning, Books@Torontoist editor Erin Balser sat down with Brooklyn-based writer Jonathan Lethem. The author of the bestselling The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn discussed his most recent project, Chronic City, a largely plotless tale of two men navigating an alternate Manhattan – one where The New York Times publishes a war-free issue, the city smells of chocolate, it snows in the summer and a tiger freely terrorizes the streets.
Torontoist: How does it feel to be back in Toronto?
Jonathan Lethem: Well, I just got in this morning, so I haven’t had the chance to take it all in. But I lived here from 1999-2001, perhaps as late as early 2002. I wrote a whole lot of The Fortress of Solitude at the Victory Café, next to this amazing comic book store, the Beguiling. It was near that giant colourful store…Honest Ed’s. I used to imagine that I lived in Honest Ed’s or at least in the shadow of Honest Ed’s. I spent my time eating a lot of Korean food along Bloor Street. I was very fond of a couple of used book stores in that area and was in and out of them all the time. I did a lot of good writing during that time.
TO: What inspired you to write Chronic City?
JL: I’ve been thinking about Manhattan my whole life. People have made something of this notion that I’m supposed to write about Brooklyn, and it’s such a shock that I crossed the river. New York is all one city and Brooklyn, in many ways, is defined by it’s relationship to Manhattan. I grew up with that consciousness about Manhattan. On one hand, it was yours and you could be proud of it; on the other hand, Brooklyn has this strong inferiority complex and an aspiration toward Manhattan in a Saturday Night Fever kind of way, a “I’m going to cross that bridge someday!” mentality. That idea, whether your just a bridge away or very far away is, in many ways defines Manhattan. It’s this place that people want to get to and where they think something fantastic is happening. In many ways, Chronic City takes that as it’s subject, with Manhattan is partly a virtual reality, where Manhattan is made up of an idea about what a great city and it’s what money and glamour consists of. Somehow, it’s formed by ideas as much as by anything real.
TO: Your last book, You Don’t Love Me Yet, was set in Los Angeles. How did you approach returning to New York?
JL: I wrote You Don’t Love Me Yet out of a sporting attitude toward Los Angeles. It’s another place I also sort of fantasized about my whole life. It’s another city of projection. I spent a month or two there several different times. I was eager to write about a place that I didn’t know well. I wanted to set my story in a place where I could escape overwhelming inheritances that accompany me while writing about New York City, and about Brooklyn in particular. Returning to New York felt natural. I don’t think of things in terms of where I’m going to set these projects. The projects declare themselves. It wasn’t a geographical choice. With Chronic City, the city, the characters and the ideas began to insist themselves upon me.
TO: So, you don’t know where you’re going to write about next?
JL: Well, I do. I’ve just barely begun the next book. It’s another New York book, but it’s also different. I’m going to write about parts of Queens, in particular a neighbourhood called Sunnyside and Greenwich Village in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Another way to attack the same subject, I guess. I’m a pretty urban writer. It’s fair to say that about me.
TO: Chronic City revolves around these two guys – Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman – essentially hanging out and doing a lot of nothing.
JL: Yes, it’s been called a “buddy novel” or a “bromance.” I’d be foolish to deny that the male relationships aren’t strong in this book and hanging out isn’t a real subject matter in this book. It’s something I’ve done before and worked up to. I’ve had the master/mentor, student/teacher, father/son-type relationship before. Chase and Perkus are close in age, but it still relates very much to that kind of relationship. As different as people see this book as being from You Don’t Love Me Yet, that was a book about hanging out and about circles of friends. It’s a subject that I’ve been attracted to in many ways. It was very much about exploring the textures of the daily life of friendship and explores the relationships between people where there’s no obvious family romance or dramatic storyline, just the shifting alliances and the minor rise and falls of a group of friends. It’s a theme that carries very strongly throughout my work.
Also, Perkus is a character that has been sneaking up on me for a long time. I had him before I had anything else. Other characters I’ve written about were sort of rehearsals for Perkus, the cultural obsessives. The Fortress of Solitude is another example of someone who is trying to make culture into something you can live on, like food or oxygen. It’s an image of someone who is both completely devoted to contemporary life and a total dissident at the same time.
TO: Do you think culture is or should be that essential?
JL: I guess we use the information surrounding us to make sense of our lives, other’s lives and our own culture. I identity with that, but I also see it as impossible. In many ways, Perkus is trying to express something inexpressible. There’s a suspicion that there’s something wrong with everything in reality and that’s, for me, a stimulating position to take, but also a perfectly disastrous one. You take yourself out of the world if you oppose everything in it.
TO: How do Perkus’s cultural fascinations come about? Do they evolve organically as you write?
JL: I wander into these cultural fascinations that I’m drawn to myself and obsessions I’ve made myself at some level. Once Perkus’s sensibility declared itself to me, I began to see things through his eyes and then began taking his obsessions much further than I would on my own. Mostly, I write about something – any cultural material that I write about – even if it seems that I’m being sort of scornful, or making fun of it, it’s there because I have some strong fondness to begin with. Marlon Brando, the Muppets, most of the music in this book, even things I really seem to be attacking at times. People are always “Oh, what do you have against X?” and I’m “It’s not me, it’s my character! He’s wound up about it at the moment, but I kinda like X. I think X is cool.” I don’t bother to even get something on the page if it’s not an interest of mine.
TO: How did the book’s narrator, Chase, come about?
JL: Chase arrived more as part of the structure of the whole book. When I decided to write about this milieu, I knew I needed this Great Gatsby-style gullible voice. He could report on a lot, but was also very easily influenced. I started thinking about acting because Marlon Brando was already in the book. I was looking for Brando’s opposite, someone who wouldn’t defy the script in any way. Also, I’ve been noticing more and more about the relationship between what I do to acting. It’s kind of method acting and voice work are built into making characters. I think about my fiction writing in terms of voice. I wanted to fool around with that relationship a little bit. I wasn’t going to write a book about a novelist protagonist, although I wanted the language in the book to be capable. I gave Chase some gifts that way. I did want him to be a shapeshifter or empathy, taking on different forms as needed to propel the book forward.
TO: The reviews for You Don’t Love Me Yet were fairly tepid. Was there any pressure to perform with Chronic City?
JL: You can’t look at your books as a conversation with your critics. You can’t think “Oh, I’ve got to fix this or argue with that.” You’d go completely insane really quickly. I doubt good books would come out of that. By the time that book was getting it’s reviews, this book was already underway. It can’t affect you except for a handful of morose days. You can’t let that become part of who you are as a writer. There was enough of an interested audience that I figured that funny little book would find it’s funny little place and that’s fine. I practically never gotten a bad review until that book. I spent a lot of time as a dark horse in the early part of my career, being published very quietly. No one ever bothers to take the dark horse down. You either ignore them because no one is making any great claims for the work or you hold them up as underrated. You hold them up and go “Gosh, you’ve got to read this. It’s so much better than this big, bloated Salman Rushdie novel that’s in the front of the bookstores. Now, after Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude later, I’m that big, bloated writer. There are moments when you realize this is what it consists of now. I’m an established middle-aged writer, officially controversial and eligible to be knocked off my pedestal and that’s fine.
TO: There’s a tiger, a whale, a coyote, the air smells like chocolate, it snows in the summer. Chronic City plays with this idea of a surreal Manhattan and this interaction between the built and unbuilt environment.
JL: It’s fascinating how people go bezerk over those events. I find something absurdly compelling and funny about the way New Yorkers get so riled up about any trace of nature invades their environment. It’s some sort of living allegory for the naïveté of the human animal. We build these cities that are somehow impervious. We built this city of the future, no animal can pervade it! And then a little raccoon comes along and the entire police force needs to be mobilized. I was trying to fool around with that idea. All the animals in the book – the whale that swims upstream, the coyote, the nesting birds, the tiger – all come from a very real things. They were all taken from real New York headlines. In a way, this is a book about the weather. The chocolate smell, the animals. They’re stand-ins for some slightly incomprehensible catastrophe that’s coming to get us all in contemporary life. It’s terrorism or global warming. It’s everywhere or nowhere. You talk about it all the time, but no one wants to think about it at all.
Jonathan Lethem reads tonight as part of Authors at Harbourfront. 7:30pm, Lakeside Terrace. Tickets are $8.00.
