Photo Credit: Torkil Stavdal
Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.
Jonathan is partnering with City Lights Books and Litquake to celebrate the publication of his new book Brooklyn Crime Novel, out now from Ecco Books (an imprint of Harper-Collins), in an event being hosted on Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at 7:00pm PST. Register here!
Where are you writing to us from?
The couch, Claremont, California on a Saturday.
What is bringing you joy right now, personally/artistically/habitually?
I like seeing the word habitually in this question. I think when I was younger I took more joy in the exceptional, the convulsive moments. Nowadays, the habitual is where the action is at. When I’m writing something I obsess on that rhythm of days, the slow additive pressure of sentences stacking up, the slow chase scene. When I’m between real projects – as I am now – I find myself substituting all sorts of other rituals to mimic the rhythm I’m craving. Right now it’s getting on my bicycle – the southern California weather is finally inviting for long rides along the creek trail, the seam where my town meets the foothills. I push myself a little each time, but like the writing, it’s less about any transformative change, more about just feeling myself pile up those tiny moments on that tiny edge of my own capacity. Soon I’ll start another book.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
Lately my filmgoing is a constant replenishment to my writing. In my teens and twenties I used to gobble up books, 20 a month on average. That reading wasn’t just “filling the well”, it was really excavating the well, the one from which everything I write originally springs. All those novels, they’re still down in there, seeping inspiration and knowledge, ways of thinking for me to draw on. But between the fact that my work (teaching, writing, editing, all of it) involves looking at text, and the fact that my old eyes can’t sustain so many hours of looking at print, means that I can’t devour books at that pace anymore. I probably read five a month now. But I can rest my eyes at the middle distance of a movie screen, and let the images and narrative wash over me, and so now those are my way of keeping the well topped up.
For this book, it was often essay films that came to mind when I was groping around for a structural assist. Orson Welles, Agnes Varda, Chris Marker, Ross McElwee.
What books are you reading right now and would you recommend any to others?
Valerie Werder’s Thieves is rocking my world at the moment.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
This isn’t speculative. I’ll open my bookstore in the next five or seven years. It will be called Scarce Thus. The bestseller will be the copies of Thomas Berger’s The Houseguest I’ve been hoarding. No customer will be permitted to exit the shop without one.
