Literary Arts brings Jonathan
Lethem to Portland Arts & Lectures this Thursday, April 12th, 7:30,
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Here's what Nora Robertson thinks about
this opportunity to see the man himself:
The first book I ever read by Jonathan Lethem was Motherless Brooklyn, and I was charmed. The Chandleresque protagonist, hamstringed by Tourette’s and growing up orphaned, parses a surreal intrigue involving cryogenic chambers, talking kangaroos and, of course, a dame who both seduces him and hangs him out to dry. Years later, I would be similarly thunderstruck by fellow Brooklynite Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy’s appropriation of hardboiled detective tropes to investigate rather more existential mysteries. Very Sartre, Camus, Godard.
I didn’t know about all of Lethem’s sci-fi stuff. Though I should have, the clues were definitely there, but I must confess, when I realized he was kinda a science fiction writer, albeit a avant-garde one, it took me years to get back. And I still prefer his more realistic and/or detective vein, Fortress of Solitude or How We Got Insipid. Ok, these are my own predjudices, and I can hear Tiffany scoffing at me now [*Scoff, scoff!* Just kidding --Ed.] but at any rate, boy am I glad I did. Even for those like me who like to keep their feet fairly on the ground, narrative-wise, Lethem’s more Trekky-friendly [Nora! You said "Trekky-friendly!" We will get some shiiit about that. Plus, I think I'd spell it "Trekkie." xoxo, Ed.] novels such as Girl in Landscape or As She Climbed Across the Table have a brash, pop-conscious voice whose accessibility sucks you in. I never feel at a remove from his characters. I’m always right there with them, their mental processes and vulnerabilities as they cope with real and surreal challenges to their worlds.
Lethem has commented publicly on his relationship to influence (see "The Ectasy of Influence" in Harpers, February 2007). As he lays it out for us, if one looks at say, Bob Dylan, there are layers and lines of appropriation. Muddy Waters claims authorship to his song "Country Blues" even as he tells ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax eight different sources. At the end of the day, however, "Country Blues" is more than the sum of its parts, now isn’t it. Our influences inform us, but if artists pull it off, they are more than the sum of their influences as children are more than the sum of their two parents.
The artists and writers will undoubtedly recognize the concept of using art as a beard for serious emotional issues in life: loss, death, life itself, though perhaps we don't call it that in everyday conversation. Lethem tells us in his essay collection/memoir of his Bohemian family, The Disapointment Artist, that if a beard is the substitution of something to conceal or avoid the reality of something else, perhaps for him pop genre fiction is a beard for the desire to avoid the expectation to make so-called serious art. Even perhaps writing in general is a beard for loss, specifically the loss of his mother to a brain tumor when he was a young teenager. Art as a beard for life, or death. For the death in his own family, for the reality of life in his family growing up. By his own admission then, he’s been engaged in a kill-the-father exercise literally: his father is the surrealist painter Richard Brown Lethem. From what he describes, I get this mental picture illustrated in line-drawing: the messiness of his father’s studio, the wafts of pot drifting over his mother’s album collection, a round dinner table in the communcal household populated by housemates and both parents’ lovers, rejected for Star Trek, Marvel Comics, Philip K. Dick, R. Crumb, The Talking Heads, Ford, Kubrick, Cassavettes. It’s no wonder my first take was a Godard vibe. The smooth slick surface, accessible in its cool factor, is a beard for pain.
There’s a new book out, You Don’t Love Me Yet, set among LA’s music scene and exploring, what else, the farcical paradoxes of love and art, and he’s coming to Portland to talk about it. Needless to say, intrepid girl reporter that I am, I am already there on the scene, 2GQ editor in tow. FYI to local filmmakers: Lethem is offering a free option on his novel. Since he’s had other films optioned--and I hope the rumor is true that Motherless Brooklyn is in production--this is, I suppose, equal-opportunity influence. See more on his Free Love page. --Nora Robertson
Photo of Lethem at Yaddo by unknown photographer, stolen by us off the interwebs. Unknown photographer, email us today for your proper props! Find us at the current year @2GQ.org, e.g. in 2003 you'd send mail to 2003@2GQ.org.
