Jonathan Lethem is the best-selling author of Gun with Occasional Music, Motherless Brooklyn, and Fortress of Solitude. He has recently re-located from his home in Brooklyn to Southern California to teach fiction at Pomona College. Rachel Elizabeth Jones joins him on campus to discuss his two latest novels, his trajectories to California, what “hipster” actually means, and how he finds his new life as a professor. His new collection of essays The Ecstasy of Influence is released being released this month.

Rachel Elizabeth Jones: Could you talk a little bit about your trajectory to California?

Jonathan Lethem: There’s a cartoon version of my trajectory, that’s been disseminated lately: uprooted-from-Brooklyn-comes-to-Pomona College. In truth I’ve been itinerant. I’ve moved from New York over and over again. It’s a place I love, and I obviously have a charged relationship to it, but it’s been a ritual to leave it behind, or to try. This is my second California life. I lived in the Bay Area for ten years in my twenties. I’m old. That was another life completely, but an important part of my life. It was where I invented myself as writer. I wrote my first three novels and became a published writer in that time. At one point I never thought I needed to go back to New York, or that I was likely to. So this present narrative seems quite ironic.

Rachel: You started college in Vermont. How’d you find that?

Jonathan: Yes, I went up to college in Vermont, at Bennington. It’s something I tried to explain in a number of different places, how influential and significant my brief college career could be, despite how quickly it might seem that I’d bounced away. I only finished three semesters. I was ambivalent about being a college student. I’m not sure I would’ve stuck anywhere.

Rachel: Was it expected that you go to college?

Jonathan: Well it is for anyone, right? Yet I didn’t expect it of myself, not completely. In high school I was obsessed with the Beat Generation script, that of self-invention and running away from things, and wanting to become a writer by going off into a garret, or immersing in raw experiences, like hitchhiking – that would serve as my college. At one point, quite absurdly because my temperament is not that of a student of Zen Buddhism, I thought, “No, not college, I’ll go off and enlist in a Zen monastery.” None of these things prevented my applying to some colleges and then going off to one, but they did seed the ground for the disappearance of my college career shortly after. I felt there were these other live prospects. Whether they were just in my head or not, I’d told myself that not all writers began with school, and since that’s what I wanted to do, I’d fool with these other possibilities. It looks very decisive in retrospect, it might appear that it worked out, in retrospect – neither was true at the time. I didn’t publish a novel until ten years after left college. I was a book store clerk.

From the distance of the East Coast, California is confusing, and you think everything is in one place. You receive a garbled impression, and mine was especially garbled. Yet the Bay Area, when I arrived, had for me the advantage of familiarity. The frozen-in-time 1960s quality of Berkeley reminded me of my parents’ milieu, and I fell into it very easily. I was sort of a vagabond student, and Berkeley is a place that is very congenial for vagabond students.

Rachel: Did you find that when you were in Berkeley that you would talk about New York?

Jonathan: Sure. I played the role of the New Yorker in California immediately, in a way that I wouldn’t have in New York. My street cred wasn’t really so impressive. I was a weird mixed bag of bohemian and Mid-westerner. None of my affiliations in New York seemed very clear or firm, but once I left, my affiliation as a New Yorker became something I could wear on my sleeve. It gave me a card to play. It was my way of continuing to think about New York. Before I really investigated that material, before I lived there again or wrote about it, I had some getting over New York to do. But I didn’t mind taking credit for being from a famously tough place.

Rachel: I recently read You Don’t Love Me Yet. What experiences did you use to inform that work?

Jonathan:The setting of that book is sleight-of-hand. I transposed my time in San Francisco in my late twenties and early thirties, when I was approximately the age of those characters. I spent a lot of time in the Haight Ashbury and the Mission, at a time when those places were funky and interesting. I was even sort of in a band, despite the fact that I’m not qualified by any talent to be in a band.

Rachel: What was the name of the band?

Jonathan: We never settled on a clear name. It bore an unworkable name for a while. “Emma the Crayon.” Which probably proves how devoted to self-erasure this band was. I drew some of energy for that book from my San Francisco days, living in neighborhoods that were being gentrified by tattooed kids. And simply the way you live at that age – anywhere and nowhere. I wrote about Brooklyn in a way that demanded a lot of cultural and sociological and political and historical specificity. Yet I got away with doing a Silverlake book – assuming you think I got away with it — because I wrote about characters who weren’t thinking about their cultural placement, or the meaning of urban life. I wrote about Los Angeles from the point of view of characters who might have actually been living in a bohemian quadrant of Minneapolis, for all they knew. It was a deliberate attempt to do something more playful and irresponsible, specifically in the relationship of my fiction to place. I’d just come off a a decade writing these grounded and accountable pieces about Brooklyn. I wanted to flip a switch and be full of shit. To write about a place that I didn’t know well and make it up and get away with it.

Rachel: So speaking of Silver Lake, and speaking of being in your twenties in the Bay, talk to me about what “hipster” means. At this point it seems like an insult.

Jonathan: I’ve watched this cultural formation in the past decade – hipster-shame – and it strikes me as a red herring, a way of channelling disgruntlement that ought to be reserved for greater evils into morose self-loathing on the part of people who are actually all more or less complicit. On the other hand, a defense of hipsterism isn’t something I’d want to sink a lot of stock into, because it doesn’t actually matter at all. Either way, it’s exactly one of the least important things you could be worried about, whether or not it’s shameful to be a hipster. I suppose I’m drawn perversely to entrench myself behind the term, the way Quakers or the Queer community adopted a term of abuse and made it their own. Why this horror of hipsterism? It’s basically people not wanting to be themselves, not wanting to listen to the music they listen to, or be apprehended dressing the way they dress or feeling the way they feel. A hipster is mostly just an unfinished person – I think that’s where the shame really comes in. People are eager not to be counted among the unfinished. They want to be something real, something complete. But you know what? It’s okay to be unfinished.

Rachel: What is the relationship between the idea of the hipster and cultural critique? You use a lot of cultural critique and you seem to poke fun at it while still holding a deep respect for it. For example, how Perkus Tooth in Chronic City gets lost in movies, or how Bedwin in You Don’t Love Me Yet gets lost in this one movie and chooses one tiny part to focus on – that sort of obsession.

Jonathan: I look at a lot of things through the lens of cultural hunger, cultural voracity, cultural obsession. My characters often identify dangerously, even overwhelmingly, with their affiliations. If you paraphrase the usual critique of the hipster it might be that their cultural affiliations are all too lightly held, that they’re received notions. That they’ve decorated themselves with cultural style, but it’s not a life or death battle for them. I doubt that’s usually true; that’s one of the ways I would defend hipsterism. People’s tastes matter keenly to them, even if they’ve been made to feel embarrassed about them and brandish them with a degree of irony. Anyway, for better or worse, I’m helplessly on the team of the super-taster – he for whom salt is too salty, sugar too sweet, and cultural treasure too precious, for whom it is as crucial as oxygen. I’ve always been very easily colonized by the books and music and movies I love. It’s not only extremely intense for me; it becomes my way of thinking about nearly anything. I use the artworks I love as a lens, or perhaps a crutch, or a tool… or an exoskeleton? There are all sorts of metaphors, each with slightly different implications, but anyway, they’re my apparatus for grappling with the problem of being a person. A novelist tends to write ruefully, or to couch in reservations, the things that are actually most defining of themselves. So, I write about this kind of character passionately, with sympathy, but also I tend to put them in social or political or interpersonal contexts that make them look absurd or problematic. I try to see characters like myself from the inside and the outside.

Rachel: With that said, say you go to a fancy LA party or a fancy New York party and you have all these characters walking around with their cultural critique or their specific project, or whatever it is, how do you personally respond to that? How do you tell if someone’s full of shit or not?

Jonathan: Full of shit about what? Sometimes being full of shit is an amazing way to get started. I was full of shit about everything at the outset, especially about being a novelist. I wasn’t one and I had no idea how to do it. I had to be full of shit for a while. I’m often most drawn to the people who are at the greatest risk of seeming full of shit, because they’re usually not risk-averse. They’re attempting something. Also – this is one of the subjects of Chronic City – life is a performance with scripts, and it matters that you recognize this. Your task is to be in play, to step onto the stage, to make something occur. That means risking being full of shit, or being called full of shit, a lot. So I wouldn’t say that’s what I’m screening for, when I walk into that room that you’ve proposed. What I am looking for is that thing you know when you meet it that’s hard to name otherwise. To be awakened. It’s what I look for on a bookshelf, it’s what I look for when I’m flipping the radio dial, and it’s what I want out of people.

Rachel: Have you always had that mindset, or did you get there later?

Jonathan: I was given a head-start. I’ve never before articulated this exact thing, that I tend to be forgiving of the full-of-shit among us. But in fact, in my parents’ world…they were bohemians and they were artists, they were activists, they were radicals, they were fools. My house, their social set, the other grown-ups – I grew up in a space that was full of preposterous people. Accepting them as a version of the world, one I could tolerate and take pleasure in, and to choose from among their flavors of magnificent bullshit as if at an ice cream parlor, and even to choose some to attempt figure out and believe in – all of that came with the territory, for me. To the small extent that You Don’t Love Me Yet is a serious book, as opposed to a waffle heaped with strawberries, it asks exactly that: How do you define interpersonal meaning when you yourself are still full of shit? That’s the question.

Rachel: Could you talk a little bit about your use of animals?

Jonathan: That’s germane to me right now. I’m preparing a course on animals in fiction, next semester. Watership Down, Call of the Wild, all of it. Now that I’m in an academic department I’ve gained awareness that there’s a lot of really good writing and theory going on at the moment on precisely this subject. Of course as a working artist I’ve just stumbled into the material by my own migrations as a reader. Animal stories were at the heart of my first interest in writing per se, through Lewis Carroll. The talking animals in the Alice books were imprinted on my sense of how characters are portrayed in writing in the first place. My first novel was full of talking animals. People associate that book with Raymond Chandler or Phillip K. Dick, not wrongly, but just behind those lies Alice in Wonderland. My detective strolls through a world of these baffling and annoying creatures, whose ability to speak is a given. The animal element activates a lot of the persuasiveness in the fiction that I love the most. Henry James means a lot to me, but it’s absolutely confounding when you realize he never shows people eating. They just don’t eat, or if they do, the meal is glossed over without you ever learning what it was. I wanted to go the other direction and have my characters defined by their hunger, defined by their sleepiness or horniness, by the animal life of their bodies. You Don’t Love Me Yet is partly an exercise in having the characters always needing a meal or drugs or sleep or…Their bodies are present. The zoo is there as a mirror for this. You find that in Dickens his characters are everywhere described in animal terms. It’s at the heart of fiction, but it hides. Except when it doesn’t. For there are so many great animals in fiction. I’m actually having a very difficult time narrowing the reading list for this course. Once you look for them, they’re everywhere.

Rachel: On that note, how do you find being a professor?

Jonathan: It’s a new experience. I’d been a teacher a lot, I’d even been called “professor”, but I wasn’t exactly. I’d parachute in from the world of writing and be a guest star or “distinguished visitor.” Sure, I grew comfortable in the classroom, and learned I had something to offer in that setting. But here at Pomona I’m actually a professor – I’m part of the department, I’m part of the careers of the students, I’m an advisor. I really have a job. And I haven’t had a job since I was a bookstore clerk. [Laughter]

Rachel: Was that your first job?

Jonathan: The only job I ever held, until this one. Honestly, this is a revelation for me. The collegiality of a department like this is an incredible thing. It’s always being said that writing is a lonely occupation, and it’s true – I remove myself from the world to write novels. It cuts against family life and against the illusion of fraternity among writers, and it cuts here against the idea of academic collegiality because I’m still the novelist. It’s a very hermetic identity. It’s a very strange choice to go away and invent people who don’t exist and spend time with them instead of the real people, right? I go and I commune with the fake people. Yet I don’t do that because I think it’s morally superior to being part of the world [laughter]. In fact it leaves me desperately hungry for the world. So as a professor, I have a really interesting version of a world: this environment, what’s expected of me, and what I find myself excited to deliver. It’s a terrific kind of engagement precisely for being such a good antidote to living in my head.

Rachel: I noticed that Richard Abneg, an important character in Chronic City, shows up in You Don’t Love Me Yet – to what extent is Chronic City a sort of New York transmutation or a sequel to You Don’t Love Me Yet?

Jonathan: There are a few little trails like this. I suspect a lot of people, for superficial but inarguable reasons, see those books as divided, utterly. One weighty if not ponderous, and set in New York, and the other Californian and frothy and small. Yet, You Don’t Love Me Yet taught me how to do Chronic City in the most direct way. The small book was the laboratory in which a lot of the terms of that bigger book were derived: how to enact my plot in terms of a group of friends who behave as friends really do, in these kind of repetitive, solipsistic, self-enclosed rituals. The reason that Seinfeld was not really a show about nothing is that it was about how appalling and fun it is to have friends with whom you develop a private vocabulary and a private world and running jokes that make you feel that you are the only real people and anyone outside that charmed circle just doesn’t get it. That’s the lineage that leads from You Don’t Love Me Yet to Chronic City.

Rachel: Can you talk about Perkus Tooth, from Chronic City? Have you gotten a lot of feedback about him?

Jonathan: People identify the book with him. When people don’t like the book, it’s because they feel that Perkus his failings have been indulged, or that he’s a jerk to begin with. When they love the book they think he’s a martyred saint. So he’s the Rorschach blot. The irony for me is that I feel that hiding in the foreground, almost too near to see, is Chase Insteadman. He’s the character I identify with secretly much. I guess it’s obvious to see where I’ve lent parts of my cultural obsessiveness to Perkus, or to observe that he’s a quasi-writer. But Chase is one of the most important characters I’ve ever gotten onto the page. It must be that because he declares himself as bland, as a chalk outline of a human being, people take that invitation to overlook him. They quit thinking about him, which I suppose is something the book had to invite them to do, in order to make itself happen. But for what it’s worth, the character I still think about, more than Perkus, is Chase.

Rachel: Have you been put off by people being so concerned with Perkus?

Jonathan: No, Perkus is attractive and strange and fragile, so if he’s the popular hero, that’s lovely. I sometimes joke that, in Motherless Brooklyn, the main character Lionel Essrog is quite a lot more loveable than I really am. He’s a magical-geek character, in the way that Holden Caufield, or Ignatius J. Reilly is, or Charley, from Flowers For Algernon – an attractor for reader sympathies. Perkus Tooth functions in a similar way. He’s a magical geek character. You feel that he’s fragile, which pulls the reader towards him.

Rachel: So now that you’re in L.A., I read that you’ve sold the film rights to some of your work?

Jonathan: Over the years I’ve done this again and again: let someone try to develop one of the books into a film. My hopes for these projects get aroused; I’m like a fan, hearing about something I want to see, and hoping it’ll be good. The one that’s like that for me right now is As She Climbed Across the Table, which has been optioned by David Cronenberg. He’s one of my favorite living directors – I’m flattered that he’s even trying, I think it’s a good match, it seems very possible that he’d do something wonderful. That’s the one that I’m in love with right now, but it’s really outside of me. It’s a thing that happens to the books that has weirdly little to do with me as their author.

Rachel: Did you learn that or it’s been like that?

Jonathan: I figured it out pretty fast. I had advantages in figuring it out because I was already a student of film – or a fan, not a student. The best adaptations of books, when books are involved as the sources of film, are the ones where they do very little “justice” to the book. They just take something they like and transform it. And so, I always thought, this is likely the best fate – just take it, make a movie. You’re filmmakers, you do your thing, and I’ll wait and see what happens. I’ll cash your check in the meantime and use it to write another book. That seems like the best relationship possible. I haven’t been seduced into thinking I could be the screenwriter or could control the outcome of these projects.

Rachel: Have you done much exploring of L.A.?

Jonathan: I know bits and pieces of L.A. Over the years I’ve come here on different kinds of trips. I lived in L.A. for a month or six weeks, now three or four different times. So I know it in bursts. I gather this is true of L.A. in general anyway, you can’t know it comprehensively. You know it in fragments. But I’ve plenty more to discover.

Rachel: What do you like about it, or what do you notice about it?

Jonathan: I really like very obvious and corny things about it – I like its diversity. It’s real. It has real diversity. And there are places that brag of diversity when what they mean is that everything is neatly balkanized. It’s not here.

The Ecstasy of Influence is out now from Doubleday, $27.95
Author Photo: Mara Faye Lethem