A few questions with . . . Jonathan Lethem

In his own right

Jenny Shank, Special to The Rocky

Published April 20, 2007 at midnight

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Jonathan Lethem's career has built steadily since the publication of his first novel, 1994's science fiction-detective pastiche Gun With Occasional Music. With his cult following burgeoning, the wider literary community took notice of him with 1999's Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critic's Circle Award, and 2003's Fortress of Solitude.

Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, Lethem's recently been busy on multiple fronts: writing profiles of Bob Dylan and James Brown for Rolling Stone, publishing his seventh novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, about a fledgling L.A. rock band, and opining on the value of creative freedom from copyright restrictions in a recent article for Harper's, "The Ecstasy of Influence."

He spoke to the Rocky in advance of his appearance in Denver next week.

Question: Many of the themes in You Don't Love Me Yet are related to the ideas that you brought up in your recent essay in Harper's Magazine. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Answer: I've had a kind of receptiveness to those thoughts for a long time, and I'd never put them in order before the way I did for the Harper's essay. But the book was written before that essay was done. I think the fact that you can see such strong resonances just shows the fact that I was moving closer and closer to articulating that stuff. But I've probably always had some interest in issues of originality and influence and sampling in the arts. I think you can see little bits of evidence of it in some of the earlier fiction as well.

Q: In You Don't Love Me Yet, Carl ruins the band by insisting that he be allowed to participate because his words had been used in the lyrics. Which is a similar premise to what you expressed in the essay. But had you thought that out?

A: I hadn't been that conscious about turning the book into kind of a moral about copyright or artistic borrowing, but I like that it can be seen that way. It's a very clever way to read it.

Q: Is it different writing now that so many people are paying attention to what you do?

A: It is different sometimes. I've been really lucky in that regard in that the build-up of different communities of readers paying attention to what I do, gathering into one very large community, has been extremely gradual for me. And that's quite unusual. Writers usually kind of blow up or don't quite quickly, or else they do later in their career but even then it mimics a kind of overnight success. . . .

It does force you to be very deliberate about finding that solitude, that sense of almost exile or working from the margins that's so important as well.

Q: Fortress of Solitude felt like the culmination of the early part of your career. Do you have a plan for the second part of your career, or do you even see it that way?

A: It's easy to look back on it and see a plan in retrospect as though I was building up to Fortress, but I wasn't conscious of any strategy. I just always tried to commit entirely to whatever project that occurred to me and engaged me, so I can only really go on doing that.

I've started a new book that I'm very excited about that's kind of bigger again, but I'd be at a total loss if I tried to have a long-term plan. There's very little I can say about the book - it's so new. It's just kind of scraps. But it's set in Manhattan this time rather than Brooklyn or L.A., and that's very strange to me in a way. It's so near at hand and so much a part of my world, but it's also something I've kind of turned my shoulder to until now.

Q: Your interest in music has come out in many of your books, and you wrote profiles of Bob Dylan and James Brown for Rolling Stone. Would you ever consider doing more music journalism?

A: Those were two obviously completely irresistible opportunities that kind of fell to me. I guess it's fair to say that I'm a bit of a prima donna about music journalism in that I got to do these dream assignments. I don't know. I don't want to say never, but most recently, having had those great experiences, I've been thinking that I'd try to do fiction for a while, write things that only I can do. That's the standard I mostly try to hold myself to. As special as it was to interview Bob Dylan, probably some other people could have delivered that piece, because in a way it was really his voice that mattered. But my novel and stories are things that only I could ever possibly make exist, so I feel a special duty to that.

Q: You must be happy that you got a chance to hang out with James Brown just before he passed away.

A: Yeah, in retrospect it became an even bigger deal than it felt like at the time, and believe me, it felt like a big one to me because I've been revering this person - he's not even like a person, he's like some sort of strange godlike figure or superhero - for so long it was quite wonderful and really bizarre to spend time with him.

Q: Many of your interests and hobbies have found their way into your fiction. One that has not yet is baseball. Would you ever consider writing a baseball novel?

A: I think not. For some reason it resists exactly the kind of imaginative colonization that I can bring. If I were to write a baseball novel, I'd probably get stuck writing the baseball nerd novel, I'd have to write about, you know, the Fabermatricians, which would be really boring.

I tend to write about subcultures, and probably the reason that baseball per se hasn't engaged my imagination is that it's sort of too popular and universal. It's not a subculture, everyone can respond to it.

If you missed our review of Lethem's new novel . . .

• The book revolves around Lucinda Hoekke, who plays bass in an upstart L.A. rock band. Lucinda takes a job offered by her ex-boyfriend, a conceptual artist who stages a fake office. Lucinda's task is to answer an advertised "complaint line," and jot down callers' gripes. When the band's songwriter suffers writer's block, Lucinda gives him the notes from one particularly intriguing repeat caller's chats - a fact that has repercussions down the road, when the caller demands a position in the band in return for the use of his words. While Lethem's gift for dialogue shines, critic Jenny Shank criticized the book for its "turgid prose." Advertised as a comic novel, Shank notes that the humor too often falls flat.

• Overall grade: C

If You Go

• When and where: Jonathan Lethem appears at the Boulder Book Store, 7:30 p.m. Monday and the Tattered Cover's Colfax location, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.

• Cost: Free

• Information: 303-447-2074 for Boulder Book Store; 303-322-7727 for Tattered Cover.

Got a dollar? Lethem's got a deal

• In his controversial Harper's essay, Lethem argues that current copyright laws get in the way of creativity and should be less stringent. Putting those ideas into practice, Lethem is offering the film rights to his new novel for free on his Web site (in exchange for a few conditions). He's also providing the rights to adapt several of his short stories for a dollar, and encouraging bands to compose songs based on his writing.

Lethem told the Rocky that as yet there have been no takers for the screen rights to the novel, "but there's been a lot of reaction to it," he says, "and I like the way it's generating some energy already."

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