Best known for Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem has written 13 novels since his debut in 1994. In addition to the novels, Lethem’s output includes an extensive array of short stories. Fans and new readers alike will thoroughly enjoy his latest offering, A Different Kind of Tension, a wide-ranging collection of stories that spans 30 years, plus seven brand-new stories to round out the anthology.
Lethem will be appearing Friday evening, Oct. 10, at 7 p.m. at the Old Dutch Church as part of this year’s O+ Festival, which runs all weekend. I caught up with him recently to talk about his new book, the Brooklynification of the universe, and the ever-shifting nature of reality in general. Read through to the end to find out what band he’s playing bass in.
What follows are excerpts from a longer interview:
Adam Snyder: I’m enjoying your new book, A Different Kind of Tension. The title comes from a Buzzcocks album. What’s the connection?
Jonathan Lethem: Well, I guess I’ve always really loved that record, and loved the title of the record. It had an inexplicability that I really liked … to me the title names a kind of feeling I have about this practice in a couple of different ways.
I’m partly naming the tension of the novel vs. the short story. People very often write both things, and sometimes you can even make a novel out of pieces of short stories, or make short stories out of pieces of novels, but there is a really interesting formal tension in the difference between them.
The other one is that I sort of started out as a science fiction writer. I have a period in the middle where I got really interested in I guess what you’d call the realist short story, but of course my instinct for surrealism or the fantastic is kind of lurking around in there, so this push and pull is another kind of tension that I identify lurking in this body of work.
There’s also kind of a private joke with myself, which is a lot of writers more or less my age have named their books for Elvis Costello albums, but the Buzzcocks never get any respect. And so I thought, OK, maybe I’m the Buzzcocks of my cohort. Why don’t I call it A Different Kind of Tension?
AS: Speaking of tension, isn’t there a paradox that in our actual lives we have this goal to reduce tension, and yet as fiction writers our job is to create tension?
JL: I think that’s an excellent question. I want to just agree with the question, first of all, yes. As someone who instructs aspirant fiction writers, one of the things that I often find myself having to do is help them feel OK about inflicting discomfort.
Because, really, we all have this enormous craving for stories that are made of uncomfortable, confusing, provocative elements. But when we’re starting to make fiction, there can sometimes be an almost helpless politeness that comes over us, where we’ll have this counterimpulse to just soothe the reader and settle them down and reassure them that nothing too bad could happen. But the reader doesn’t really want to be soothed that way. It’s always really disappointing when the writer does something that lowers the temperature or the risk.
AS: In many of your best-known novels, Brooklyn is not just a setting, it’s elemental, like this mega character that holds all the other characters. Is it safe to say that Brooklyn lives like a kind of presence within you?
JL: Yeah, I think that I am helplessly engaged with that place. I mean, you call it a kind of mega character — I might say it’s a real place that’s also a supercharged, all-purpose metaphor.
Its conflictual energy, its innate, almost paradoxical degrees of diversity, its tendency to transform but remain the same — those things are like the defining metaphorical feelings I have about reality. The shape-shifting, the sense that one has to accept and devote oneself to a world that can’t be relied upon — I think it’s in every one of these stories, really, whether Brooklyn is even remotely eligible to be named in the space of the story or not.
I wrote four novels before Motherless Brooklyn. I think the formation of me as a short story writer comes in that period when I wrote those four novels that don’t mention it. It was almost like I was avoiding Brooklyn for a long time, and then it expressed itself against my will in some of the things I wrote.
You know, like these bands of feral children on Mars in Girl in Landscape — that’s me accidentally already arriving at the idea of street kids, but I’ve transposed it, because I’m not ready yet to talk about Brooklyn directly.
AS: When I read the Brooklyn books, there’s a deeper underlying theme, a sense of being in a place where, at least as a young person, you feel unsafe. Can you talk about that?
JL: Well, yeah. When I say that the world is comprised of fundamental instabilities, the idea of continuity or authority or — your word — safety is a constant negotiation.
This is what connects the feeling of that kind of specific urban historical detail to my most fantastical, surreal inventions. Both are attempts to describe a sense of the world as fundamentally unstable, comprised of multiple, subjective, irreconcilable assertions. You know, like this space belongs to everyone, or no one. But there’s no consensus about what kind of space it is.
AS: I believe that O+ will be your first-ever reading in Kingston. Kingston is now seen by some to have been Brooklynified. As somebody who has survived the Brooklynification of Brooklyn — if that makes any sense — do you have any advice for folks who are trying to process this?
JL: Oh, that’s a funny question. Yeah … be very kind to each other. I mean, I have a leftist, serious, indignant concern with the corporatization of everything, and I have the same kind of concern with the displacement of communities by real estate interests or developers.
What you find me writing about in Brooklyn Crime Novel is a period that actually precedes the big money, where you have this kind of poignancy, where people are seeking one kind of community and it begins to overwrite another.
We’ve seen this pattern. In late ’60s Brooklyn it was still a surprise — it shouldn’t be such a surprise anymore. You know, people looking for an affordable place, and perhaps even specifically seeking diversity, unusual kinds of decaying buildings to patch together because they adore old buildings, become in a sense the accidental villains of early gentrification. Because we know the script now, right?
AS: That was part of the crime in Brooklyn Crime Novel.
JL: Absolutely. Yeah. So now we have to be savvy, we have to understand that we’re all on the same side against the same forces. And so, in community-making, the question is not whether you’ve been there a long time or whether you’re just showing up this afternoon. The question is, how do you engage with the people in front of you?
And it’s really the fundamental question of our moment, right? Human beings are in front of you — what are you going to do with that? Are they going to be part of your community, are you going to recognize them, or are you going to thing-ify them, turn them into a problem, or invisible-ize them?
It’s really down to a lot of individual responses that become collective.
AS: Well put. Just to pivot slightly, I heard you one night being interviewed on KCRW. That’s how I found out you teach at Pomona College. I’m curious how you wound up teaching there and what you think about it?
JL: Well, I know I’m constantly surprising people by my present occupancy of what’s kind of a part of Los Angeles, although it’s a kind of Inland Empire hinterland. I sometimes joke it’s like the Midwest of Los Angeles.
I mean, first of all, I’ve always had this attraction to the West Coast. When I first left Brooklyn, and then dropped out of college, I kind of ran away to the Bay Area … you know, my first few novels were written there before I circled back to Brooklyn for a while.
But, you know, they found me — they kind of scouted me up. It was the right time. I had little kids at that moment, and the attractions of a kind of stable occupation with health insurance were irresistible. And I do seem to thrive on versions of exile. I like to be in the center, and I like to be specifically in New York at times, but I also seem to have a pattern of running away from it.
AS: I also saw something you wrote online recently — you kind of teased us and said that you played bass on an album, but you didn’t say which one. Look, I interview a lot of musicians. I can’t let you off the hook. What band does Jonathan Lethem play bass for?
JL: Well, the record isn’t out yet. That’s why maybe if you were trying to cyberstalk it, you weren’t successful.
It was kind of a COVID-era confabulation. I don’t know if you know Shrimper Records and some of the bands that are associated with Shrimper. The most famous kind of graduate of their scene is the Mountain Goats.
There’s a handful of others. It’s very much an Inland Empire kind of lo-fi, for a long time cassette-only, label. Defiantly anti-commercial music. And, um, I’ve fallen in with some of those people. We formed a kind of COVID supergroup made up of pieces of Falcon Eddy, Refrigerator, and Wckr Spgt, all throwing ideas out — because we were sitting in our houses, less than a mile from each other but unable to visit — with me writing some but not all of the lyrics.
I somehow, um, conned them into believing I could be the bass player. But they covered their bets by keeping their regular bass player too, so you’ll never know if it’s actually me. If it gets virtuosic, it’s probably not me. The album comes out, I think, in March. The group is called The Dissociation.
AS: Fantastic. We’ll be on the lookout for that one.
Lethem will appear at the Old Dutch Church, Friday, Oct. 10, at 7 p.m., in conversation with author Ayana Mathis, as part of the O+ Festival, which runs Oct. 10–12. This year’s festival features live performances by Kool Keith, the Fiery Furnaces, plus dozens of other musicians, writers, artists and health practitioners. Wristbands are available on their website. All profits go to supporting O+ artists’ health care clinics in Kingston. opositivefestival.org
A Different Kind of Tension came out Sept. 23. It’s published by HarperCollins and is available at your friendly local bookstore.
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