THE title of Jonathan Lethem’s 2003 best-selling
novel, The Fortress of Solitude, is an allusion to
Superman’s private retreat, located far away from
his primary residence in Metropolis, the sprawling
city that in many ways defines the Man of Steel. Likewise,
Lethem, who is known to many readers for writing about
his own metropolis, Brooklyn, New York, is often found in
another, more secluded home, in Blue Hill, Maine. As if to
reinforce this parallel, the driving directions he has sent me
(a long list of exits, turns, and merges that comprise the route
out of Brooklyn, where he still has an apartment, to his white
farmhouse, located over four hundred miles north of New
York City) have a touch of superhero stateliness. “You have
now joined forces with Route 15,” he writes.
For Lethem, whose eighth novel, Chronic City, was published
in October by Doubleday, life in Maine is hardly

solitary—with him are his wife, Amy Barrett, an ebullient
fi lmmaker, and their two-year-old son, Everett—but his immaculately
organized, bookshelf-lined offi ce does indicate a
certain peace of mind. A silver MacBook and an iPod resting
on its speaker dock are arranged upon
a wooden writing desk, which faces a
window onto greenery. An original
photograph of William S. Burroughs—
taken by Allen Ginsberg—hangs on the
wall. In gray corduroy pants, blue longsleeved
T-shirt, and black Chuck Taylor
All-Stars, Lethem appears younger
than his forty-fi ve years. He looks, as
his early mentor, bookstore owner Michael
Seidenberg, has described him,
like “a normal guy.”
Yet there is something about his
stormy-sea blue eyes—a quiet intensity,
you could call it—that hints at the mind
behind the visionary writing that twelve
years ago landed him on Newsweek’s list
of one hundred people to watch in the
new century. Sitting in a striped armchair
in a corner between bookshelves
as Maisie, the family’s “neurotic” Jack
Russell terrier, darts about, Lethem
pauses as he searches for precise words,
a tendency that mirrors his writing approach.
“I’m very tolerant of stillness.
I don’t mind sitting there for half an
hour,” he says. “I’d rather not move my
hands just to move them; I’ll wait for
the right thing.”
Although he is the author of eight novels,
a novella, four story collections, an
essay collection, and numerous works of
journalism and criticism—not to mention
being editor of several anthologies,
including The Vintage Book of Amnesia
(Vintage, 2000) and Philip K. Dick: Four
Novels of the 1960s (Library of America,
2007)—Lethem doesn’t consider himself
prolifi c. Small indications of this
modesty are peppered throughout his
more recent books. “Recognition creeps
up on one,” utters Abraham Ebdus, the
father of the protagonist, Dylan, in
The Fortress of Solitude. In Chronic City,
about a former child sitcom star living
off residuals while navigating a surreal
version of the Manhattan social scene,
Lethem writes: “Legitimacy settles on
us in various ways.”
Such lines encapsulate the arc of
Lethem’s career, which has been a
mostly steady climb since his debut
novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, was
published by Harcourt in 1994. For the
next fi ve years, until his fi fth novel, the
National Book Critics Circle Award–
winning Motherless Brooklyn, was published
by Doubleday, Lethem was
respectably reviewed, but also, he suggests,
comfortably midlist. “When The
Fortress of Solitude came out, people said,
‘Great second novel!’ and I said, ‘Sixth,
but thanks!’” he recalls with a goodnatured
laugh. When most readers think of Jonathan Lethem, they don’t
often think of novels such as Amnesia
Moon (Harcourt, 1995); As She Climbed
Across the Table (Doubleday, 1997); and
Girl in Landscape (Doubleday, 1998), all
of which blend the infl uence of science
fi ction, mystery, and even, in the case
of Girl in Landscape, westerns, with elements
of literary fi ction.
In 2005, two years after the publication
of The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem
was under the brushes of a car
wash with Barrett, in Maine, when
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation called to award him
a fi ve-hundred-thousand-dollar “genius”
fellowship. “I couldn’t hear what
they were saying, but I suspected I was
happy to be hearing it,” he says. “It
solved a lot of problems on the spot.”
The foundation’s citation read, in part:
“By orchestrating…allusions to popular
genres within his fi ction, Lethem
heightens emotional engagement with
his characters, blurs boundaries across
a broad spectrum of cultural creations,
and expands the frontier of American
fi ction.”
Lethem’s new book, Chronic City,
which he started writing in 2004, pushes
his boundaries even further. “It’s associated
with reelecting George Bush and
accepting the nightmares of the previous
four years—where 9/11 happens
and becomes horribly appropriated for
this crusade,” he says. “It’s an angry and
sorrowful book on that level, trying to
accept things about what reality had
become, or how deeply unreality had
infi ltrated. I was trying to get at some
essence of how I feel about the texture
of everyday life and the degree to which
it’s riddled with complicities, illusions,
and displacements.”
The terrorist attacks of September
11, though, aren’t mentioned explicitly
in the novel. Instead, lower Manhattan
is covered in ominous gray fog. “It’s not
my way of thinking,” Lethem says of
handling events head-on. “I started to
feel if the anger in this book and the energy
driving it was going to be coherent,
it had to confess at some level that there
was trauma. The way 9/11 was a real
event but also an event behind which
other things conceal themselves—that
became my subject.”
Ultimately though, in Chronic City,
as in all of Lethem’s books, the characters
take center stage. The novel traces
the intersecting trajectories of former
child star Chase Insteadman, whose fi -
ancée, Janice Trumbull, is an astronaut
trapped in orbit; misanthropic retired
rock critic Perkus Tooth, who moves
into a fancy Upper East Side apartment
building whose only tenants are
dogs; Oona Laszlo, a ghostwriter with
a riotous sense of humor (“a character
funnier than I am,” Lethem says); and
Richard Abneg, once a Lower East Side
anarchist, who works for the mayor undoing
rent stabilization.
Lethem’s new novel also represents
a return to New York City—just not
the borough that readers have come to
expect—as a setting for his fi ction. With
a “huge chapter” of his life now spent in
Maine, and Chronic City set in Manhattan,
his days of being known as the Bard
of Brooklyn have likely come to an end.
Not that he was comfortable with this
or other such labels in the first place.
In fact, his previous novel, You Don’t
Love Me Yet (Doubleday, 2007), was a
purposeful attempt at shrugging them
off. “I was slightly at risk of becoming
a civic monument,” he told science fi ction
magazine Locus earlier this year.
“People wanted me to write about childhood
and Brooklyn in these big novels
full of Dickensian richness, so I wrote an
angular romantic comedy basically
derived from the tradition of Muriel
Spark.” The New York Times Book Review
called the novel “parenthetical,” but Lethem
says it refreshed him and taught
him a few things he needed to know in
order to write Chronic City, such as how
to handle intricate social arrangements
and bantering, jaded circles of friends.
“I loved Fortress and the sequence
of essays that came along with it, The
Disappointment Artist, but by handling
so much intimate material and taking
on so much sorrowful stuff about family,
gentrifi cation, and time, I came out
of those years thinking, ‘I’ve become a
very ponderous dude; I should remember
that part of my assignment, in my
mind, is to make wonderfully useless
artifacts for people to enjoy.’”
LETHEM has drawn much of
his fictional material from
childhood. The eldest of
three siblings, he was born
in 1964, when his parents—avant-garde
painter Richard and political activist
Judith—were living in an illegal sublet
loft in SoHo. His father, a Fulbright
scholar, studied and later taught painting
at Columbia University. A year after
Jonathan was born, the family moved to
Kansas City, Missouri, where his father
taught at the art institute, then returned
to New York City, to a brownstone on
Dean Street in Brooklyn, in 1968.
In those early years, the Lethem home
had “a quasi-commune aspect to it,” the
author says. “My father’s students and
my mother’s radical friends were always
crashing there.” Living with a working
artist in the house demystified the process
of creating art; as his old high school
friend, novelist Christopher Sorrentino,
says, such a situation “tends to bleed the
romance out of what making art entails.”
His mother gave him a typewriter when
he was fourteen, shortly before he lost
her to brain cancer. The summer following
her death, he put it to good use,
diving into the writing of a 125-page
manuscript titled “Heroes.” Around
the same time he wandered into Brazen
Head, a used-book store in Brooklyn run
by Seidenberg, who would become a lifelong
friend and mentor.
Now gray-bearded, the charismatic
Seidenberg owned three businesses operated out of one space on Atlantic
Avenue in the late 1970s—front to back:
a used-book store, a puppet theater, and
a moving company. “Jonathan said, ‘Hi,
can I work here?’” Seidenberg recalls.
“He was like a little adult, precocious
and well read.” Seidenberg wanted to
hire Lethem, but the store wasn’t profitable.
“He said the magic words: ‘I’ll
work for books.’” They did not discuss
the then-recent death of Lethem’s
mother, Seidenberg says. “He came to
escape. He came to be in my world. I
knew he needed something, but I didn’t
know the extent of it.” The two men
have remained close, with Seidenberg
serving as the basis for mobster Frank
Minna in Motherless Brooklyn, his moving
company having morphed into the
novel’s detective agency, and the bookstore
owner’s Eighty-fourth Street
home standing in as Perkus Tooth’s garret
in Chronic City. (Even Seidenberg’s
three-legged white pit bull, Ava, makes
an appearance in the new novel.)
After graduating from Manhattan’s
High School of Music & Art, Lethem
studied studio art at Bennington College
in Vermont, during the same period
Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt,
and Jill Eisenstadt attended for writing.
Citing “money and cultural awkwardness,”
Lethem took a semester
off and returned to New York City.
He almost moved in with his and Seidenberg’s
friend, rock journalist Paul
Nelson, who later died tragically; Nelson
was one of the primary inspirations
for Perkus Tooth. “The only thing that
kept me from living with Paul was that
he smoked these horrible-smelling little
cigarillos,” Lethem says. “Paul was the
ambassador of a number of things I’m
still obsessed with.” Though Perkus is
not based entirely on any individual, he
is, as Lethem says of all his characters,
a “container” for various people, ideas,
and infl uences. “I was mourning Paul
by writing Perkus in some way.”
Lethem never returned to college and
still jokes he’s a sophomore on leave.
Instead, in 1984 he moved to Berkeley,
California, and found “a place where my
parents’ version of the counterculture
was still alive,” he says. “Reagan’s America
hadn’t taken the hippie dream away
from Berkeley.” He worked in used-book
stores; met his fi rst wife, novelist Shelley
Jackson (their marriage lasted ten years);
and reconnected with Sorrentino, author
of the novel Trance (Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2005). “We admire—and
disdain—the same things, in an uncanny
way. Not just movies, say, but scenes in
movies,” Sorrentino says. “The other
day I wrote him recommending this
relatively obscure book I’d just fi nished,
Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, and
Jonathan wrote back, ‘I just fi nished that
last month.’ We’re permanent residents
of the same page. I think that has a lot
to do with our being autodidacts, college
dropouts who acquired knowledge
through the habit of randomly pulling
books off the shelves, following our interests
back to their sources, tracing different
branches from those sources, then
returning to the initial interests.”
In Berkeley, Lethem wrote his early
novels: Gun, With Occasional Music, a science
fi ction–mystery hybrid; the postapocalyptic
Amnesia Moon; and As She
Climbed Across the Table, a campus farce
set against a relationship’s disintegration.
“A lot of Jonathan’s earlier books
are all about executing a high concept,
while now I don’t think he’s having
‘ideas’ so much as seeing narrative possibilities,”
says Sorrentino. Seidenberg
agrees: “The early novels are clever ideas
that are executed. They come from a
different place than the later work.”
An agent submitted the trio Lethem
called “Moon, Table, Gun” to publishers,
and As She Climbed Across the Table
narrowly missed becoming Lethem’s
offi cial debut from Bantam. Instead,
Harcourt picked up Gun, With Occasional
Music, which was published in
1994, followed by Amnesia Moon, the
story collection The Wall of the Sky,
the Wall of the Eye, and As She Climbed
Across the Table.
At Harcourt Lethem had been edited
by Michael Kandel, whose background
is in science fi ction, having written four
of his own novels in the genre. Shortly
after the publication of As She Climbed
Across the Table, however, Lethem
moved to Doubleday, where he began
working with Bill Thomas, who saw
in him a more literary writer, and he
strived to get him reviewed as such. Girl
in Landscape, Lethem’s fourth novel, was
the fi rst to be published after the switch,
in 1998. While the fi rst part had been
written while he still lived in Berkeley,
Lethem told Publishers Weekly at the
time that he was putting his toes in the
water for coming back to Brooklyn.
Speaking at the Writers Center Stage
series in Cleveland this past March, Lethem
told the audience: “Girl in Landscape
is truly my most autobiographical
book, but nobody would ever know
this because it’s about a girl and it’s set
on Mars.” The personal nature of the
novel is evident in the following passage:
“‘I want to be perfectly truthful,’
said the doctor. ‘Many people with your
mother’s illness fi ght it again and again
and throughout their lives. No drug or
radiation can ever completely eliminate
the cancer. But people live years…’ Or
they don’t, Pella understood.”
“The books get serious when they go
to Brooklyn,” says Seidenberg. “Jonathan
comes to times in his life when he
decides to deal with things, and he made
the decision to deal with life in Brooklyn.”
Lethem himself moved back in
1996—around the time he and Jackson
were divorced, though they had separated
four years earlier—and started
to write Motherless Brooklyn, which
borrows more from detective novels
than science fi ction (though in a typical
Lethem fl ourish, his detective has
Tourette’s syndrome). With its publication
in 1999, Lethem’s big move—not
only to the borough of his childhood
but also to a larger readership and more
widespread critical recognition—was
complete. “Jonathan’s ditching sci-fi
was his Dylan-at-Newport moment,”
says Sorrentino.
Lethem, however, is quick to point
out that this “Newport moment” is
more complex than it appears, and consists
mainly of the public perception of
a radical shift rather than a signifi cant
change in the artist who was, as Lethem
says of Dylan’s switch from acoustic
to electric guitar in that famous set
in 1965, just “continuing his practice,
moving through forms and elements
that mattered to him. And, in fact,
as Dylan buffs know, his first music
using electric guitars came several
years before, in a song called ‘Mixed-
Up Confusion.’”
Similarly, Motherless Brooklyn, like
Gun, With Occasional Music, features a
detective and a mystery storyline, while
The Fortress of Solitude incorporates fantasy
elements, notably a Tolkien-esque
magical ring. Lethem even calls Chronic
City a “monolithic reworking of Amnesia
Moon.” While his interests, infl uences,
and approach remained consistent, what
does fi gure more heavily into his more
recent work is setting. “My early books
are the books of a transplanted person,”
he says. “I wrote about the Bay Area
twice after just arriving there and being
wrenched out of the deep immediacy
and knowledge of my New York life into
this relatively opaque California reality.
Obviously, [California] has its own
deep and intricate textures, but I wasn’t
able to contact those, so I wrote about
displacement.”
OVER lobs ter and crab
rolls on his porch in Blue
Hill, Lethem seems anything
but displaced as he
discusses his plan for his New York
Chronic City appearances (reading the
novel aloud in its entirety on a series of
sequential nights in different venues)
and the challenges of having a twoyear-
old: “It’s hard to sit with a book
and think, ‘I’ll read these pages rather
than play with that marvelous child.’ I
don’t have the same slack time I used to
have.” The shortage of time hasn’t limited
the magnitude of his focus, however.
Lethem is currently working on
a book about the 1979 Talking Heads
album Fear of Music for Continuum
Books’ 33 1/3 series of authors writing
about music albums. He’s begun
a new novel as well, this one set in
Queens—his mother’s borough—in
the 1950s and 1960s. He also recently
fi nished a short story that took him six
months to write.
“I don’t give up on a lot of work,” he
says. “I usually think, ‘I must have been
driving at something, even if it looks a
little stupid or I’m rather stuck.’ The
heart is pleasure in writing.” Which
translates to pleasure in reading. Lethem
advises readers to seek out “minor
authors, forgotten authors, books where
you haven’t already listened to Terry
Gross interview the writer. I think
it’s so important to meet narrative at
its dreamlike, immersive best,” he
says. “Just experience what it is to love
narrative—not for its signifi cance or as
an X ray of the artist in question—not
for anything but itself.”

Dr. Sacks got us talking about journaling, and I remembered I used to keep a journal faithfully — until I started writing professionally. Then the journals became mere notebooks for recording ideas for essays, articles, novels, memoir…some of the rawness left my work. I want to try to get more of the uncensored, emotion-filled writing of the journals into writing created with an audience in mind. As an introverted, private person I do feel a resistance to that sometimes, a resistance I know I’d be better off overcoming. Reading the diary of a brain-wounded soldier who wrote over three-thousand pages of lucid, arresting prose while not being able to read it back to himself was the most inspiring thing I’ve come across in some time. Should be required reading for all writers. (Man With a Shattered World) We’ll never complain again.

The Foreign Service Journal included Mexican High in its annual round-up of books by Foreign Service employees (thanks, Mom!) and their relations. Check it out here:
mexican-high_fsj-review