Jonathan Lethem: Difference between revisions

Jonathan Lethem is a novelist, whose early work was mostly in science fiction, but who also deals in more mainstream literature, detective fiction, and surrealism.

Biography

Lethem was born in 1964, and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where he currently lives in the neighborhood (Boerum Hill) of his youth. His mother (an activist) and his father (a painter), were Bohemians living in a pre-gentrified area of NYC during the 1970s. His mother died while Lethem was still a teen.

Intending to follow the path of a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended Bennington College in Vermont in the early 1980s and dropped out. He hitchhiked cross-country to California and settled there for a decade or so, working in bookstores as a clerk and writing in his own time. After managing to publish just a few short stories in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Jonathan broke into the literary scene in full force once his first novel was published. Gun, with Occasional Music was a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, complete with talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the illegal drug scene, and cryogenic containment cells.

Moving from smaller to larger publishing houses, Lethem put forth very different books at each successive turn. The 1995 novel Amnesia Moon explored a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape highly influenced by the late Philip K. Dick, a poly-dystopia rife with perception tricks.

After publishing many of his early stories in a 1996 collection (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye), Lethem's next novel, As She Climbed Across the Table was a love story set in motion when a physics researcher falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly. Her previous partner is spurned, and his comic struggle with this rejection, and with the anomaly called "Lack," constitute the majority of the narrative. As She Climbed, was written while Lethem was cutting ties with his own wife, Shelley Jackson.

In the late 1990s, Jonathan moved from the SF Bay area back to Brooklyn. His next book was published around this time, entitled Girl in Landscape. Its plot bore similarities to the John Wayne 1950s movie classic The Searchers. A tween girl on Mars is forced to endure puberty while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders.

Lethem's ambitions eventually turned to more standard postmodern literary fare. Shedding the labels of a genre hero, Lethem continued to write stories with odd twists. Many are collected in the forthcoming Men And Cartoons (2004), referring to Lethem's twin obsessions of the inner workings of the male brain and comic-book superheroes.

The first novel of his post-sci-fi period is 1999'sl Motherless Brooklyn, which takes on the detective theme once again, this time maintaining objective realism while exploring subjective alterity through a protagonist afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome. Edward Norton is adapting and planning to star in a film adaptation currently slated for 2005. [1]

Following Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan took a rest from long-form fiction, publishing story collections, edited volumes, doing magazine pieces, and shepherding his 55-page novella This Shape We're In to an eventual niche as one of the first books issued by McSweeney's Press, the publishing arm of Dave Eggers's McSweeney's quarterly.

Lethem also married and divorced once again during this period, moving part-time to Toronto and then retreating back to Brooklyn again in the process. After collecting his thoughts for a couple of years, Lethem took up the mantle of an old idea, to write a semi-autobiographical book about racial tensions and boyhood in Brooklyn during the late 1970s. Fortress of Solitude, put out in 2003, is his longest work to date, and sprawls over the 70s for half its length, while the second half surveys the irony-laden 1990s. The main characters are two friends of different backgrounds who grew up on the same block in Boerum Hill.

Jonathan has expressed interest in basing his next long-form work on the love lives of West Coast hipsters and their trials and tribulations.

Bibliography

Novels

• Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)
• Amnesia Moon (1995)
• As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)
• Girl in Landscape (1998)
• Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
• This Shape We're In (2000)
• The Fortress of Solitude (2003)

Collections by Lethem

• The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye (1996)
• Men and Cartoons: Stories (2004)

Collections featuring Lethem

• Kafka Americana (1999) (with Carter Scholz)
• The Vintage Book of Amnesia (2001) (Editor)

Non-fiction

• Da Capo Best Music Writing: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Pop, Jazz, Country and More (2002) (Editor)