In an interview with The Paris Review, you said you quit [Bennington College] art school because of the corruption of art by money and connections. Now, as an extremely successful writer, do you think you’ve come full circle in a way?
Well, one way I’ve come full circle is robust relations with Bennington. In their literature, they refer to me as a graduate of the class of ’86. If that’s a form of corruption, then I’m definitely corrupted. I’m a 50 year-old novelist, I’m part of the establishment. I’ve been published for 20 years by a division of Random House, which is as corporate as the arts can get. But I still identify with the feeling I had of being a suspicious, anti-institutional wild cat, and I express it in the work. As I get older and find my way to health insurance and a safe school for my children, I’m not acting out in the same ways. It probably makes me an incoherent person. But most people aren’t lined up with their inner selves.
And aren’t writers festivals part of the same “establishment”?
Well, it’s true that they’re kind of a garnish on the deep impulse to write and read, which is solitary and profound. But they tend to be full of people who are excited about books. [The organizers] are people who care about what I do and are dragging me halfway across the world. And I love for instance that I’m going to be there with Paul Theroux who I read when I was a teenager and who in the 70s was a leading American novelist.
In many Asian cities, there’s a Brooklyn fetish taking over the lifestyle scene, embodied by industrial-chic décor, brunch and farmers markety-ness. As someone who lived in Gowanus [Brooklyn], moved away, then came back when it was a gentrified Boerum Hill, any thoughts on the “brooklynization” of the world?
In my personal lexicon, “brooklynization” should mean that suddenly a lot of people are getting mugged. I’m never shocked to see when I’m in Europe the backwards baseball caps and Brooklyn sports gear on people. I’ll be curious to see what it’s like in Asia.
You’re prolific across three genres. How do you “replenish the well”?
Going from one genre to the other is a way to let the well fill back up. But I have a deep identity as a novelist. Most of the time, I’m cooking up the next novel, and if I’m far from it, it’s strategic: I need to gather materials or replenish. I’m not equal in my devotion to all the things I do. A lot of the things I do are things people ask me to. When people want an essay or a review or a personal piece, it’s usually because the context interests me, but it’s the fiction I live to do.
What are you reading these days?
I’m also a professor, so at the moment I’m sunk deep into mid-semester reading blahs. I’m not in an extraordinary reading spot right now. But I do have this fixation with [Danish author] Karl Ove Knaushaard’s My Struggle. I’m hanging around the bookstore waiting for the next volume to be translated. He tells you everything. He’s taken the stops off. Sentence by sentence, the volumes are not dynamic, but there’s something about his ruthless honesty and self-examination and the way he floods every situation with so much language—he’s getting at something extraordinary and you feel like you know him in a way.
What’s your writing routine like?
I just have one rule and my whole practice is based on this rule, which is to write every day. I write in the morning, sometimes super incredibly early. However my day is shaped, I do writing first, before other things. It substitutes for all the other kinds of obsessiveness that other writers have.
Tell us about the talk you’re giving about cultural references at SWF.
My early books were set in an imaginative space. And then suddenly I started referring to New York City and specific streets and sandwich shops. That led me further down this rabbit hole of depending overwhelmingly on cultural references. The talk is a defense of the practice. I grew up wanting to be a painter and also as a fan of music, there’s this idea of pure expressivity, as in classical music. And the ways in which writing can and can’t emulate that is really interesting to me. I’ve seen writing as really entrenched with references. My thinking about this stuff changes every time I talk about it. I don’t work from a script.
Jonathan Lethem is giving three talks at the Singapore Writers’ Festival: Letters from America (Nov 8, 10am, Singapore Art Museum); Words Are Not Paint: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cultural References (Nov 8, 5pm, National Museum of Singapore) and The State of Literature (Nov 9, 11:30am, SMU). For more info, click here.
