Also by Jonathan Lethem
NOVELS
Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)
Amnesia Moon (1995)
As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)
Girl in Landscape (1998)
Motherless Brooklyn (1999)
The Fortress of Solitude (2003)
You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007)
Chronic City (2009)
Dissident Gardens (2013)
A Gambler’s Anatomy (2016)
NOVELLAS
This Shape We’re In (2000)
STORY COLLECTIONS
The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye (1996)
Kafka Americana (with Carter Scholz, 1999)
Men and Cartoons (2004)
Lucky Alan and Other Stories (2015)
NONFICTION
The Disappointment Artist (2005)
Believeniks!: The Year We Wrote a Book About the Mets (with Christopher Sorrentino, 2006)
They Live (2010)
Crazy Friend: On Philip K. Dick (2011, Italy only)
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (2011)
Fear of Music (2012)
AS EDITOR
The Vintage Book of Amnesia (2000)
Da Capo Best Music Writing (2002)
The Novels of Philip K. Dick (Library of America, 3 vols., 2007–2010)
The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (with Pamela Jackson, 2011)
Selected Stories of Robert Sheckley (with Alex Abramovich, 2012)
Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z (with Kevin Dettmar, 2017)
MORE ALIVE and LESS LONELY
Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Lethem
First Melville House Printing: March 2017
Permissions located in the back of the book
Melville House Publishing
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Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
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London N4 2BT
mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse
Ebook ISBN 9781612196046
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Fritz Metsch
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Lethem, Jonathan, author. | Boucher, Christopher, editor.
More alive and less lonely : on books and writers / Jonathan Lethem; edited and with an introduction by Christopher Boucher.
LCSH: Literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc. | Authors and readers. | Books and reading. | Authorship. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Books & Reading. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays.
LCC PS3562.E8544 M67 2017 (print) | LCC PS3562.E8544 (ebook)
| DDC 814/.54–dc23
v4.1
a
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Also by Jonathan Lethem
Copyright
Introduction
by Christopher Boucher
I
ENGULF AND DEVOUR
The Loneliest Book I’ve Read
Footnote on Sylvie Selig
Engulf and Devour
The Figure in the Castle
The Greatest Animal Novelist of All Time
The Counter-Roth
II
IT CAN STILL TAKE ME THERE
The Only Human Superhero
Forget This Introduction
What’s Old Is New (NYRB)
To Catch a Beat
Footnote
III
OBJECTS IN FURIOUS MOTION
Fierce Attachments
Attention Drifting Beautifully (Donald Barthelme)
Rock of Ages
My Hero: Karl Ove Knausgaard
A New Life (Malamud)
A Mug’s Game
Steven Millhauser’s Ghost Stories
IV
LOST WORLDS
The Mechanics of Fear, Revisited
On the Yard
Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird
Everything Said and Exhausted (Daniel Fuchs)
How Did I Get Here and What Could It Possibly Mean? (Bernard Wolfe)
’Twas Ever Thus (Tanguy Viel’s Beyond Suspicion)
Russell Greenan’s Geniuses
V
ECSTATIC DEPICTIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Consumed
Dog Soldiers
Bizarro World
On Two Sentences from Charles D’Ambrosio’s “Screenwriter”
Remarks Perhaps of Some Assistance to the Reader of Joseph McElroy’s Ancient History: A Paraphase
VI
THOMAS BERGER AND I HAVE NEVER MET (ISHIGURO, BERGER AND PKD)
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Butler Did It
Footnote on Ishiguro
High Priest of the Paranoids
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
To Ubik
Life After Wartime
Thomas Berger
Letters from the Invisible Man: My Correspondence with Thomas Berger
Footnote on Berger
VII
OK YOU MUGS
Heavy Petting
More Than Night
You Talkin’ to Me?
New York Characters
Lost and Found
The Original Piece of Wood I Left in Your Head: A Conversation Between Director Spike Jonze and Critic Perkus Tooth
Johnny’s Graying Teenaged Sense of What Isn’t Boring (Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002)
Close Reading (Ricks on Dylan)
Rod Serling
Mutual Seduction
VIII
FAN MAIL
Carved in Need
New Old Friend (A Toast to Kenneth Koch)
Eyes Wide Open
Something About a Slice
Pynchonopolis
To Cosmicomics
Anthony Burgess Answers Two Questions
A Furtive Exchange
Books Are Sandwiches
Acknowledgments
Credits
About the Author
About the Editor
Introduction
by Christopher Boucher
The barber, the cheese man, and the bookie were all named Carmine—oh yeah, wheels within wheels, big time.
—Motherless Brooklyn
I first heard about the project that would become More Alive and Less Lonely at Fenway Park in the summer of 2015. I’d gone to the Red Sox game with my good friend Jaime Clarke, a Boston-based writer, editor, and bookseller, to see them play the Phillies. Sometime around the fifth or sixth inning, Jaime mentioned that his friend Jonathan Lethem was interested in working with my publisher, Melville House, on a nonfiction book. Jaime thought I should consider editing the project—was I interested?
With that question, the game stopped mid-pitch and everyone at Fenway froze—the players, the crowd, the vendors, perhaps all of Boston. Not only is Lethem one of the most important writers of my generation, but he’s also one of the brightest stars in my literary solar system—a star I’ve steered by for my entire writing career. The game resumed, but I can’t tell you a single thing about it—my attention was elsewhere.
—
Jaime put Lethem and me in touch, and Lethem sent me the work he’d collected—roughly seventy-five pieces, some never before published—all written over the past two decades or so. I was charged with identifying a framework and a focus. I didn’t have to look too hard. The theme of books and book culture jumped out at me immediately. What’s more, I was struck by how well these pieces cohered. Collectively, they formed a sustained meditation on the endeavors of reading and writing; a celebration of a life spent in b
ooks; a readerly call-to-action. Without knowing it, I’d been waiting to read a book like this for years. Grateful as I was to glean lessons on craft from Lethem’s fiction, I did so only by inference and assumption. But this is a hotline—rare, direct access to Lethem’s X-ray-like critical insight; his mental library; his infectious hunger for books of all kinds.
Because these selections are culled from a twenty year span and a variety of publications, More Alive and Less Lonely invites you to travel in time a little. You might turn a page and find yourself in 1985, sitting next to Lethem at a reading by Anthony Burgess (“Anthony Burgess Answers Two Questions”). From there you can hop forward to 2009, where readers are eagerly awaiting Lorrie Moore’s first book in eleven years. Flip from there, perhaps, back to 1983, where a teenage Lethem confronts the beat hero Herbert Huncke at a Brooklyn bookstore. There are delightful surprises at every turn: anthems for books you might not be familiar with (Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird, for example, or Tanguy Viel’s Beyond Suspicion), radically creative anthology contributions (an essay on footnotes, for example, which itself takes the form of self-referencing footnotes), and tributes that correlate directly to Lethem’s novels (most notably, “The Original Piece of Wood I Left in Your Head,” a fictional interview between the film director Spike Jonze and Chronic City’s Perkus Tooth).
By and large, the chapter headings divide the selections according to their mission: The work in “Lost Worlds” shines light on obscure or out-of-print titles, for example, while “Engulf and Devour” collects writing about books in the canon. “OK You Mugs” amasses Lethem’s writings on media, while the selections in “It Can Still Take Me There” reflect—either directly or indirectly—on the entity of the book itself.
I see these chapters as temporary containers, though, suggested routes that I’m sure you’ll abandon to cut your own paths. Some readers may gravitate towards Lethem’s writing on one particular writer or topic—Thomas Berger, say, or the notion of amnesia as a narrative device—while others will surely look to More Alive as a partial portrait of contemporary literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Lethem completists, meanwhile, might comb these writings for biographical details—I’d direct them to Lethem’s anecdotes about his surprise visit to Chester Brown in Toronto (“A Furtive Exchange”), or the time he made Philip Roth laugh at a party (“The Counter-Roth”).
Some of the lines of motion here are more subtle. As a student of Lethem’s fiction, I found myself tracking his analysis of other writers’ styles, for example. I love his description of Moore’s “innate thingliness of words…their plastic capacity,” the way he rejects abstraction in the work of Thomas Pynchon (“…figuring out what it is like to read Pynchon is what it is like to read Pynchon. You’re never done with it.”) and his reverence for Moby-Dick—which, Lethem writes, “installs itself in your brain as a kind of second brain, bigger than that which contains it, much like swallowing an ocean of language and implication.”
Look, too, for those tendrils that run between this book and others by Lethem. In one of my favorite moments in 2012’s The Ecstasy of Influence, for example, Lethem writes that “Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality, and so forth.” Pair that with what Lethem says about Franz Kafka here—that “[he] grasped that language itself—even the very plainest and most direct—is innately metaphorical, fabulated, and grotesque. What’s worse, consciousness, being constructed from language, has that same unholy drift…” (“The Figure in the Castle”).
Finally, take note of the new, unpublished writing that appears here for the first time—the footnotes on Berger and Sylvie Selig, for example—and the spirit of restless inquiry therein. Like a detective on a case, Lethem circles back, re-examines the evidence, corrects himself and reframes anecdotes from new perspectives. It’s not the answers that drive him, after all, but the questions’ persistence—and, to borrow from his words on Philip K. Dick, the “beauty of their asking.”
In the end, I confess I was driven by my own selfish interests here; I curated a book that I myself wanted to own—one I could carry with me into bookstores, sip on the fly or gulp from in longer sittings, look to for both short bursts of insight and sustained inquiries. This book, after all, is a node, its objective to lead you to other nodes—those mentioned here, and then to other books by those authors, then to books that influenced those authors, through an infinitely expanding web of texts.
Driving these connections, though, is Lethem’s remarkable generosity of spirit and gratitude. Ultimately, in fact, I regard More Alive and Less Lonely as a love letter—one addressed to books, writers and readers alike. Lethem says as much in the pages that follow. He writes:
“I followed the higher principle of pleasure, tried to end up where I’d started: with writing I loved and wanted to recommend to someone else. That is to say, you.”
I
Engulf and Devour
The Loneliest Book I’ve Read
I’m writing today about the loneliest book I’ve read—lonely in the wonderful sense that I’ve still never met anyone else who’s ever read it. This has increasingly seemed a wonderful thing to me. I’ve learned to value, actually to crave, that old privacy which used to be my constant familiar when I read, whether I was still selecting children’s books or making my earliest explorations of the grown-up’s shelves. Books weren’t surrounded, for me then, by reviews, awards, consensus, zeitgeist or buzz. I never felt guilty for being the last to discover something, never felt smug or self-improving for reading something difficult. Instead, it was forever only me and a book on a lonely exploration. Me in a secret garden. And my loneliest book really was a secret garden—a children’s book called The Happy Valley, it concerned an isolated land where people were permanently happy and strange. No one but me has ever broken in there, to The Happy Valley, so far as I know (I realize I’ll change that by writing this essay). The irony, though, is that my lonely book was written by one of the most famous authors in the world, at least at the time he wrote it.
His name was Eric Berne and if you were around in 1963 you probably read his famous book Games People Play, which held a spot on New York Times bestsellers lists for more than two years. Berne was among the fathers of something called “Transactional Analysis,” and in Games he became its popular explicator as well, and some kind of cultural star. This was that same moment when the Beatles dawned, and with them the “real” sixties; our parents were ready for a fully credentialed, fully bespectacled psychiatrist to explain hostilities and neuroses as “bad games” that could be identified and banished. The book is lucid and clever, with an air of existential empowerment, an anti-authoritarian tinge: institutions played bad games, whether they were governments, colleges, or families, relationships, or one’s own hidebound mind. Autonomy was the higher sport. If you’d found yourself backsliding into a round of “Frigid Woman” or “Courtroom” or “Now I’ve Got You, you Son of a Bitch,” well, it was only a game: start over. Berne’s genius title found its meme-like way into the culture, giving title and lyric to both a country song by Joe South and a soul number by The Spinners—and that’s how it’s likeliest to be remembered now.
Then, as now, a pop guru with a two-year bestseller could rely on having his ephemeral jottings published, even if only as a courtesy—if Deepak Chopra has a children’s book in him, you can bet his publisher will put it in hardcovers. Eric Games People Play Berne did have a children’s book in him, The Happy Valley. Grove Press published it in 1968. Grove published it, some adult purchased it, removed the jacket (and thereby any evidence of its connection to Games) and gave it to me.
I’ve never had confirmation of the book’s existence besides the copy now here in my hands. Unlike Bosco, The Bugaloos, Quisp and Quake, Free to Be You and Me, and other touchstones of my child-cultural experience which have n
ot only been confirmed, but burnished into kitsch talismans, no one I’ve mentioned it to has ever heard of, let alone read, The Happy Valley. The book might as well have been scooped from an alternate world. Like any book in the mind of a child, it had the authority of its existence, which was all it needed then. My friends had Alice In Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and A Wrinkle in Time: I had all of these and The Happy Valley, too. For me it was just as deep as those books, equally as singular and self-contained a fantasy. And unlike the others, it has never been decanted into adult context—no erotic photography or disguised Benjamin Disraeli, no Christian allegory, no disappointing movie adaptations. In my early twenties I worked in a bookstore which specialized in Oz books and Oziana. There my glimpses of the nerdish frenzy of the collectors, and the showoffy one-upmanship of the scholarly types, who sonorously graded the deficiencies of the commissioned sequels by Ruth Plumly Thomson, forever ruptured the magic bubble of the first book. This can never happen to The Happy Valley. The Happy Valley is mine, and it is safe.
The book isn’t nearly as innocuous—okay, insipid—as its title. It’s thrillingly weird. The protagonist is a blue python named Shardlu, who is introduced as “not very handsome to look at, and not very clever…the only way he could earn a living was by being kind to people on Tuesday night and Friday morning. He was listed on the payroll as ‘Friend & Companion.’ ” Shardlu has a bad dream that causes him to curl into a ball and roll downhill, where he bumps into a sign, which sets the unpretentious, unforced surrealist tone for the book:
You are now entering the valley of Lamador. Everybody will see something different here. You will see one thing and your father and mother and dog will see something else. A father will see big trees, big birds, and big animals. A mother will see little flowers, little birds, and butterflies. A dog will see little animals, big and little trees, and bones, but he will smell more than he will see. But the main thing that you will see is to see what happens next.
What does happen next has the deliriously digressive quality of a sunlit dream, or possibly four or five dreams drifting together like clouds. It involves Shardlu’s engagement with the citizens of Lamador—a caravan of dressed, talking animals that include a rabbit named Dulcy and a sheep named Flossie. The animals are led by a strange idiot-sage elder with a long white beard, named Abe, who never answers questions, but often volunteers wisdom impromptu, such as his speculation that Shardlu has come to them from Australia: “I knew that the Australians were going to fall off sometime, and now it has happened…any fool can see that the Australians are hanging head downward.” Also drifting through are an elegant Prince and a Princess with the air of spoiled, distracted lovers, not quite concerned with the main plot, and an explorer named “The Restless Nogo,” who confesses he discovered Lamador the first time he ever left his house. A temperate crisis is caused by Shardlu’s hunger, which he directs at Dulcy the rabbit—Shardlu recalls that his mother advised him to “always keep a little bunny for a rainy day.” In this he falls into alliance with the Princess, who’s been eyeing Dulcy’s pelt for a rabbit-skin umbrella to protect the fragile jelly-bean house she’s built to honor the Prince. Further mild conflict is provided by the arrival—by parachute—of three Robbers, fleeing their native land of Rodamal:
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