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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with me. It is spooky season, so next week we're going to get our scare on. We'll speak with the curator of The Criterion Channel's, Halloween spectacular, the '90s Horror Channel. We'll also attend the tale of Sweeney Todd with Josh Groban, who is starring in the Broadway revival.

We'll speak to director Tommy Kail as well, and we'll talk about Brooklyn's historic Greenwood Cemetery with the author of a new book of photos and essays about it, plus a guide who leads tours of the grounds. That is in the future, but right now, let's get this hour started with author Jonathan Lethem.

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Alison: The Brooklyn neighborhood novelist Jonathan Lethem grew up in the 1970s is gone, but he keeps writing it back into existence like in The Fortress of Solitude. Back in the day, the neighborhood around Dean Street didn't even really have a real name. As he said during our December 2020 get-lit conversation.

Jonathan: It was South Brooklyn, or maybe it was North Gowanus, or it was just where you were when you were not yet in Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights.

Alison: Lethem returns to the unmodified streets of Brooklyn in his latest novel. Although this time the timeline is not fixed. Sometimes it's the 21st century, sometimes it's the '90s, sometimes it's 1978 when a slice of pizza in a subway token cost 50 cents each. Made up of a series of vignettes, some long, some are paragraph, some are list, told from the vantage points of people in the neighborhood like we the crotchety, but often correct old timer, or C a charming black kid who might be too fearless, or the screamer whose name is self-explanatory.

The thread that pulls it all together is the neighborhood itself, and the sense that while things are changing, some things like crime and gentrification remain the same, even if it looks or sounds a little bit different. It is a large and sprawling and intense, and it is called Brooklyn Crime Novel. Joining me now in studio is Jonathan Lethem. Welcome back to the show.

Jonathan: Thank you, Alison. Nice to actually be in the studio with you. It's a pleasure.

Alison: Jonathan has a full calendar on Saturday. He'll be at the New Yorker Festival with Colson Whitehead, heard of him. On Wednesday, October 11th, he'll be at St. Ann's Church, hosted by the Brooklyn Book Festival and Books Are Magic and Conversation with Xochitl Gonzalez. You may have read her piece with Jonathan in The New Yorker. Both events require tickets, by the way. What did this book start out as and then what did it become?

Jonathan: Well, there's a real story in the sense that-- This book returns to the source code for me, the Dean Street baseline condition, the '70s gentrification, diversity, and conflict, and bewilderment for growing up in this place that was so enriched and so conflictual and so meaningful to me. When I finished that book, which is over 20 years ago, I thought I'd done it. I didn't mean that no one could ever say more, but that I couldn't, that I'd completed my utterance, and that it was for someone else to pick up after that. Somewhere in the 20 years that followed, I think a chorus of different voices got into my head.

I used to joke that when I would walk around the streets of the neighborhood, I would think every square of pavement has something in it that I didn't capture, that I didn't get right. This gorgeous musical production was created at the public theater. I was so taken out of myself in a way by it, because I'm not a musical artist, and I could never have conceived of even trying to make that thing. It was like having my work translated into another language entirely and then embodied by these performers on a stage and sung. It reached into me in a very intense way.

I was talking on stage because they put me on stage with the creators of the musical about whether I'd ever write about Brooklyn again. Up to then, I'd had an automatic reply, which was no, for better or worse, success or failure, I did what I was going to do. I joked instead, and it was an unconscious joke. I said, "With all respect to this fantastic musical we just saw, a part of my imagination saw through the eyes of some kid who grew up alongside me, who thinks that the whole thing is a crock. Like not right, that I just made it all up. There's an actual real story that corrections need to be made.

I joked that, "What if your musical becomes like Cats on Broadway, and everyone's wearing the T-shirt and everyone's drinking the coffee mug?" Some kid who grew up on Dean Street feels that the relationship between this image that he's stuck under is like the relationship of the musical cats to the life of a real actual cat. He's like, "I'm going to make it right." This book was written from this antagonistic position.

Now, I'm very proud of The Fortress of Solitude and love that musical, but in a way, I concocted this book out of the sense that there was so much more to say and so much that could be gotten right in a different way if I let go of some of the lyricism and attacked it from a really different kind of point of view and also let a lot of other voices into the mix.

Alison: Are you your own antagonist?

Jonathan: Yes, I did, I played my own antagonist in this. My friend Dana Spiedo read the first draft of this book, and it was composed in the midst of the quarantine, and which was also the George Floyd time. Everyone was in involuntary and often deeply uncomfortable set of reflections. We were thrust inward by our isolation, and we were challenged to rework and reexamine so many different things.

The question of whether I could even begin to write a book like this loomed very large, but that anxiety was also in the mix. It was an ingredient and a catalyst. When I showed it to Dana, she said, "This is a time when everyone's worried about whether you're punching up or punching down, and you found the third way, which is punch yourself."

Alison: [laughs] Punch yourself in the face. I'm hitting me. I'm hitting me. What did you learn about the difference between memory and nostalgia in writing this?

Jonathan: I think I conceived of nostalgia as the forbidden. Anytime I tasted a whiff of it, I wanted to instead triangulate memory with documentation and other people's view, even if it led to a deeper confusion. I thought that confusion was an engagement that mattered. I distrusted not only nostalgia but in a way some of the basics of storytelling, the things that I rely upon, entrancing people with a continuous narrative. Instead, this is a very discontinuous book.

I let the inquiry be the plot of the book instead of the fate of the characters from one page to the next. What keeps you in if you stay in, I can't say whether that's going to work for everyone, is the ferocity of the need to understand and interrogate this place at the deepest level. The voice is on a journey of restricting nostalgia, taking it off the table and instead doing memory as an investigation.

Alison: I know that you had mentioned in your conversation with Xochitl Gonzalez that you talked to people from your past, you dove in and you did the whole Facebook rabbit hole. What was something that you heard in those conversations which really surprised you? Like, "Wow, I really thought that couch was yellow when it was truly blue and Justin misremembered it."

Jonathan: I had so many things overturned. You can't imagine, Alison. Stories that I thought belonged to me because they happened to me. I started to realize there was even this effect where there was like a trans, you know how people will tell themselves that they were at the game where the famous thing happened?

Alison: Oh yes. There's a name for that.

Jonathan: Yes. This was true of the collective experience of childhood in Gowanus, in Boerum Hill, on Dean Street. I realized we'd become a group mind, and we'd exchanged not only experiences and tendencies but even what we thought were intimate memories, things that had happened to one kid, had really happened to another. I had all kinds of things like that occur. Also, as I told Social, I made a questionnaire and I had a series of questions about crime and experience of street life, and there was this wild divergence in how people would answer it, but there was also really striking continuities.

There were two questions that every single kid I'd grown up with answered the same way. One was, did you ever shoplift anything? From the most obedient, the nerdiest, the private school kids, but frankly the whitest kids, it didn't matter. Every one of us had gone in and pocketed a Chaca [unintelligible 00:09:39] or a Charleston Chew, or--

Alison: Five-finger discount.

Jonathan: Yes, absolutely. It was integral to our experience. It was part of the way you made yourself a participant in the life of the street. The other one was that every single person, kid, we're talking about 50-year-olds now, 50 to 60-year-olds consented to this more exotic question I asked, which was, did you feel that you could talk to your parents about what the life on the street consisted of? Every single person was like, "No way." It was untranslatable. You didn't even try. It was another reality. We knew it and we didn't have language for it. The last thing you would do is try to make your parents grasp what you were going through out there.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to correct myself. It was in The Atlantic, not The New Yorker. Sorry about that. My guest is Jonathan Lethem. We're talking about the new book, Brooklyn Crime Novel. When and how do your characters come to you? I've interviewed authors who say the character appears, the voice appears, or they want to write about a young boy. They begin and then the boy appears. How do characters appear to you?

Jonathan Lethem: I always need there to be a relationship to somebody real, even if it's their elbow or their eyebrow or their way of saying a certain word wrong. I build my characters out of glances at my friends, my family, and also glances in the mirror. There are always ingredients that come from myself, no matter how outwardly the character may diverge, and this is to an extraordinary extent, of course. I recognize where I've put myself into the women in my books and into the Black characters and the Puerto Rican characters or whomever it may be. That's how I get into this even to be able to begin.

I also use, and I think this is maybe the more surprising remark because I think a lot of people would say, "Yes, yes, of course, you use yourself and use other people," but I use other people's characters. Fictional characters in films or in books that mean a lot to me, also get into the mix. Archetypes from famous things, fable and myth, and children's books. Miss Havisham from Dickens becomes part of the old lady in this book in a certain way.

Also obscure ones from books that only I treasure, or I feel like only I treasure out-of-print things. That is of course to say, "I'll use whatever I need." It's always this mongrel amalgamation. No character is alive to me unless they're electrified by different things coming into the space. It's almost like the character is a chalk outline, and I need different ingredients to weather of different kinds to fly over that chalk outline and bring it to life.

Alison Stewart: I'm so interested in how people name characters. I asked Victor LaValle about how he named his Villain in his book, and he said it was someone who had been mean to his grandma. He gave him that last name. Some of them are really clear, Walter Mosley's, the person who's saving the world in his book is Martin Just. How do you name your characters?

Jonathan Lethem: That's a great and funny question for this book because I restricted myself from using names so much. The general rule for me is I like the names to be, first of all, just memorable. As a reader, as a young reader, I remember being really grateful when the characters in a book were super distinctive and even weird. I mentioned Dickens already. Dickens makes these unforgettable, absurd character names, Martin Chuzzlewit or whatever it might be.

Then there were postmodern writers like Pynchon, who did the same thing. I was like, "That's great because I can remember them." If someone calls all their characters, Joe, John, Jim, and Jill, I just keep losing it. I always promised myself I would give this gift in return. For a reader like me, I would make them memorable. Then again, in this book, a practice that I began to fool around with in my previous novel, The Arrest, where characters weren't given proper names, but were given honorifics. They were called the Carpenter, or Journeyman, or the guy who lives in the greenhouse. I started to realize, this was another form of memorability that I liked, was like, you never forget that the carpenter's the carpenter, if that's how you refer to him. I went to this, in this book, there's the screamer and

Alison Stewart: The Wheeze.

Jonathan Lethem: The Wheeze. There are these people who are named for their properties, for their roles, for the things that other people think about them, which is often how we remember people. When I'm entering names in my phone, I might not use your last name. I might be like, Alison-

Alison Stewart: Talk Lady. [laughs]

Jonathan Lethem: -talk lady. I was like, "Let's do this instead."

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jonathan Lethem. We're talking about his book, Brooklyn Crime Novel. It's so interesting because one of the characters is C. Again, to the name just calling him C. C is a young Black boy, and I'm going to read this out. "When C wins over a new set of white parents, he sees them transform like the phases of the moon. He can watch as their initial fears, their uptight self-loathing reservations melt off into fond relief. Their relief is in thinking that this street, the one mad block of it in particular, where all the kids mix and you don't know what's what, a scene so alluring, so threatening to the white mind, the street is going to be okay for their child." What is important to C when we meet him?

Jonathan Lethem: It's great. You read one of the only-- I haven't been on a book tour for very long. I've read aloud three times, two of the three nights, I read exactly what you just selected. I've been thinking about this passage and watching it land aloud, which is so different, of course. Sometimes from the way you've made a page and you don't know what it is to put it in social space right between people. That's a really important few sentences there.

C, I describe him earlier in the book as a parental tuning fork, which I just said, I offer my characters an ingredient for myself partly so I can just get started so I can begin to find them to be real and make them live. I was always very, very identified with my friend's parents. I was watching them as much as I was watching my friend. When I would enter a home, like, "What is different here? What's happening? How do they feel about me? Am I like the friend that they're going to encourage their kid to hang with?"

Alison Stewart: That's funny. [laughs]

Jonathan Lethem: Or are they going to interrogate their kid afterwards, like, "Have you gone into that kid's house? What's it like over there?" I was always really thinking about this. Now, actually, in some ways, the first time I worked with this same material in the Fortress of Solitude, the book is almost more identified with the parents than the children. Ironically, I think 20 years later, I'm much older. I'm much further from my childhood, but I think this book is more identified with the children. I'm looking out through C's eyes and the parents are a little bit more like the parents in a Charlie Brown Cartoon like, wah, wah, wah, wah.

Alison Stewart: 100%, yes.

Jonathan Lethem: They don't get to have their interiority so much. I was thinking about this super attention to the parents and what it means to him as a way of constructing what all the boys in this book and all the children in this book are trying to do, which is construct a model of their world that makes some sense. Why have all these people come to live in the same space and how are we going to do it? [chuckles] Can we do it? His way of doing it is like, "What do these parents want from me?"

Alison Stewart: Who is Beaver's friend? Wally? No. Wally is his brother. Beaver Cleaver. Always said, you look [unintelligible 00:17:48] [crosstalk].

Jonathan Lethem: [laughs] Send your fact check this out real quick.

Alison Stewart: You look lovely today, Mrs.-- We'll get it after. Hey, we're going to go to the break and I'm going to look it up. My guest is Jonathan Lethem. We're talking about Brooklyn Crime Novel. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Jonathan Lethem. His new book is Brooklyn Crime Novel. He'll be at the New Yorker Festival with Colson Whitehead on Saturday the 7th, and on Wednesday, October 11th, he'll be at St. Anne's Church, hosted by the Brooklyn Book Festival and Books Are Magic and Conversation with Xochitl Gonzalez. Tickets are required for both of those events. It's Eddie Haskell. We have Eddie Haskell. That is who we have come up with.

Jonathan Lethem: Eddie Haskell, the parent pleaser.

Alison Stewart: The parent pleaser. I want to talk about the Wheeze, this other character, The Wheeze. Oh, the Wheeze, as I said, he's crotchety, but he's correct a lot of the times. What's the Wheeze's main goal in the day?

Jonathan Lethem: I give him a couple of different names. He's the representative spirit for-- The Wheeze, the character I said I borrow from other people's fictional characters, the Lorax in Dr. Seuss.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Jonathan Lethem: Wheeze is the Lorax. He's the little one who's standing up for the truffle of trees, [laughs] against the bulldozers, and it makes him extremely unpleasant and crotchety for everybody. Of course, he has this heart of gold, and he's also probably has BO. If Dr. Seuss was writing a grownup novel about the Lorax, you'd be like, unfortunately, the guy hadn't taken a bath in two weeks. He's a difficult person to end up next to at the local bar. That's a bad night out. You're on a date and there's the Wheeze. It's not working out. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: No, not at all.

Jonathan Lethem: It's not what you were looking for from your nicely gentrified night out in Brooklyn.

Alison Stewart: There's an appearance of a novelist, who gets a face full of it, for writing a novel about Brooklyn. It is the Wheeze who tells him you gentrified gentrification.

Jonathan Lethem: Yes

Alison Stewart: Great line. That's you, yes?

Jonathan Lethem: There's the trick.

Alison Stewart: Is it all--

Jonathan Lethem: That's me as seen by that version of me that I decided to be who hated me. If I were going to make an estimation, that guy is in the bar, who gets accused of that by the Wheeze. His book is maybe 35% less good than the Fortress of Solitude. It's got some good stuff in it, but it's too broad, it's too romantic, and it got turned into a musical that wasn't good. It got turned into Cats. Now everyone's wearing this-- I think in the book, the novel is called Take Me to the Bridge, [laughter] so everyone's wearing, Take Me to the Bridge T-shirts. It's me and not me, just as the person who wrote this book is me and not me.

Alison Stewart: That idea that this place where you grew up and so meaningful to you and so many other people suddenly it's merch. It's merch about the place.

Jonathan Lethem: Yes. This happens to me when I'm in France and I see some incredibly sweet French teenagers walking down the street with t-shirts that say Brooklyn and have a stoop on them. I'm like, "Am I vain enough to think this is my fault?" If so, it's a little gross. It's not where I was aiming when I started thinking about where I was from, because it's a very conflictual experience. If I did one thing in this book that I'm most proud of is that I left the conflicts raw on the page. I didn't sew it up. I didn't smooth it over.

Alison Stewart: Yes. This is, for example-- Do you call them chapters or entries? What would you call them?

Jonathan Lethem: Yes, they're chapters. Some of them are short.

Alison Stewart: Chapter 44, The Block Association, 1970 style. "Excuse me, but the boys could be forgiven for wondering of the block association, what exactly the F are they for? The white people trying to get the unwhite people interested in something without ever, it seems being able to specify what, and failing largely. This seems more or less an open declaration that they're living in two different worlds. The world that is simply is and doesn't need any help in associating with itself and the one that is a construction of papery wishes and dreams. The boys are sometimes enlisted in the distribution of leaflets and joining people to come to gatherings to discuss things like attracting a Cinderella project to the block pro and con."

Jonathan Lethem: Yes. That term, Cinderella project, might sound like a non-sequitur, but there was this thing, Brooklyn Union Gas, would sponsor the renovation of Brownstones at a time when there were a lot of them that were simply abandoned. Literally cement block windows. If you took one from that state to glory, to total restoration with a little bit of money from Brooklyn Union Gas, of course, this meant you had to advertise it as a Cinderella project, and you had to have gas fittings. [laughs] You couldn't do it without having a lot of gas. You'd have a gas lamp in your front yard to evoke that proper Victorian-- Like we brought it back to its true existence.

You would have a little magic like Cinderella, but of course, this raises the bizarre question of, does that mean the other ones are ugly stepsisters or does it mean it's going to revert at midnight or what about Cinderella is going on here?

Alison Stewart: Obviously, people who know your bio, you've been in California for a while, you obviously come back and forth to Brooklyn. It's home, home for you. What do you do when you visit Brooklyn? When you come back, where do you go?

Jonathan Lethem: I walk around obsessively. Another subject that I tried to get on the page in this book is the load of confusion. As the past stretches, you live long enough, which is a privilege as an artist to live long enough. You become like a bridge through time, not only to other realities. Writing about the '70s is increasingly like a science fiction, world-building project. I have to bring a reality into existence in my mind and then get on the page that there isn't a great deal of evidence that could it be like this. There are those of us who know, who feel it's still in our bodies, but the evidence is farther away.

I walk around and I see it through this double vision. I see the past lying around and fragments everywhere. That makes the present really inconsistent for me. It's not fully available. Because I'm so embedded in this involuntary and then sometimes cultivated time travel.

Alison Stewart: It is time travel.

Jonathan Lethem: Experiences. Yes.

Alison Stewart: This book is a lot of time travel. That's all. Just had to say out loud.

Jonathan Lethem: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You dedicated this book to Lynn Nottage. Yes, that Lynn Nottage, won the Pulitzer twice for Ruined and Sweat and just generally a good egg as a human. Why is it dedicated to Lynn Nottage?

Jonathan Lethem: You could think of 100 reasons you might be happy to take your book to Lynn, who's obviously just a massive genius talent and the sweetest human, but she's also a kid that I knew from before I can remember. She lived I think six or eight addresses down Dean Street from me. For various reasons, we all played in Lynn's yard from the very beginning. It was the best paved one for stickball games and stoop ball games, but also Lynn's dad looked out really good. You always felt like you were under the protectorate eye of Wally Nottage.

We went to high school together and have never stopped comparing notes on the crazy, beautiful, impossible experience of being from that place. She's been a huge influence on anything I've written, but especially when I go back to Dean Street. I'm thinking partly with her. With the superpower of having Lynn's voice in my head.

Alison Stewart: I saved it for the end, but what is the crime in the Brooklyn Crime Novel?

Jonathan Lethem: I don't want to spoil the non-mystery, non-solution trick of it. It's 1,000 crimes and it's no crime at all. Everyone's a perpetrator and everyone's a victim in this book.

Alison Stewart: What's a petty crime?

Jonathan Lethem: Oh, man. There's the shoplifting, there's the vandalism. I think my favorite crime is the Catholic school girl who bullies the other one out of the colored television she wins at the parish raffle. There are a million of them. I had the incredible good fortune of the reminiscences of all kinds of people who could have been writers. Brooklyn talkers who were such good talkers that they might as well have been-- My book channeled them as hard as I could because they gave me so much. There's a lot of, especially those petty crimes that pile up in the book that come straight from someone just sharing with me.

Alison Stewart: What's the crime that makes you sad?

Jonathan Lethem: There are tormenting ones towards the back end of the book. Those are among the ones that I thought about helplessly for decades, versions of them because I don't handle them directly. I translate them into fiction, but they're also the ones where, again, I relied so much on reflections from others. In the city when I was a kid, we had Bernie Goetz, and we had Etan Patz, and we had Son of Sam, these crazy mythic crimes that almost were instantly translated into tabloid legend. They became urban legend, even as practically as they were happening.

In the neighborhood, we had our own versions of those. That in the space of our community were as big and as confusing and as subject to transformation into myth. I wanted to simultaneously, if I could, evoke that mythic quality that things take on and hack into the center of those myths and try to figure out what the intimate moment meant if I dared to the people who were witness or even participants in it. That was a heavy freight. The whole book in a way, is built as a machine for building up to and trying to contain that freight.

Alison Stewart: The name of it is Brooklyn Crime Novel. It is by Jonathan Lethem. Jonathan will be at the New Yorker Festival with Colson Whitehead on Saturday and on Wednesday at St. Anne's Church, hosted by Brooklyn Book Festival and Books Are Magic. Thank you for coming to the studio.

Jonathan Lethem: Oh, thanks so much, Alison, for having me. This was terrific.

 

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