Profile of Jonathan Lethem on Famous Like Me

Jonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American writer, best known for his novels, short stories, and essays, whose work encompasses a variety of genres and styles.

Biography

Lethem was raised in Brooklyn, NY, where he currently lives in the neighborhood (Boerum Hill) of his youth. His mother (an activist) and his father (the avant-garde painter Richard Brown Lethem), 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, Lethem 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. The novel was a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award, and placed first in the "Best First Novel" category of the 1995 Locus Magazine reader's poll.

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.

In the late 1990s, Lethem moved from the San Francisco Bay Area back to Brooklyn. His next book, published after his return to Brooklyn, was Girl in Landscape. Its plot bore similarities to the John Wayne 1950s movie classic The Searchers. A young girl is forced to endure puberty while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders.

The first novel begun after he returned to New York City is 1999's 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. The novel won the National Book Critic's Circle Award, The Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, the Salon Book Award, and was named book of the year by Esquire. It is generally regarded as Lethem's most endearing and irresistible novel.

Following the success of Motherless Brooklyn his UK publisher brought out new editions of his back catalogue. This included the first UK edition of Girl In Landscape and a revised version of The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye .

In the interval of four years during which he wrote his next novel, The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem also published story collections, edited volumes, wrote magazine pieces, and shepherded 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 during this period, living briefly in Toronto in the process. In 2003 he finally published his semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, The Fortress of Solitude, a novel of encompassing ambition featuring dozens of characters in a variety of milieus -- but which centers on a tale of racial tensions and boyhood in Brooklyn during the late 1970s. The main characters are two friends of different backgrounds who grew up on the same block in Boerum Hill. It was named one of nine "Editor's Choice" books of the year by the New York Times, and eventually published in over fifteen languages. For many readers, this engaging, sprawling, uneven tome is Lethem's greatest testament to date.

His second collection of short fiction, Men and Cartoons, was published in late 2004. In March, 2005, The Disappointment Artist, his first collection of essays, was also released.

Lethem is at work on a novel about a rock band in California, a return to the setting of much of his earlier fiction.

The polarity between California and New York, between the West Coast of Chandler and Dick and the East Coast of Lethem's childhood, black music, and graffiti, is one of the most important semantic axes in his oeuvre. Considering The Fortress of Solitude is a partly autobiographical novel, Lethem's Californian novels become an escape from his New York childhood, while the New York City diptych (Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude) is a return to the author's origin and past.

On September 20, 2005, he was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."

Bibliography

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)

Novellas

• This Shape We're In (2000)

Fiction Collections

• The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996, US edition)
• Kafka Americana (1999) (with Carter Scholz)
• The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye (2002, UK edition)
• Men and Cartoons: Stories (2004)

Non-fiction Collections

• The Disappointment Artist (2005)

Miscellaneous

• The Vintage Book of Amnesia (2001) (Editor)
• Da Capo Best Music Writing: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Pop, Jazz, Country and More (2002) (Editor)

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