(Jonathan is an old friend, as this brief salute will make clear, and asked me to introduce him at the 92nd Street Y in 2007.)
I first met Jonathan Lethem in the early 1980s, when we both attended the old High School of Music and Art up on 135th Street. I found him, then, to be a young man prone to asking indiscreet questions at inappropriate times. As you can probably imagine, I did my best to avoid him. Fortune had something else in mind, however -- as it often does -- and after I’d been living in San Francisco for about ten years I discovered that Jonathan had been living across the bay in Berkeley for just about the same amount of time. Our reacquaintance came about because I’d discovered Jonathan’s first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, then just out, which I was delighted to find, years after having been made uncomfortable by such tendencies, was all about a young man prone to asking indiscreet questions at inappropriate times -- though within the fictional culture Jonathan had posited for the book, any question, asked under any circumstance, was considered both indiscreet and inappropriate. Naturally, the book is a murder mystery -- that is, a form of sustained inquiry, and therefore both a lengthy joke and the sort of artistic knot that Jonathan has always been interested in untying.
As a fellow New York exile, sharing with Jonathan a penchant for a particular species of nosy verbosity, I appreciated immediately the sly commentary Jonathan was making about Left Coast culture -- perhaps the point of origin for the ecumenical application of the don’t ask - don’t tell ethic. But as a writer, I appreciated that Jonathan had homed in on one of the principal tasks of the writer of fiction, which is to cast an ice cold eye on your subject and to mercilessly query the pieties that can withstand a more casual appraisal; to track down, as the critic Roland Barthes has observed, the hidden nature of what-goes-without-saying. It’s no accident that Jonathan’s marvelous novels are each, in one way or another, cast in the form of a quest, or an investigation, nor is it an accident that while these pursuits are rarely resolved definitively in the books, they leave the reader who experiences them altered.
I’ve spoken exclusively, and badly, about Jonathan Lethem’s work, and said very little about the man, which I believe is what I was asked here to do in the first place. So let me just say this in conclusion: Jonathan Lethem is a friend of mine, and to speak of him personally would so fill this room with my bias in his favor that it would be a form of reverse pollution. With his recent statements concerning artistic appropriation and the need for artists to pass what they’ve accomplished back and forth to one another as a form of knowledge -- statements backed, I should add, by the substantive gesture of offering up the rights to some of his own works virtually free of charge, including the one he’ll be reading from tonight -- Jonathan has publicly demonstrated himself to be a generous man in sometimes frighteningly ungenerous times. But this fact hasn’t come as a surprise to me, or to any of his many friends and colleagues. In a literary culture where something as simple as the bestowal of an unqualified compliment is treated as an act of maganimity so vast that it immediately becomes suspect, it’s not news to find out that Jonathan Lethem has given something away. It’s a delightful reversal of what seems to be the norm to report that today, when he can fill Kaufmann Hall, Jonathan is perhaps even more generous than he was thirteen years ago, when he and I read together at Cafe Venus on Valencia Street in San Francisco before a dozen people. So, without further delay, let me give you my classmate, my colleague, my collaborator, my consigliere, and my dear friend, Jonathan Lethem.
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I first met Jonathan Lethem in the early 1980s, when we both attended the old High School of Music and Art up on 135th Street. I found him, then, to be a young man prone to asking indiscreet questions at inappropriate times. As you can probably imagine, I did my best to avoid him. Fortune had something else in mind, however -- as it often does -- and after I’d been living in San Francisco for about ten years I discovered that Jonathan had been living across the bay in Berkeley for just about the same amount of time. Our reacquaintance came about because I’d discovered Jonathan’s first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, then just out, which I was delighted to find, years after having been made uncomfortable by such tendencies, was all about a young man prone to asking indiscreet questions at inappropriate times -- though within the fictional culture Jonathan had posited for the book, any question, asked under any circumstance, was considered both indiscreet and inappropriate. Naturally, the book is a murder mystery -- that is, a form of sustained inquiry, and therefore both a lengthy joke and the sort of artistic knot that Jonathan has always been interested in untying.
As a fellow New York exile, sharing with Jonathan a penchant for a particular species of nosy verbosity, I appreciated immediately the sly commentary Jonathan was making about Left Coast culture -- perhaps the point of origin for the ecumenical application of the don’t ask - don’t tell ethic. But as a writer, I appreciated that Jonathan had homed in on one of the principal tasks of the writer of fiction, which is to cast an ice cold eye on your subject and to mercilessly query the pieties that can withstand a more casual appraisal; to track down, as the critic Roland Barthes has observed, the hidden nature of what-goes-without-saying. It’s no accident that Jonathan’s marvelous novels are each, in one way or another, cast in the form of a quest, or an investigation, nor is it an accident that while these pursuits are rarely resolved definitively in the books, they leave the reader who experiences them altered.
I’ve spoken exclusively, and badly, about Jonathan Lethem’s work, and said very little about the man, which I believe is what I was asked here to do in the first place. So let me just say this in conclusion: Jonathan Lethem is a friend of mine, and to speak of him personally would so fill this room with my bias in his favor that it would be a form of reverse pollution. With his recent statements concerning artistic appropriation and the need for artists to pass what they’ve accomplished back and forth to one another as a form of knowledge -- statements backed, I should add, by the substantive gesture of offering up the rights to some of his own works virtually free of charge, including the one he’ll be reading from tonight -- Jonathan has publicly demonstrated himself to be a generous man in sometimes frighteningly ungenerous times. But this fact hasn’t come as a surprise to me, or to any of his many friends and colleagues. In a literary culture where something as simple as the bestowal of an unqualified compliment is treated as an act of maganimity so vast that it immediately becomes suspect, it’s not news to find out that Jonathan Lethem has given something away. It’s a delightful reversal of what seems to be the norm to report that today, when he can fill Kaufmann Hall, Jonathan is perhaps even more generous than he was thirteen years ago, when he and I read together at Cafe Venus on Valencia Street in San Francisco before a dozen people. So, without further delay, let me give you my classmate, my colleague, my collaborator, my consigliere, and my dear friend, Jonathan Lethem.
Return to The Bottom Drawer
