Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem’s ninth novel is a sweeping multi-era examination of radical politics set against family drama—or is it a family epic, complete with political intrigue? Dissident Gardens, Lethem says, is both, as well as an examination of the interplay between the two.
Fresh off a six-month sabbatical from teaching creative writing at Pomona College in Claremont, Ca., the MacArthur Fellowship winner will discuss Dissident Gardens at St. Louis County’s Library Headquarters on Friday evening. He spoke with SLM by telephone from Florence.
Dissident Gardens follows three generations of New York radicals. Is it a book about history, or a book about a family?
Well you know, for me as a novelist I’m always much more centered on people and their emotions and the intimate experience of our daily lives. One kind of opens out into the other. In the case of Dissident Gardens, thinking about this kind of character, and what kinds of lives they’ve lived, forced me to look at their historical circumstances and their political lives because that was what defined them.
I wanted to write about these characters who were really entrenched in their political lives. This huge distance between the daily lives we live and the sense of history in the background was really my subject, but it meant I had to get the history into the book. I had to know a certain amount of it myself, and I had to make the reader feel it all around them. It was a really demanding project on that level. I hope I got it right! You never want to load it too much up with research. You want it to seem like the characters are living, breathing, their emotions are the center of the story, but in this case I had to kind of make them live the kind of lives where they are always glancing at politics and culture and history. It’s sort of like the sea they’re swimming in.
Your books take wildly different forms, and no one can fly in this one. What’s with the changing parameters?
I know people sometimes sort of experience the shifts or the change in emphasis and imagine that I’m kind of thinking ‘Let me get away from something, let me become someone else.’ It’s never really like that from the inside. It’s much more a matter of my developing a kind of appetite to tell a certain story, and then developing it on its terms.
The book that was the precedent for me in writing Dissident Gardens, the book that made me know I could do it, was The Fortress of Solitude, which people remember as being a book about, like, superheroes, kids who can really fly and turn invisible. There is that as the big hook, but if you go back and look at what I was really writing in that book, it’s a kind of interrogation of New York City in the 70s, what it was like to grow up inside this place that was so rich, but also kind of disastrous.
I had to think about Brooklyn in the 1970s, the racial issues in that book: is it a book about prison, is it a book about drug policy? So it really told me that even to write about my own life scrupulously, I was going to have to learn a lot of things and present a lot of other information. That was where I developed both the powers I guess you would say, and the appetite to do something like Dissident Gardens.
How do the protesters of today, like the Occupy movement, stack up to earlier generations?
By chance I was born into a family of protesters, and took it as a way of life. It was really normal to me to be in the streets over everything that mattered in the slightest. It was unhesitating and it was passionate, perhaps sometimes it was even overconfident. The contrast now is that when something occurs in our culture, something like Occupy, it feels really propositional. Some of its awkwardness or slightly inchoate quality was also part of a very important aspect. It wasn’t just ‘OK, now let’s hit reset, it’s the 60s again, or it’s the 30s again,’ but ‘What would it be to do this now?’ was being asked and I think that it needs to be.
One of the things that seemed important to me was that it was both an outgrowth of online culture, and in a sense at the same time it seemed to be a kind of a reply to online culture, because it was so about physical presence. You show up at the park, you do something that only your body can do. What does it say about what’s possible in this new world of interfaces, that we needed that and that it seems so extraordinarily different from simply forming like an online petition or like a Facebook page?
So what are you working on now?
I’ve just gotten started on another novel. It’s new enough that there’s not much I can say with confidence without feeling like I’m talking about something which doesn’t exist yet. After Dissident Gardens, which is kind of a broad historical context, and required a lot of research, and is a very encompassing book with different kinds of knowledge and different voices, this one is a little more narrowly focused, and is more of a piece of storytelling. It’s focused on one character and it’s set in the present, and it’s really not demanding the same kind of research of me, which is nice. I do what each project needs me to do, and for Dissident Gardens I did a really uncommon amount of that, sort of just having to learn things about history. I’m kind of relieved now to be back more in storyteller mode.
Maryville University and the St. Louis County Library Foundation present Jonathan Lethem at St. Louis County Library Headquarters, 1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd. June 27 at 7 p.m. Free, with copies of Dissident Gardens available for purchase from Left Bank Books.
