Nine Songs: Jonathan Lethem

The trick without a tell, a wonder which never wanes but only grows more unknowable. An act of creative grace. “Music symbolises what is impossible for me to do,” he says. “I’m humbled by it, endlessly.”

The Brooklyn-born novelist has long since tamed language: a material he has learned to contort, twist and entirely reinvent without prediction. Since passing through the halls of Bennington College in the cohort of era-defining authors including Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis, Lethem’s imagination has produced some of the most vivid jewels in contemporary American literature.

He writes of multi-post-apocalyptic futures in Amnesia Moon, psychedelic detective fiction in Gun, with Occasional Music and the tangle of place, memory and boyhood in 1970s Brooklyn in the semi-autobiographical The Fortress of Solitude – all sprawling pit stops belonging to the same, singular mind.

But before that, there was art. His first love, first instinct. From those tentative daubs of paint made on the same wall he used to hold himself up on two feet as a toddler, to carving marble at seventeen, the visual arts were a constant and natural medium in Lethem’s life.

At college, he took art classes while writing fiction almost secretly, as if it were a kind of betrayal. He knew how to be an art student, how to superficially impress in what he likens to an “extinction burst” of frantic action, just before deciding the act of making art was to be abandoned.

“My college art teachers saw through the bullshit,” he writes in his latest book, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. “I was hiding. The paintings had words in them, and were loaded with hints of characters, concepts, and situations. Overloaded. These are paintings that wanted to be novels and stories”.

Lethem made the decisive leap from “bodily artefacts to language-smoke”, and the chasm between them is the subject of Cellophane Bricks. The surreal and form-defying collection of stories are inextricable from the artworks which sparked them, printed alongside his prose in full colour. It’s a continuum of ideas, the way one reacts to another: the cellophane ephemerality of language and the brick-like tangibility of visual art unified, at last, in a single form.

“It represents transparency about my gregariousness with visual artists and how much I want to be part of their world,” he tells me.

“I thought of these writings as orphans, because I knew that to make them land in a meaningful way then the book needed to be pictorial, and my ordinary publishers were not going to want to do a book which was so fabulously full of colour images – it would just seem so shrunken and marginal. And then ZE Books came along and instantly galvanised this into a real opportunity, so the book went from being about the work of other people to being very reflective, full of confession, self-portraits and moments of memoir.”

Lethem’s work notoriously defies convention or genre. His writing is borderless. His way of storytelling has been likened to a DJ mixing music. “I almost think, in a strange way, that my relationship to visual art and to music contains an opposite quality,” he explains. “I grew up making drawings and paintings, and I felt I could. Of course, it’s very rare to be a good artist – let alone a great one and have other people agree on it – but it felt accessible to me.

“I knew how to craft a painting or make a drawing, and it was very rooted in my own experience and capacity. But music? I don’t have the talent, I don’t have the ear, I can’t sing, I can’t memorise. It’s a kind of thing that reduces me to my state of awe, or my fan-ishness. It’s always out there, sort of in the sky, something I could reach for but never attain. But both nourish my sense of what life is for.”

Lethem grew up in a house of music, art and books; his father was an avant-garde painter, and his mother had been involved in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the ‘60s. She handed him records to play and shared stories of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Dave Van Ronk, which cultivated an intimacy with the sounds and the city.

When his mother died from a malignant brain tumour when Lethem was thirteen, the music she introduced him to has defied the space between them. What followed was a head-first immersion into the heady days of NYC punk defined by The Ramones, The Clash and Talking Heads, with smuggled records and sweaty performances at CBGB’s.

What draws Lethem to music is not any common denominator of genre or taste, but instead the ideas they spark. His office is a monument to art: not only paintings and sculptures, but books which pin down the transience of words – and records, those thin plastic discs which capture the most elusive artform of them all.

“I listen to music all the time. I need it,” he says. “I listen to it while I write, and I console myself with it in the morning. And when I’m smart enough to turn off the news and put on my music, I’m always likely to have a better day. I hunger for it.”