All Interviews

Jonathan Lethem has spent the better part of his literary career circling the one book everyone knew he would eventually write: the big Brooklyn novel. "I was mostly kind of intimidated by the material itself, the fact of growing up in Brooklyn. I was avoiding it in all of the early books," he admits by phone during a vacation in Bay Point, Maine. "I certainly had it in mind for a long, long time before I wrote it. There are elements in it that go back to impulses to write a novel that I had when I was 18, 19 and 20, when at that point I would never have even approached having the necessary tools to do justice to this material in any way." Blending the science fiction, mystery and Western genres, Lethem received critical acclaim for such earlier works as Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), Amnesia Moon (1995) and Girl in Landscape (1998), proving himself the likely successor to his literary heroes Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

Then came Motherless Brooklyn. When his noir mystery featuring Tourette's Syndrome sufferer Lionel Essrog won the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award, it afforded Lethem the time and the confidence to finally confront his Brooklyn past head-on, without using spaceships or talking animals.

Five years in the writing, The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem's 640-page "spiritual autobiography," finds the 39-year-old at the top of his game as he vividly re-creates the mixed blessing of growing up in Brooklyn during the '70s, '80s and '90s. Set against the backdrop of urban gentrification and the moral drift of post-'60s America, Lethem's magical history tour follows the very different lives of two Brooklyn friends one black, one white from stickball, comic books and graffiti "tagging" through garage bands, crack cocaine and the Hollywood shuffle. An ambitious, kaleidoscopic tour de force with its own soundtrack of soul, punk and rap, The Fortress of Solitude is Do the Right Thing meets Once Upon a Time in America.

Lethem's parents were among the first wave of bohemians, radicals and artists to decamp into the blighted inner-city neighborhood in the early '70s, well before gentrification became a household curse word. Those mean streets weren't kind to the likes of Lethem, who was routinely "yoked" (relieved of available cash and/or valuables) by black toughs skilled at intimidating young white newcomers.

"I think in many ways it was a kind of social transaction that was community making," he says. "It was a kind of conversation that was going on, a very uncomfortable one, but why should it have been comfortable?" Despite his everyday ordeals, Lethem found Brooklyn an irresistible street fair of popular culture that seeped indelibly into his life and art.

Fortress tells the story of Dylan Edbus, the white son of an artist, and Mingus Rude, the black son of a famous soul singer, Brooklyn buddies whose friendship embodies the complex racial, cultural and social changes of the era. In the book's first section, "Underberg," Lethem details their adolescence in a hyped-up third-person narrative so saturated with brand names, musical groups and tagger slang that you can almost hear the boom boxes blasting from the stoops. It ends abruptly in a shooting.

"I did want to portray the kind of dream quality that childhood has. Being pulled out of it at the end of that section is sort of a rupture. Even though on the face it's a difficult childhood that Dylan has, it seems like a paradise lost once it's lost." Lethem, who attended Bennington College, likewise dispatches Dylan to Vermont, where he first discovers the sad truth: any identity he might ever hope for is hostage to the harsh realities of life back on Dean Street. Dylan has no better luck becoming a Californian (Lethem also lived in Berkeley for a decade), though his attempt to pitch a film project to a vapid producer is one of the book's finer set pieces.

Meanwhile, back in the 'hood, Mingus sinks further and further into the same crack cocaine addiction that destroyed his father. He eventually ends up in a succession of New York prisons. The climactic jailhouse reunion between the two estranged friends is an oblique pas de deux of two lives sadly squandered. The book's final section, "Prisonaires," is narrated by Dylan, a subtle shift of voice that makes the ending all the more chilling.

"You do become closer to him in the sense that first person forces an identification, but I think it's an uncomfortable one then because he's kind of a shit in the last part of the book and you loved him in the first part," Lethem says. "I think there's almost a sense of betrayal that you feel when you encounter the small-mindedness of his adult life and the puniness of his moral sphere." Lethem admits the best part of the success he achieved with his previous novel, Motherless Brooklyn, is the freedom to continue to surprise his readers. Looking for Motherless Brooklyn II? Forget about it.

"I've been really rewarded for what a lot of people in the past have been punished for, which is refusing to repeat myself," he says. "There are writers, even some with tremendously successful careers, who feel that they can't go and write whatever they would like, that there is an expectation built up that they're at the mercy of, and I don't have that. If anything, I have almost the reverse; the readers that I meet and hear from are sold on this idea that I'm going to keep mixing things up and meandering, and they would be disappointed if I did repeat myself." As he approaches the big 4-0, Lethem says he's relieved to have finally put the motherless place behind him.

"I don't know a lot about what comes next, but I've realized that I'm probably going to leave Brooklyn aside for a while now, that I've just spent enough time focused so completely on that place. I think I'll write a book that's contemporary, not at all historical, and maybe also leave children and parents alone for a bit. I've been obsessing over those matters for three books in a row."

Jay MacDonald is a writer based in Mississippi.

Much has happened in the life of Jhumpa Lahiri since she was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her first book, Interpreter of Maladies, an exquisite collection of short stories whose central characters are Indian immigrants to America.

In early 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias Bush, a journalist with Time magazine, in a traditional Bengali wedding ceremony in Kolkata (or Calcutta). A little more than a year later, the couple had their first child, a son. And shortly after that, Lahiri received a Guggenheim fellowship and completed work on her fine first novel, The Namesake, which is being released this month.

So maybe it's no surprise that Lahiri says winning the Pulitzer has had no real impact on her. "It doesn't affect what I do," she says during a call to her home in New York. "It doesn't really affect how I work." She says she continues to maintain her long-time practice of writing in the mornings. "Having recently had a child has made things a little more challenging," she says. "But things are working out pretty well and my life has moved smoothly into this new phase of motherhood.

" In conversation, Lahiri is poised, friendly, self-deprecating and slightly reserved. "I'm not a very good close reader of my own work," she demurs when asked to explain the meaning of an incident near the end of The Namesake. "I look for meaning in other people's work, not my own."

This probably isn't as startling as it first sounds. After all, the experience of writing fiction is certainly different from the experience of reading it. And Lahiri says writing is always "very hard" for her. "There are other things that I think of as pleasures in my life, like eating a good meal, being with someone I love, or seeing a beautiful piece of art. Writing is work. I tend to doubt it all the way through. But I know that if I don't write, I feel like something is not right inside of me and with the world. Writing is a vital part of my existence and the way I think about and experience life. It's all very connected to my well-being as a person."

None of Lahiri's doubts and difficulties with writing are evident in The Namesake, a remarkably assured first novel. Readers will find here the same elegant, deceptively simple prose that garnered so much praise for her short stories. Here too are many of the familiar themes – alienation, loss, connection, regeneration – that Lahiri explored so deftly and with such subtlety and clear-sighted compassion in her story collection. But in The Namesake, Lahiri has "more room to poke around in the lives of the characters and their backgrounds." The result is a seemingly quiet, almost undramatic novel whose characters and incidents continue to leap freshly to mind weeks after reading it.

The Namesake tells the story of Gogol Ganguli, the American-born son of Ashoke Ganguli, who arrives in Massachusetts from India in the late 1960s as an engineering student, and Ashima, Ashoke's wife through an arranged marriage. Gogol, named by his father in honor of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, struggles to transform himself and escape the traditions of his family and the community of Indian immigrants to which his family belongs. Part of Gogol's escape plan involves changing his name.

"The original spark for the novel was to write about a boy with a peculiar name, a name that sort of plagued him," Lahiri says. "In the process of writing the book, I realized that it was important and inevitable for him to accept his name, to realize that there is never a way to shed what is given to you by your parents. The book isn't so much about names per se. It's more about what we inherit from our parents – certain ideas, certain values, certain genes – the whole complex set of things that everyone gets from their parents and the way that, no matter how much we create our own lives and choose what we want out of life, it's very difficult to escape our origins."

Gogol and the other characters of The Namesake come fully to life through the slow accretion of detail. As readers of her short stories know, Lahiri is an exceptional observer of human behavior. She writes, for example, with remarkable insight about something as seemingly routine as people preparing and eating food.

"I like cooking and eating all different kinds of food," Lahiri says. "And I come from a very food-oriented family. Like most children of immigrants, I'm aware of how important food becomes for foreigners who are trying to deal with life in a new world. Food is a very deep part of people's lives and it has incredible meaning beyond the obvious nutritional aspects. My parents have given up so many basic things coming here from the life they once knew – family, love, connections – and food is one thing that they've really held onto."

Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. Her father, a university librarian, and her mother, a school teacher, are originally from Kolkata. "A lot of the novel rose out of my experience of growing up," Lahiri says, "and while The Namesake is not explicitly autobiographical, it sticks pretty closely to the general way I was raised. I drew not only from my own experiences but more widely from experiences of the children of my parents' Bengali friends in creating Gogol's character."

But Lahiri resists any idea that she's "representing a group. I would never claim to be doing that. These characters are a very few examples of the range of experience out there. I find it gratifying just to work with words, with language, to work through memories, experiences, observations, imagined things and situations, all of that combined, to try to make things come to life on the page."

Which is exactly what Jhumpa Lahiri succeeds in doing in The Namesake.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

Stewart O’Nan’s ghostly trio takes the driver’s seat One Halloween night, a speeding carload of partying teenagers misses a turn and collides head-on with the hereafter. What happens next, to those who survive and those who don’t, makes for a wild and wicked ride in Stewart O’Nan’s The Night Country, a spooky little tale in the Ray Bradbury tradition guaranteed to give parents the pre-Halloween willies.

It’s Cabbage Night, the night before Halloween, in Avon, an affluent Connecticut suburb. With manicured lawns, peopleless, well-lit streets and stores of every ubiquitous, national brand, Avon is vanilla, vanilla, vanilla. Nothing wicked this way comes, ever. (Just ask the author; he’s lived in the actual Avon for years.) Tim and Kyle, two teenage buddies headed home from their bagboy shift at the Stop’n’Shop, are tailed by kindly, troubled Officer Brooks. All of them were there one year ago when a Camry carrying five teenagers slammed into a tree. Three kids died that night: Toe, the driver; Danielle, Tim’s girlfriend; and Marco, our narrator. There were two survivors: Kyle, whose massive injuries rendered him childlike, and Tim, whose survivor’s guilt has hardened into suicidal intentions.

Brooks, the first officer to reach that gruesome scene, has retreated into the bottle to battle his demons. His only mission now is to prevent Tim and Kyle from repeating that horrible scene on purpose this Halloween.

What makes The Night Country so chilling is the haunting presence of the wisecracking undead. The ghostly trio drifts in and out of the lives of Tim, Kyle and Brooks, dropping vague references to an otherworldly agenda of their own. Although O’Nan chooses Marco, “the quiet one,” to narrate, Toe and Danielle add plenty of adolescent commentary via parenthetical, and often chiding, asides. O’Nan, the critically acclaimed author of seven previous novels, says he read a newspaper account of an actual multiple teenage fatality in a nearby community and couldn’t shake it. “A year later, on the very day, the two survivors got in a Jeep with a suitcase of Bud in cans and a mobile phone and went driving around town to visit all these old spots that they used to go to with their friends and they telephoned all their other friends saying, ÔWe’re going to kill ourselves, we don’t want to live anymore because of the accident last year. We just wanted to say goodbye to you.’ And they ran into the exact same tree that their friends had hit. Afterward, all their friends and the town put all these bouquets and teddy bears around this particular tree. The town came and cut the tree down because they didn’t want any copycats after that. Very weird.” A horror fan from his earliest days growing up in Pittsburgh (also home to director George A. Romero of Night of the Living Dead fame, he notes proudly), O’Nan had long dreamt of writing an homage to Ray Bradbury, to whom this book is dedicated.

“He was one of my first great loves. There was something magical about his short stories. One of my favorite books of all time is Something Wicked This Way Comes. I loved that book and for years I’ve said that I’m going to try to write something like that,” he says.

The teen accident and double suicide seemed the perfect basis for a novel. “In Something Wicked, the dark thing comes to the small town and it’s up to the innocents there, the two boys and their librarian father, to fight off this dangerous thing. There are no small towns anymore where I live; they’re all suburbs. So when I started writing this book, I thought OK, let’s bring the magical thing into this place that is decidedly un-magical.” Like Halloween, one of his favorite fright flicks, O’Nan conjures up foreboding from the very ordinariness of life in Avon. As horrifying as dying young in twisted wreckage might seem, surviving with Kyle’s array of disabilities may be even scarier.

“In movies and TV and pop writing, it’s always about events instead of consequences,” he says. “These things happen and that’s supposed to be the big climax. But it’s really living with this stuff; how do you keep living with this stuff? Because we all do. Your life doesn’t just stop; you’ve got to go on somehow.” O’Nan, like Bradbury, is a decidedly free-range author, although some aspect of the gothic is never far from view in such disparate works as Wish You Were Here (2002), A Prayer for the Dying (1999) and A World Away (1998).

So what exactly is it that scares him? “Everything!” he chuckles. “I thought for a long, long time that I would die in a car crash. Fear of economic collapse. Fear of Republican presidents. Fear is one of the big subjects I always take on in every book.” That said, he doesn’t intentionally set out to write intelligent horror with every book. In fact, each book tends to send him in the opposite direction, as if to “completely obliterate” the previous novel. It would be fair to say that distraction is the key to his creative process. “What happens is, I will start one book and have the characters and the action and the setting, all that stuff, and one lone little tiny character will zip across a sentence and will seem so much more interesting than what I’m doing that I will follow that character that I know nothing about to somewhere I hope is more interesting. And that’s the book that I will end up writing, and the book that I had planned to write, I’ll never get to,” he says.

Though it didn’t get under his skin during the writing, O’Nan can now add The Night Country to that list of things that keep him up nights. “Now it sort of creeps me out a little bit. I have a daughter who just got her license and she goes to that high school. It’s very weird. My great fear is that something bad will happen this fall when the book has just come out in our town. I’ve very worried about that.” Jay MacDonald is a professional writer based in Mississippi.

Over the years, Pete Dexter’s hard-edged novels have been widely praised for both the riveting stories they tell and the sparkling clarity of the sentences with which they are told. His 1988 best-selling novel, Paris Trout, won the National Book Award. In 1996, The New York Times hailed his novel Paperboy as "eerie and beautiful." Pete Dexter is not just a reader’s writer, but a writer’s writer.

So it’s a great surprise to hear Dexter say, "I actually didn’t read a real book until I was maybe 20. The rest of the family were readers and writers. I was the one that wanted to shoot out the windows and have a good time."

Dexter now lives with his family on an island in Puget Sound, up on a cliff so high that "you wouldn’t want to get drunk and fall off into the water." During a call to his home to discuss his masterful new novel, Train, he doesn’t really say what transformed him from a wild child into a respected newspaper reporter in Florida and, later, in Philadelphia. But he’s quite specific about how he became a novelist.

"The day I thought I could do this was when I finally read Robert Frost and saw what he was about. I mean I just got it. It was like teaching a dog to sit up; suddenly one day he just got it. There’s nobody that’s got better craft. There’s a wildness inside the poems. They’re very physical. They’re full of objects and nouns and there’s always something going on in them. Strangely enough, I have the feeling I’m in his head when I’m reading his stuff. I’ve never read another poet that I enjoyed like that."

Of course, nearly the same words can be used to describe Dexter’s own fiction. His best books (count Train among them) possess a sort of terrifying beauty, a wildness inside. Yet they unfold precisely, in sentences and scenes that have an excruciating, almost-physical weight and measure.

Over the phone, the author’s voice sounds like sandpaper and leather. It’s mid-afternoon, and Dexter, who normally starts writing after midnight and sleeps late into the morning, is still near the beginning of his day. If he’s working on a screenplay, he says, he’ll usually finish by 2 or 2:30 a.m. "If it’s a book and I’m at the stage where I’m trying to hold it all together, I’ll sometimes go until 5 or 6. It’s a nice time of night. The phone doesn’t ring. Things are very quiet. And, then, I’ve always liked to sleep in the morning. God, I love getting up at one o’clock in the afternoon!"

As intensely devoted as he is to his craft, Dexter is almost shy about discussing the meaning of his novels. "I’m terrible at explaining this stuff," he says. "I figure that if the characters are right and the things that happen to them feel true, then the meanings will be there. I can’t imagine myself starting from the other end, saying I’ll write a book about what it means to be black and talented at a time when people wouldn’t allow you to be talented. That’s not the way I think."

Pressed, however, Dexter proves to be quite eloquent about his new book. Set in Los Angeles in the 1950s, Train tells the intersecting stories of three main characters. Lionel Walk, nicknamed Train , is a young black caddy at a Los Angeles golf course who has a real but unrealizable talent for golf. Norah Rose is the surviving victim of a murderous boat hijacking. Miller Packard is the police detective who seems to bring both order and chaos to the others’ lives.

Of the seemingly unknowable Packard, Dexter observes, "Packard is the biggest mystery in the book. That’s because we see the least through his eyes." Lurking in Packard’s background is his traumatic experience on the World War II battleship Indianapolis, which was sunk by the Japanese, leaving its sailors at the mercy of the sea and the sharks. "When we pick him up," Dexter says of the character, "he’s already spent four days in the Pacific Ocean, probably being as scared as you ever could be and experiencing things as bad as they can be without actually being killed. Something in that rush appealed to him and he goes through life putting himself in places where things happen. And because of that he becomes empty in some way probably because he doesn’t understand or believe that love exists. When love hits him later on, it changes him."

As Dexter suggests, in its own strange way Train is at least partly a love story. A visceral, elemental, haunted and haunting one, to be sure, but a love story nonetheless. Dexter tells it with the same unsparing, almost aggressive lack of sentimentality that is evident in his previous novels. This characteristic has earned him a pigeonhole on the noir side. "I can’t write a check without someone saying, well, that’s pretty dark," he jokes.

In fact, Train is often very funny. But it’s not, as Dexter points out, "comedian funny." His humor is "the natural byproduct of cultural and personal stress. One of the things that always comes out of conflict in real life is humor."

Like many writers, Dexter is unsure about the book’s reception. "I write the book and you read it and what happens in that book occurs when you and I meet on the page," he says. "A lot of it is just a mystery to me, too. I don’t necessarily know how the process happens."

Still, for the first time in a number of years, he’s looking forward to the book tour for Train . He’s with a new publisher (Doubleday), and he’s "enjoying the energy. These people are having fun, it seems like, and I’ll always respond to that. I live my life in fear that somebody else is having fun and I’m not."

He adds, "I’m not getting on airplanes anymore. I’ve got all kinds of metal in my body from various injuries. I’m always setting off the detectors and, with airports the way they are now, I get searched six times getting on the plane. So I’m going to drive. Down the coast, over to Chicago, New York, Philly, down to Miami and back through Denver. Take my time. Stop and hear some stories."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.