{"id":246344,"date":"2025-09-22T12:59:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T12:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/246344\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T12:59:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T12:59:12","slug":"life-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/246344\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Lethem is concerned with time. Time as an element of narrative, yes: His new book, A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories<\/a>, is a collection of stories spanning his career. Time as cultural capital or signifier, also: New and selected volumes such as this, after all, are no longer published as frequently as was once the case. \u201cIt\u2019s an object of fascination,\u201d Lethem tells me over Zoom on a recent Monday, \u201cbecause as a young reader and book collector, I was very conscious of how authors\u2019 books pile up on shelves. It always arrested my attention when someone had a new and selected stories. That really seemed to state something. So I feel very lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n

Luck comes into play for every artist, what Bob Dylan referred to as \u201ca simple twist of fate.\u201d The farther along I get, however, the more I think in terms of perseverance\u2014or perhaps practice is the more accurate term. Lethem, too, has come to approach his work through such a filter. \u201cThe plot of this book,\u201d he writes in a brief author\u2019s note, \u201cis persistence in making myself available.\u201d It\u2019s as good a description as I can imagine of a career as eclectic as any in contemporary literature.<\/p>\n

For Lethem, that career began with a short story, \u201cThe Cave Beneath the Falls,\u201d published in a science fiction magazine in 1989. It doesn\u2019t appear in A Different Kind of Tension, although the book goes back nearly as far. Opening with two stories from 1990, it showcases 30 pieces spanning 35 years, including 19 that have been gathered in five previous collections. The effect is of a kind of fun-house mirror, a set of reversals and inversions, in which the author\u2019s fascinations\u2014his motifs, as it were\u2014double back on one another: talking animals (\u201cThat\u2019s my thing,\u201d he laughs. \u201cAnimals talk in my stories. I have to keep rediscovering it\u201d); superpowers; elements of genre; and always, always, that restless imagination, in which the most common situations come fraught with mystery, the delirious sense that anything might happen at any time.<\/p>\n

Lethem\u2019s 1994 debut novel, Gun, with Occasional Music<\/a>, helped solidify the template; taking place in the Bay Area at some point in the future, it weaves noir and science fiction tropes into a territory all its own. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award for the 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn<\/a>, which revolves around a detective with Tourette\u2019s syndrome. Three years later, he published what may be his most ambitious work of fiction, The Fortress of Solitude<\/a>, which blends autobiographical details drawn from his experience growing up in Brooklyn with more fantastical elements. The result is, if not quite magical realism, then a kind of phantasmagoric naturalism, in which the world is rendered as a place of, by turns, dangerous and beguiling wonders, which, of course, is precisely what it is.<\/p>\n

In the wake of these efforts, Lethem turned his attention from Brooklyn, although in recent years, he has made a loose return. Brooklyn Crime Novel<\/a>, from 2023, revisits and recapitulates themes and settings of Motherless Brooklyn, while \u201cThe Red Sun School of Thoughts\u201d\u2014the long story that closes A Different Kind of Tension\u2014echoes, despite taking place for the most part in San Francisco, some of the dynamics that drive The Fortress of Solitude. \u201cIt plays a little weird sleight of hand,\u201d Lethem says of the piece, which was written specifically for the collection, \u201cby transposing the geographic setting, although, of course, the Bay Area is a place where I experienced another kind of youthful coming-of-age.\u201d Set in 1976, and narrated by a 13-year-old whose father has left the family to take up residence with a commune \u201choused in a deep, ramshackle three-story Victorian on Guerrero,\u201d the text relies on a double vision, juxtaposing the wistful na\u00efvet\u00e9 of the young boy with the more nuanced perspective of the adult narrator, \u201ca sixty-year-old man, steeped in the minute adjustments and disappointments of adult experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mature version of the character looking back, in other words.<\/p>\n

Something similar might be said of Lethem, who at 61 is his narrator\u2019s close contemporary. This introduces a third tier of time, which has to do with retrospection. Whatever else it does, the writing in A Different Kind of Tension traces Lethem\u2019s development as an author, from early stories such as \u201cHow We Got in Town and out Again,\u201d with its postapocalyptic whimsy, and \u201cFive Fucks,\u201d which devolves in a bravura act of authorial deconstruction, to \u201cSuper Goat Man\u201d and \u201cLucky Alan,\u201d two of my favorites among his shorter works. In its reflective impulse, the book differs from The Ecstasy of Influence<\/a>, the 2011 nonfiction omnibus it otherwise resembles, not least for the depth and breadth of its scope.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love that book,\u201d Lethem acknowledges, \u201cbut it\u2019s very fitful, pugnacious. It\u2019s full of thrown elbows and makes all these claims, and I don\u2019t really feel this new book is troubled by the need to fight for something. It\u2019s more like: Would you look at that? I\u2019ve done this for 30 years, and there\u2019s a really interesting story here, if you care to check it out.\u201d He continues: \u201cI\u2019ve joked with people that you could read the book backwards and see me growing younger.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an arresting idea, bringing to mind the image of Fitzgerald\u2019s Benjamin Button come to life.<\/p>\n

And yet, isn\u2019t that the point of a new and selected? To see where one has landed through the lens of where one\u2019s been? Certainly, influence is a factor also. Take, for one, those talking animals, which come to Lethem via Kafka (\u201cthe master of the talking-animal story,\u201d he notes) and before that Alice in Wonderland, which he calls \u201cthe axiomatic moment for me as a young reader, when I start to see there\u2019s someone behind the screen who\u2019s playing with my brain, and I like it, and I want to figure them out.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Lethem is describing is the earliest moment of thinking as a writer. What he\u2019s describing is the emergence of a creative consciousness. At the same time, in that process of emergence, influence becomes transformed\u2014or, better yet, internalized\u2014as we begin to influence ourselves. It\u2019s not just all the stories, all those words and sentences, recontextualized by being brought together in a new and selected. It\u2019s also all the voices, all our voices. All those versions of ourselves. Self, after all, is nothing if not fluid. We are always interrogating: ourselves and our fascinations, our fixations, reframing from a different angle, and perhaps nowhere more so than on the page.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout it being a morbid thought,\u201d Lethem muses, \u201cwhat if I died tomorrow? I mean, it would be too soon, but I\u2019d have some stuff to show for the journey. And I thought, Well, what if I\u2019m not embarrassed about that? I realized a book like this might be a little like the box set of a band. And I thought, OK, what if this is the box set of the Go-Betweens? What do you want in there? You want not just the hits but the B-sides. You want to exhibit the peculiarities of this body of work.\u201d\u2022<\/p>\n

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TENSION, BY JONATHAN LETHEM<\/p>\n

\"<i>A<\/a>Related Stories\"Headshot<\/p>\n

David L Ulin is a contributing editor to Alta Journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonathan Lethem is concerned with time. Time as an element of narrative, yes: His new book, A Different…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":246345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[130942,59812,1022,171,130941,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-246344","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-a-different-kind-of-tension","9":"tag-book-review","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-jonathan-lethem","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115248075113489494","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}