If you cough up the debt to get that MFA, apparently you get a free copy of The Writer’s Chronicle in your mailbox. Sweet. The very fine interview with Jonathan Lethem is not online, so here are the bits that struck me. He says:
I was deliberately marginal. I believed I was meant to be a writer who worked outside traditional structures of prestige. It wasn’t a moral issue for me, but an aesthetic issue. Writers like Patricia Highsmith, or Phillip K. Dick, carried this sense that they were exiles within their own literary generations. I cast myself as one of those, which is a somewhat perverse thing to do. It’s a fetish to choose exile, but I did, and I achieved it for a little bit. I published several novels that found their way to readers who treated me as a cult artifact, while not being reviewed, for instance, in the New York Times. … There’s certainly no shred of dark horse-ness in how I’m published now. I’m given every chance by my publisher to be taken seriously, and I enjoy that, now that I have it. But I’m grateful to have known both sides of legitimacy, to have functioned as an outsider for a bit.
And on Motherless Brooklyn:
I experienced a sentimental urgency to proclaim that Brooklyn was where I was from. The way people talk there, the way they’re more impetuous in their talk: that’s what I’m like. That’s why I’d been uncomfortable in California, I decided, because everyone was so careful and damped and gentle in the way they spoke. I was constatnly being responded to as if I was out of control when I just thought I was being emphatic. People would take a step back and act like I was always a bit too much.
So I began making this provocative and exiting analogy between being a Brooklynite in California and being someone with Tourette’s Syndrome.
