Jonathan Lethem speaks on new book ‘Brooklyn Crime Novel’ at Portland Book Festival

Jonathan Lethem, the bestselling author of 12 novels, including “The Fortress of Solitude” and “Motherless Brooklyn,” has often focused his books on New York’s Brooklyn neighborhood he grew up in. His newest, “Brooklyn Crime Novel,” makes the neighborhood a main character. The book examines gentrification, nostalgia and race, among other topics. Lethem spoke to Dave Miller in front of an audience at the 2023 Portland Book Festival.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The writer Jonathan Lethem became a literary star for his novels, “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” books that unearthed and re-examined the Brooklyn neighborhood of his childhood. Lethem moved on, figuratively and literally. He lives in California now and has written books that take place all over, but his latest is a return to his roots and a chance to dig even deeper. It’s called “Brooklyn Crime Novel.” We talked about it in front of an audience at the Newmark Theater during the 2023 Portland Book Festival.

The whole book is about where you grew up, which at a certain point, became known as Boerum Hill. It wasn’t called that too much before you arrived. What did it look like? What did it sound like or smell like in the 1970′s?

Jonathan Lethem: Well, that’s everything I wanted to somehow reconstruct in the book, was this aura. You know, you live long enough and the past becomes really, really past, and you start to realize that you have information in your body that no one else can even imagine. I like to write things that are really journeys for people, but if you could just nail down these kinds of things that you’re mentioning - the scents, the sounds of a single block of the city in 1977 - it’s like taking people to Mars. It’s really a journey to another universe.

I had a weird advantage in one sense, in that I had tried before. I had a book called “The Fortress of Solitude,” 20 years earlier. And in some ways that book was more into the lyrical, descriptive, sensory, atmospherics. And I’d already evoked the place for myself as a kind of reconstruction, but I’d done it in a very romantic way. And this time I wanted to do it in a much less romantic way. I wanted it to feel kind of like a tabloid actuality, like you’d been jolted back into a set of experiences and frameworks that were now radically distant from our own.

Miller: In your acknowledgments, at the end, it’s mainly just a long list of names. And you say that in writing this book, you relied on help to an unusual degree. You call the people who then follow, “carers, thinkers and rememberers.” What did you ask those people?

Lethem: Well, it was very specific at a certain point. I developed a questionnaire, actually, which I would send out. I began, not as a writer, I was a painter. My father’s a painter and I thought I was gonna make visual art, and so I grew up with this idea about expressivity, that you made things gesturally, out of your imagination, out of your own impulses, out of your own memories, maybe - but you didn’t rely on other people. You certainly didn’t do research.

The image was that of an action painter. You make a magnificent, expressive movement of some kind and then you bring it out into the world and you’re like, “look at me, I did something cool.” And this was my model for writing when I began. I thought of it as a purely personal, imaginative, gestural kind of work. I wasn’t a good student. I didn’t learn how to write nonfiction or a thesis or do research. I never wrote a dissertation on anything. So I didn’t have any methodology like that. And for a long time, I wrote novels the way a painter paints.

But when I wrote “The Fortress of Solitude,” it was the beginning of accruing some of the skills of a researcher, the things that a nonfiction writer takes for granted - talk to other people, ask for help, look at an archive. And that was because I wanted to get some of the setting and the historical context for where I’d grown up right, enough that no one would quibble with it. And I had a few old friends. I had my brother, and my best friend, Carl, and my neighbor Lynn Nottage, who’s a very famous playwright now. I would reminisce with them a little bit, and they’re in that book. But it was still a very tight cluster of people who were more or less in a kind of intimate conversation with me.

But this time, I wanted to be like a social scientist, and I went to the broadest possible array of sources and archives. And also I began looking up people I’d grown up with and relocating, like kids I was at school with, and hadn’t seen for 40 years. And I went into these deep, deep rabbit hole, reconstructive memory conversations, but I used a questionnaire to do it.

Miller: What were, in the end, the most helpful questions on the questionnaire?

Lethem: That’s a really good question. There were two that there was a total consensus on, and I think those became galvanizing because of the way they shored up my intuitions about this project. The two that everyone agreed about - one was, “What was the first thing you ever stole?” And everyone had something, everyone was a thief.

Miller: Shoplifting.

Lethem: Shoplifting. Absolutely. It was totally universal.

Miller: And you asked that for a reason. Also, the way you asked it acknowledged the universality of this. You didn’t say, “Did you shoplift?” You said “What was the first,” because you knew. So what was yours?

Lethem: What was mine? I think it was a comic book. I’m sure it was a comic book.

Miller: Do you remember how you did it?

Lethem: Yeah, sure. My sleeve, obviously. It’s a terrible vulnerability in the comic book - they curl very naturally into your sleeve. You just need a winter coat.

But, okay, this was a really important insight for me because my intuition was that we’d grown up in a totally criminal context. And by that, I don’t mean famous crimes, although there were those, but that everybody on the street in Brooklyn in the ‘70′s had to form a relation to the idea of crime. Like until you understood in a sense, it was a part of your world, whether you were principally a victim or principally a perpetrator; probably you were some kind of both, but that you had to have an attitude about it and you had to have a version of it that you could wear around that you weren’t eligible to be part of the community.

But the other question that everyone gave me the same answer to, I think the wording was “Did you ever talk to your parents about any of this?” And the answer was, “Are you kidding!?”

Miller: And just to be clear, it wasn’t, “Did you talk to your parents about you shoplifting?”

Lethem: About that? No.

Miller: It was “Did you talk to your parents about everything that was going on...”

Lethem: …about what our lives on the street consisted of.

Miller: Do you think that that was, if not unique to your circumstance, somehow significant, or do you think it’s different than the not unusual wall between generations - kids and parents?

Lethem: Well, this is a question that bedevils my life and this book. How much of what I’m writing about in “Brooklyn Crime Novel” was absolutely unique, not only to the time and the place, but even to the neighborhood and to the street, because there are aspects of Dean Street and the life we lived there, the kind of community of children that I’m writing about that I do think derived from really particular circumstance, about almost the infrastructural reality of that street and that neighborhood at that time.

But then again, there are things that open into universalities about childhood, about parents, about life in urban environments - especially racially mixed ones, class diverse ones. And so it’s both - in a way that’s really intricate and energized the project in many ways to say, I think everyone understands, but also, I’ve got to say, this was really weird.

Miller: You just brought up a lot of things that I wanna circle back to. But let’s come back to crime. It’s a fascinating question that’s threaded throughout the book. And I think that at one point, your narrator even acknowledges this. So the book is called “Brooklyn Crime Novel,” but that’s a little bit of a red herring. It’s not a police procedural. It’s not a murder mystery. A ton of minor crimes are threaded throughout, and are important in the lives of the young people.

There are more major things that happen that we won’t get into now because folks should encounter them for themselves. But the version of crime that seems most meaningful to this day, that maybe reverberates the most in people’s lives, is something that you call “the dance.” What do you mean by that?

Lethem: Well, we had a kind of exchange. I’ll back up and say when I first left Brooklyn and I would go out into other worlds - I went to college in Vermont, then I moved to California - I would visit people in other cities. I was into wandering. I wanted to be anywhere but New York. But when I would talk about New York City, a common question was, “Have you ever been mugged?”

And shorthand, I had ways of dealing with it if I wasn’t interested in the question. But if I was interested in the question, if I wanted to stop and answer it, it was really hard to answer because the answer was either, “never”...And I mean never in the sense that what people mean when they say mugging is like what happens to Batman’s parents. A guy with a handkerchief on his face puts a gun up and you step into an alley, and he says “Your money or your life.”

Well, that hadn’t happened to me. I hadn’t had that kind of standard mugging. But if, on the other hand, it meant someone taking stuff from you on the street of New York City, it had happened more times than I could count, and it was a ritual transaction that fascinated me because it was precisely nameless. It floated, and it’s the fact that we weren’t supposed to give a name, amongst ourselves, to our parents, you wouldn’t report it as a crime. It was this inarticulate but expressive maneuver.

Miller: Can you just describe how it might go?

Lethem: Well, I could do you right now.

Miller: As long as it can be on the microphone so folks can hear it on the future radio broadcast.

Lethem: Whatchu lookin at?

Miller: Uh.. nothing, nothing.

Lethem: No man. Whatchu lookin at? What’s the problem? What’s your problem? You don’t like me?

Miller: No, I’m just trying to go to the store..

I feel like I’m not doing the play-acting right. Which, the worst case scenario is you actually take my money because I’m not acting correctly…

Lethem: There’s no correct way to act.

Miller: We tried.

Lethem:  It was a kind of expressive encounter that involved familiarity, guilt, often even a kind of fondness, recognition, and then the surrender of something: your bus pass, your baseball glove, most often a dollar or some pocket change, but it was always covered in a kind of “We know we’re just joking. You know I like you, you know you didn’t do anything wrong, you know you like me. We were just fooling around. Thanks for the money.”

Miller: Was there an implied threat of violence?

Lethem:  Of course, of course. And sometimes there was a rough-housing kind of violence to it. Often, a headlock was very typical. “You know you like me? Yeah, we like each other. We’re friends.”

Miller: You write that it was a usual enough occurrence, that it wasn’t uncommon for kids to put the money they cared about, say, in their socks, and you have quarters or a dollar bill in the pocket because that’s the “mugging money.”

Lethem:  I didn’t make up the term “mugging money.” And in my questionnaire, I asked about whether people had ever been in the habit, the practice, and again, people would write into my questionnaire as if I was being foolish, like, “Of course, of course, you kept 50 cents in your pockets to hand over, and a dollar in your sock to spend on what you had hoped to spend it on.”

Miller: The things you weren’t gonna shoplift.

Lethem: Because you were always, remember, both victim and criminal. That’s the big takeaway.

Miller: You grew up, and so did I, at a time when the word trauma was not used nearly as much as it is now. And we could spend an hour talking about that and there are probably benefits and drawbacks to the frequency that it’s tossed around now. But it’s not a word that you associate at all in the writing of this book, with what you experience. And it did make me wonder, say, the bodily experience, if the fear associated with that, even if there was never explicit or rarely explicit violence, and even if it was couched in a jokey way, if the fear of that has lingered?

Lethem: Well, that’s a great question. I mean, I think there’s fear at the core, but much of what I’m interested in in this book is - and it relates to the idea of trauma, but I don’t think the language of trauma was useful to me. It’s the management of anxiety or fear or guilt, often combinations of those things through attitude, performance, stylistics, paraphrase and ritual. In a way, we all participated in creating a theater of the hard-boiled. You know, we’re from Brooklyn, we do this kind of thing. This is what it is to be from the streets, this is what it is to be street-savvy, to have street cred.

It’s not that different, in a way, from the way the essence of the hard-boiled style conceals trauma to begin with. The hard-boiled detective, when he’s invented between the two World Wars, wears a trench coat because he’s a war veteran. It’s a reference to trench warfare. But that’s stylistic. We don’t think of that when we see Humphrey Bogart with his kind of hard exterior and broken heart underneath, we get what it looks like and how it feels, we’re attracted to it. It seems useful. Adopting the hard-boiled manner is very, very alluring, but we don’t think about it as, he’s a wounded war veteran, he’s recovering from shell shock, or not recovering from it because he can’t. So this idea of the management of something through a collective ritual, stylistically, was very important to me.

Miller: You write, or your narrator writes, “while the DIY renovations are going on inside the houses, the DIY reparations are transpiring on the sidewalks out front.” We haven’t talked about your experience of the racial component of what you call “the dance.” What was it?

Lethem: Well, it took a lot of forms, but the most traditional thing was that the white kids were surrendering money to the non-white kids and the white parents were silently consenting to know and not know that this was going on. That’s where I felt the aspect of reparations came in because it was a kind of, “They don’t have what you have, tolerate this, don’t talk about it.” Everyone was managing in a gentrifying space, in a post-civil rights triumphant atmosphere, where everything was supposed to be very Kumbaya, and very good, and very organized and fine. We’re all gonna get along.

The unspeakable wrongness that persisted and was being managed was that the civil rights era hadn’t transformed everything. That disparities and injustices were everywhere but were not being named. And so the movement of tiny bits of property, shame, dignity, from one place to the other was a kind of substituted response, and guilt was everywhere.

Miller: What do you mean when you say that?

Lethem: I mean, it was kind of a silly joke for me to try to get you to play-act a “dance” with me, because you couldn’t have occupied the role because you don’t feel fundamentally in torment about me, that you are in bad faith towards me. But in the “dance” as I understood it and accepted it now - I could never have enunciated any of these things when I was a kid - there was an ingredient which was, you know that when I say, “What are you looking at,” or, “Why do you look at me that way?,” what’s implied is you’ve already done something wrong by coexisting with me and meeting my eye.

Miller:  And being part of the displacement of people who look like me.

Lethem: Of course! Absolutely. Now, nobody was enunciating this, but I do believe that actually there was almost as an element in the life of the children in that neighborhood at that time, that we were all sort of political scientists, but without any language for it.

We were enacting and negotiating injury and injustice that could not be translated into language with our bodies and space.

Miller: One of the mysteries to me as I was reading the book is what you think the parents actually knew about what was going on, what they knew but pretended not to know, and what they were truly ignorant of. I mean, maybe it’s impossible to sort that out, but what do you think about what parents were thinking at that time?

Lethem: Well, I think it varied enormously and I tried to give some indications in this book, but I was actually a lot less interested in the parents. The first time I wrote about growing up in the neighborhood, in “The Fortress of Solitude,” I was in my thirties, the world was 20 years younger. Everyone was closer to these experiences, and I was closer to my own childhood. But weirdly I took the position of the parents a lot. I identified with the parents a lot in that book. I was really in love with them and their worlds - their yearning, their wish to make this place that they’d come to make sense and to be good neighbors, if they could be.

Twenty years later, writing about it again in my fifties, I was like, screw them, those dumb boomers. They messed it up. I’m just gonna write about the kids and what they experienced, without giving so much lip service to the good intentions or misunderstandings, the comprehensible confusions of the parents. I made the parents in this book more like the parents in a Peanuts cartoon: “Wah wah wah.” They’re like the wall of incomprehension.

Miller: Except I think that maybe in Peanuts cartoons, they might as well not be there. But your narrator says this about parents: “The institution of parenting is itself in a mixed state, one of collabs, abdication, reinvention. The parents may identify with you more than you identify with yourself. Who can say?” Was that as destabilizing as it sounds?

Lethem: Well, there are a lot of amazing memoirs now written about the stratum of parenting, the hippie commune-living parents of the ‘70′s. I had a great example in my space. My father is still alive and I adore him, but he absolutely exemplifies this sort of self absorption and also incredibly idealistic, absolutely unbroken idealism about his path in the world. There’s no ruefulness in that generation. They did these amazing things or they’re still about to do them, it might still happen. I identified with them a lot as a child and that was my way of trying to understand them. But that’s also because they were easy to identify because they were extending their childishness in many, many ways. And so we were in the same space, the cultural-historical moment had made them. It was the age of Aquarius, and the Aquarian is always ready to become something.

Miller: [You] write that if you sorted boyhood there into different periods, the first would be the “False Oasis.” What [does] that phrase mean?

Lethem: There is this period when the children, collectively, do identify with what, in a sense, is like the memo they’re handed. And this has to do with the extremely specific historical conditions. The civil rights era has just happened and a lot of people are wanting to claim victory. And in this legacy of an urban space like the one in Brooklyn that I inhabited, white people are coming back from the suburbs. They’re like, “We’re gonna give the cities a chance. Let’s all live together.” It’s a kind of Jane Jacobs idealization, which is a very appealing one, right? Make community, live close with people. And its expression took the form of diving in, and there were lots of results, all kinds of experiences and confusions.

And now we go back and we put the name, which is a very general word that we use as if it’s unbelievably specific, “gentrification,” on all of this. Well, under that name lies a lot of different kinds of reality. Yes, there’s predatory real estate. That’s the easy thing. But there’s also so much idealism, so many artists, so many people yearning to find a way to be “in community.” And if it was only capitalism, if it was only cynically motivated, that would be easy to denounce. Instead, it’s this crazy confabulation of so many different kinds of desire and attempts to create something.

So the memo that was given to the children was, “We just took care of this. You guys, you’re the luckiest kids in the world because we...” - you know, I think I have a joke in the book with its very caustic hard-boiled voice – “...smoked some reefer and listened to some jazz records and we marched and now you guys get the world.” It’s all gonna be great because you’re all together.

And we were, like any children, totally excited by the idealization that we were offered, initially. So that’s the false oasis.

Miller: At one point, a character imagines going back to some parts of the neighborhood he spent time in as a child. You write, “What’s he going to say? I didn’t used to be white.” Can you help me understand that? I mean, what is he trying to communicate? The sense is he’s never gonna say those words because they’re absurd. But what’s behind them? What would they communicate about his experience of race in his adolescence?

Lethem: Well, behind this very idealistic memo, there’s another very, very pernicious, painful memo. Very hard to admit you’ve been given, which is, “You have a ticket out of here.” And once you hear that and you receive it into your body - even if you don’t want to acknowledge it, because it seems evil, because it’s distinguishing your ticket from the ticket-lessness of someone who lives by your side - you know, you’re viable. Wait it out. Self-invent. Get into a good college.

Miller:  Or go to a private school, even when you’re in middle school or high school, or go to a fancier school.

Lethem: If you can convince your parents to send you to a different school, then all you have to do is get from the subway to your house. To abandon the scene of this idealization, which is so painful to do and yet, so inviting. If you can’t solve the problem of “the dance,” that you’re close and in torment with your collective - because we kids were a collective for a time.

So this joke, “what am I gonna say, I didn’t used to be white,” is the recognition that one has separated oneself and begun to construct a new identification. This may be odd to say, but in a space like that, it isn’t only the Black or Brown kids who learn to code switch. So that character who’s thinking, “What am I gonna say? I didn’t used to be white?” is thinking, is it okay if I code switch back into the collective, if I become a street kid again? But am I playing at something? And suddenly it all looks false. Their entire predicate for existing looks very, very false.

Miller: Do you remember when you first started hearing the word gentrification?

Lethem: Yeah, I thought about this a lot. So, you mentioned at the beginning, Boerum Hill, the neighborhood was an invention, which became a fascination to me. It was made up out of a portion of blocks that had otherwise been claimed by downtown Brooklyn or north Gowanus, and it was made up by an old woman named Helen Buckler who lived about five houses away from me. And she invented the term by finding the name Boerum on an old map. It was like farmland, Henry Boerum or Simon Boerum - a couple of brothers had owned some farmland in that area and she invented it in 1964, and I was born in 1964. The word gentrification was coined by a sociologist named Ruth Glass in London in 1964. So I felt, okay, this is telling me something.

I’ve been traveling with these terms, Boerum Hill on one side and gentrification on the other, since my birth.  But it’s now so common, so recognizable. I can throw it out here knowing that everyone’s gonna have a feeling about it and maybe even want to contest like, “Oh, yeah, you say it’s not simple.” I think it’s simple. It’s when “X” happens, right? People really feel they know this term, but it was not, I researched this because I wanted to reclaim my own intuitions.

There were other things that were being named. But until the mid-’80′s, this term wasn’t familiar at all. Ruth Glass had coined it in London. She was a sociologist. She was describing a thing that had happened in a part of London, but she was an academic and it was an academic term that took a very long time to filter into common usage or into journalism. You can’t find any reference to gentrification in the New York Times until the mid-1980s. And then it’s very tentative. It’s always explained when it’s used; it doesn’t appear in The New Yorker until 1989. And then it rapidly, because of the need to start talking about this painful collective experience, it becomes a very familiar and famous word very quickly after that.

So when my parents were talking about it in the early ‘80′s, they were actually outliers and it was because our neighborhood was like the laboratory of gentrification and they were leftists, they were radicals. And so they were finding this term when they needed it, to start to reverse what had otherwise been described positively, as I say, and mostly these terms are gonna seem incredible. People would talk about being “urban pioneers.” Well, now that doesn’t sound really very nice anymore.

Miller: But just to say, people used it in a positive way about what they were doing.

Lethem: Well, again, if you have Robert Moses, who’s trying to bulldoze your neighborhood to build an expressway, and on the other side, you have Jane Jacobs, you feel like you’re on the good side. “No, we’re gonna revitalize it. That was the term, it was…

Miller: Renewal.

Lethem: …renewal, renaissance, revitalization. And it was an assertive, proud movement.

Miller: One of the other dicey phrases that you introduced me to in the book is “Cinderella Project.”

Lethem: Well, this was really particular. The Brooklyn Union Gas Corporation got involved in sponsoring the restoration of certain of these row houses, the Brownstones, and they would give you a grant under something called the - I don’t know what it was called - Cinderella Imperative or something. And then you would have a Cinderella House. Well, what does that make the other ones? Ugly stepsisters? Does it mean it’s gonna revert at midnight? It’s very odd.

But of course, the reason they would do this was that it was also a craze for gas fittings which also connected to this Victorian fantasy. And there was a lot of translating, this is something that seems incongruous now, but the hippies who in one sense were hippies - I’m kind of one myself, not into conventional forms of prestige - but they had this Victorian fantasy. They liked to dress up in costumes and put gas chandeliers in their houses and restore the marble fireplaces. So it was an imposture that was very charming on one level, but then again, it was also, if you look at it through the lens of, how do people establish a provenance that may not be telling the whole story. It was a way of reclaiming the white background of these row houses.

Oh, look, they’re Victorians, we’re restoring them. We’re not gonna modernize them. We’re gonna clean up the beautiful old claw foot bathtubs and the marble fireplaces and we’re gonna put gas chandeliers in, because they used to be Victorian houses and we’re gonna make them into that again. Well, what that does is, it creates a myth of origins, as if they really ought to have always belonged to the people that they now belong to, because they were built for them. It completely [inaudible] everything that happened between the building of the neighborhood…

Miller: …and decades of Mohawk ironworkers, or Dominicans…

Lethem: …and everyone else who ever lived there.

Miller: That does get to something that was fascinating. And you wrote about it in a New Yorker article recently and it’s suffused in the novel. It’s the emphasis on the incredible hundreds, thousands of hours of work that these “brownstoners,” as they call themselves, put in - either paid for, often did themselves, sanding and painting and scraping and putting in new brickwork. But the implicit, maybe explicit, argument is that this work ennobled the process and is a kind of excuse for what followed. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I’m curious, what was the emphasis in the work that they put into it?

Lethem: It was a kind of sweat equity. And also, if you’re gonna call yourself a pioneer or a settler, you’re gonna exhibit this devotional, “I’m gonna process this space into...” It was like making something into a garden with your own hands.

Miller: You should have seen this land when I arrived and now it’s fertile.

Lethem: Right.

Miller:  What do you make of that argument? How do you reckon with it?

Lethem: Well, I don’t think there’s anything to reckon with. I just wanted to record the extraordinary, intricate mindset that explains the space that I can still see as if it’s yesterday, and that seems so exotic now. But the reason it’s meaningful to talk about it is not that I’m gonna convince someone in 1968 not to buy a building in what was formerly Gowanus, because that doesn’t make any sense. And anyway, as so many of you may be just thinking, “they were just trying to find a place to live.” But it’s just to notice that, right now, the same kind of self-ratifying fantasies accompany all kinds of marvelously good intentions by marvelously approachable, likable people - who may in fact be ourselves - and could also be participating in similar kinds of fantasies that would look as peculiar - to put a neutral word on it - if we had the benefit of time.

Miller: Well, it’s interesting you say that because one of the things that I experienced reading the book is that I lived very close to the neighborhood here, talking about 20 or 25 years ago. I was in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, which is blocks away from where we’re talking about, for a number of years and I walked all the streets that you wrote about in this new book. I had many happy times in a bar, the Brooklyn Inn, that you write about. This was about 30 years after your parents’ generation. I was just a later-arriving white person.

The only reason I bring this up is to acknowledge that gentrification, to go back to this sort of all-encompassing, half-helpful word, doesn’t stop, it’s not static. It spreads, it continues, it metastasizes, it changes, and many people are implicated in it, in complicated ways.

Lethem: Well, of course you’re implicated in it, but that’s also to say maybe the frame is wrong, and this is one of the things that I came to see. During my childhood, when the word revitalization turned into, maybe we have a new name for it and it’s not such a happy name, “gentrification,” the parents, the adults in my neighborhood kind of divided up into two teams. There was the pro and con, and at first that seemed very legible to me like, “okay, I’m on the anti-gentrification team.”

Needless to say we can see the double bind - that it’s very difficult to be part of the people making a neighborhood more white and be effectively against the increases in it becoming fashionable and expensive and more policed that always accompany this, right? But it also started to seem to me that the scale was wrong, that you can want to be, let’s say, a really good landlord, and rent an apartment for below market value, which in fact is what my father always did. He always found some kind of ceramicist who was working as a waitress and he would rent the basement apartment at a bargain. So he wasn’t literally raising the costs, but you can’t be an anti-gentrificationist in an area that’s like eight- or twelve- or twenty-square blocks because it’s not understanding that the problems are so much larger, they’re structural.

The issues that you’re contending with are about our society. They’re about capitalism. It doesn’t actually work to either be in favor or opposed to a good coffee shop. That’s not politics really. It’s just attitude. And so I began to think, this is an insufficient framework. I mean, you didn’t move there because you either wanted to participate or wanted to stem the tide of something; you moved there because it was where you wanted to live at that time.

Miller: It was affordable and it was cool. A complicated word in of itself. Your narrator says at the beginning and at the end that he wants to avoid nostalgia. What is nostalgia?

Lethem: This gets to my having the sensibility I have. You know, one of the things I noticed about myself was that I spent my life running away from Brooklyn and then I’d move into spaces that reproduced it, or I’d be attracted to spaces that reproduced it in all kinds of ways.

Miller: How conscious of that were you at the time?

Lethem: It took a while for me to acknowledge it and to see it. It still happens to me, half accidentally. In California, I recently fell in love with a town called Landers, on the edge of the Joshua Tree desert. And I was like, “Oh, crap. It’s the desert. Almost nobody lives here and there are just these weird twisted trees and rocks, but it’s gentrifying, isn’t it? I did it again.”

This feels right to me in a weird way. The wrongness feels right to me. The sense of something transforming and obviously, it doesn’t have to do with race or displacement, because there’s enough room for anyone who wants to come. But with the idea of it becoming…you used the word cool, the idea of it changing into something else and there being layers of different forces in contention, under the skin of the reality. And this is my space.

I think I’ve done it as a writer, as well. I think I moved into science fiction just in time for the gentrification, and the feeling I have for my own past - well, many people have this, is that it’s delicious. I mean, when I wrote “The Fortress of Solitude,” the paradox of that book is, it would seem, to use the word trauma, it would seem to be a catalog of childhood traumas. But the latter part of the book is the thing everyone finds so excruciating, is when the character leaves, and everyone’s like, “Can’t he go back there and be mugged some more? It was so nice back then.”

And I agree, he turns into a total pill when he abandons that space. And I pine for that. The problem of Boerum Hill or Gowanus in 1977, I wanna dream my way back there. And in “The Fortress of Solitude,” I did it very nostalgically, and I don’t mean to criticize that book. I am very proud of that book, but it’s suffused with this golden light, all the music. I’m constantly re-arousing this sensory fascination with the way the buildings and the trees looked and the way the music sounded, and the way we all lived together in such an aggressive, disastrous utopia. And then it was all like a lost world for me.

But in this book, I wanted to make it more stark and I wanted the politics and the confusion to be raw and on the surface. So I had to strip away all of the golden light coming through the trees. I try not to mention the music that’s playing. It’s a book of stark actualities. What were the structures? What were the patterns of behavior? I don’t even give the characters very much intimate detail. They’re actually like figures in a hieroglyphic that I’m studying.

Miller They don’t have names either. At one point you write: “This inquiry isn’t finally about what nobody knows, or what everybody knows. It’s about what a small number of people remember, even if they avert their eyes when passing on the sidewalk. It is about the knowledge that’s locked up inside their bodies and how it wishes and doesn’t wish to come out.” What were some of the things for you that you didn’t want to come out?

Lethem: You know, the most important work you have to do on this earth, and I’m gonna sound really vainglorious, but I feel like this book, “Brooklyn Crime Novel,” was the most important work I came to earth to do. But by definition, on it’s simplest level, it’s gonna exhaust you. It’s going to implicate you and it’s going to leave you seeing yourself as a part of history. It’s to acknowledge where we come from and not individuate, not take it personally, not self-aggrandize, but to say “I just happened to be born into this world. And I’m just gonna try to account as well as I can for the things I’ve seen and the places I’ve been.”

But it’s, in some sense, very demeaning to the vanities of a person who grew up both in a civilization, America, that glamorizes self-invention and self- actualization, and then also in a bohemian subculture of the arts that doubles down and says, “Oh, become whatever you wanna become and make beautiful things.” I didn’t have that work to do here.

Miller: I’m fascinated by that answer because I thought you might have said what was hardest to write about was this aspect of very complicated racial politics, and my place in it. But if I understood you correctly just now, what you said was the most challenging aspect of this was to see yourself as an insignificant player on the world stage.

Lethem: I saw this book as…the mission was to leave myself out.

Miller: Isn’t that impossible?

Lethem: Of course, it’s impossible. And it’s impossible in a way that becomes fascinating, and in a way it becomes part of the subject of the book..

Miller: It becomes, very self-consciously, a part of the mechanism of the book as you go.

Lethem: The book ended up taking this impossibility as one of its subjects, because to do the work I needed to do, I needed to put myself out of the scene and out of the picture and not care about myself and not advertise my own sensitivities. For me, this goes back to my life as a reader. It’s the precursor to my ambition to write.

I read books to become other than who I was. I desire this more than anything in the world, not because I disliked myself, but because the appetite to be translated into “the other,” was ravenous. I couldn’t get enough of that. And I sought it in all kinds of different forms and versions. I wanted to time travel and I wanted to become an alien and I wanted to become a woman and I wanted to become anything that a novel could make me become.

And yet the book also is endlessly admitting I’m stuck here. I’m this white guy walking down the street. But to identify with what doesn’t identify with you, there is the deepest remorseful sensation possible.

Miller: Johnathan Lethem, thanks very much.

Lethem: Thank you.

Miller: That was Jonathan Lethem in conversation at the Newmark Theater for the 2023 Portland Book Festival.

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