Jonathan Lethem
The novelist on writing about Los Angeles, film adaptation, and fighting intellectual property right
His early novels took place in California, but Jonathan Lethem earned his reputation as a Brooklyn writer. His two most widely acclaimed novels - Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude - imaginatively explored race, class, and cultural issues in the motley borough in which he was raised. So a few eyebrows were raised when he set his latest book, You Don't Love Me Yet, in a yipster enclave of Los Angeles.
Lucinda Hoekke, the novel's heroine, is a late-20-something bass player living in Echo Park. When she's not practicing with her unnamed band, Lucinda works at the Complaint Line, set up by a conceptual artist to field anonymous complaints from callers responding to randomly placed stickers reading, "Complaints? Call 213-291-7778." (Try it.) Over the phone, she falls for the mesmerizing phrases of Carl - nicknamed "the Complainer" - and initiates an affair with him. When the Complainer's words are transmitted through Lucinda to her band's lead singer, they become lyrics for the band's best songs, calling into question claims of ownership to the material when the band starts to get bigger.
These ideas - the hazy notion of originality, the untraceable onset of the creative act - echo themes discussed in Lethem's quite substantial essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence," published in the February 2007 issue of Harper's Magazine. The essay explores the concepts of cultural borrowing and intellectual property rights, coming down hard against stringent copyright laws as suffocating to "creative vitality."
In that spirit, Lethem initiated a project through his website called Promiscuous Materials that offers up his stories and lyrics at no cost for other artists to use and rework. He also recently announced that he will option the film rights to You Don't Love Me Yet to a filmmaker of his choice in exchange for just 2 percent of the budget. By doing so, Lethem claims, he hopes to spark a re-examination of the typical ways in which art is commodified.
-Nikki Bazar
CityBeat: Why Los Angeles?
Jonathan Lethem: I lived in California for 10 years - not in L.A., but in the Bay Area - and a lot of my older books are set in the Bay Area. The Brooklyn stuff, that was a very satisfying vein for me. It worked for a while, but I think it's good for artists to stay mobile. There's that famous James Joyce quote about artists needing "silence, exile, and cunning." I guess I'd just been looking for that "exile" part of things: working from the margins, doing preposterous things, disavowing one's credentials.
Did you live here while you were writing it?
I've been there a few times for a month or two at a time, but I hope this book doesn't seem to be advertising itself as an X-ray vision of Los Angeles; it's much more of a pipe-dream. I wrote it out of my own projected curiosity and puzzlement over Los Angeles, but also there's a way in which I did write it from a zone of familiarity and that is the area as a bohemian enclave. These characters are daft about Los Angeles; they're not having deep thoughts about the gentrification of Echo Park or anything. They could probably be living out their daft existence more or less unchanged if they had plopped down in Williamsburg or Austin, Texas.
I read somewhere that you said that by doing an L.A. novel, you felt as if you were "faking it." Is that a comment on L.A.?
I wasn't, in this case, interested in the credibility you get from claiming to be from a place and writing all incisively about it. I was writing about my own projections of Los Angeles and my characters are faking it too, so it put me in the frame of mind to think about self-invention and posturing. There's something about the identity of being an artist where you always have to be trying to do things you don't know how to do. Everyone's sort of a fake before they're real.
For the Promiscuous Materials project you put up lyrics written by the band in You Don't Love Me Yet. When I listened to real bands' versions of those songs, they didn't sound like what I was imagining when I read the book.
The funny thing is, I don't really know more about how the band sounds than I got onto the page. Everyone wants me to tell them what it would sound like, but I can't. I think they might sound the most like the Vulgar Boatmen.
In the book, the band's hit song contains words that the Complainer says to Lucinda, who then hands them off to the lead singer, who then passes them off as his own. Is this meant to convey that no one can really claim to be the creator of a work of art?
It's not like the book was written as a heavy way of bearing down on any idea. It sort of glances off those thoughts, but the book is, I hope, a little too frisky to seem like it's got a big and ponderous agenda like that. I am interested in that stuff. I like the way, in certain pop forms, the art or the magic or the genius can seem to kind of come from everywhere and nowhere, and then when a band breaks up and everyone has these pathetic solo albums, you wonder where the thing that you loved went. So I'm sort of fooling around with this question of things that gain in value and meaning as they transmit from one person to the next and they don't quite belong to anyone.
You are currently in the process of reviving the comic book series "Omega the Unknown," and it was reported early on that Steve Gerber, one of the original creators of the series, was initially upset about not being involved. Did this incident spark the ideas for the essay?
I was already pretty far under way with all that stuff before I stumbled into that confusion, but of course it was a very interesting position to be in while I was already in the thick of this thinking. Everything is so intensely specific in the legacy of appropriation and intellectual property, and the comic world is a very, very complicated and often very sorry one, and totally different from the kinds of stances and values that I've absorbed and the way that it functions in the work that I do.
On your website you announce that you'll be giving away movie options to your new book for a return of 2 percent of the budget once it's completed.
Promiscuous Materials offers out stories that anyone can do what they want with, make other works out of, but not exclusively. So, if you do it you don't have any guarantee that somebody else might not be adapting the same piece. I'm also giving away the option on this novel without a money transaction and then I can get paid further down the line if the movie gets made. It's a slightly puzzling proposition, so it may take filmmakers a little while to organize their thinking about whether or not it's something they want to mess with because it involves a slightly different way of arranging the rights.
I've read that Ed Norton is making a film out of Motherless Brooklyn. Are you involved?
I'm pretty removed from it. He and I met and talked a couple of times, so I know what he means to do with it, but I don't know how quickly he's progressing. I've never felt that it was my place to look over filmmakers' shoulders if I optioned the rights to a novel. I'm a novelist; just because I wrote the book doesn't mean that I know how to best make it into a film. Obviously, I'd rather have a good movie than a bad one made, but if the bad one's made, the book's still there, it's intact, it hasn't been altered. In the meantime, I have other books to write.
Published: 04/05/2007
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