More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers

by Jonathan Lethem

Overview

From the award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Ecstasy of Influence comes a new collection of essays that celebrates a life spent in books

More Alive and Less Lonely collects over a decade of Jonathan Lethem’s finest writing on writing, with new and previously unpublished material, including: impassioned appreciations of forgotten writers and overlooked books, razor-sharp critical essays, and personal accounts of his most extraordinary literary encounters and discoveries. 
 
Only Lethem, with his love of cult favorites and the canon alike, can write with equal insight into classic writers like Charles Dickens and Herman Melville, modern masters like Lorrie Moore and Thomas Pynchon, graphic novelist Chester Brown, and science fiction outlier Philip K. Dick.
                                                                                                                
Sharing his infectious love for books of all kinds, More Alive and Less Lonely is a bracing voyage of literary discovery and an essential addition to every booklover’s shelf.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612196046
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	03/21/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

JONATHAN LETHEM is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn; three short story collections; and two essay collections, including The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among other publications.
 
Editor CHRISTOPHER BOUCHER is a professor of English at Boston College, editor of Post Road magazine, and author of the novels How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive and Golden Delicious, both from Melville House.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Education:

Left Bennington College after two years

Read an Excerpt

More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers
Introduction by Christopher Boucher

The barber, the cheese man, and the bookie were all named Carmine—oh yeah, wheels within wheels, big time.

—Motherless Brooklyn

I first heard about the project that would become More Alive and Less Lonely at Fenway Park in the summer of 2015. I’d gone to the Red Sox game with my good friend Jaime Clarke, a Boston-based writer, editor, and bookseller, to see them play the Phillies. Sometime around the fifth or sixth inning, Jaime mentioned that his friend Jonathan Lethem was interested in working with my publisher, Melville House, on a nonfiction book. Jaime thought I should consider editing the project—was I interested?

With that question, the game stopped mid-pitch and everyone at Fenway froze—the players, the crowd, the vendors, perhaps all of Boston. Not only is Lethem one of the most important writers of my generation, but he’s also one of the brightest stars in my literary solar system—a star I’ve steered by for my entire writing career. The game resumed, but I can’t tell you a single thing about it—my attention was elsewhere.

—

Jaime put Lethem and me in touch, and Lethem sent me the work he’d collected—roughly seventy-five pieces, some never before published—all written over the past two decades or so. I was charged with identifying a framework and a focus. I didn’t have to look too hard. The theme of books and book culture jumped out at me immediately. What’s more, I was struck by how well these pieces cohered. Collectively, they formed a sustained meditation on the endeavors of reading and writing; a celebration of a life spent in books; a readerly call-to-action. Without knowing it, I’d been waiting to read a book like this for years. Grateful as I was to glean lessons on craft from Lethem’s fiction, I did so only by inference and assumption. But this is a hotline—rare, direct access to Lethem’s X-ray-like critical insight; his mental library; his infectious hunger for books of all kinds.

Because these selections are culled from a twenty year span and a variety of publications, More Alive and Less Lonely invites you to travel in time a little. You might turn a page and find yourself in 1985, sitting next to Lethem at a reading by Anthony Burgess (“Anthony Burgess Answers Two Questions”). From there you can hop forward to 2009, where readers are eagerly awaiting Lorrie Moore’s first book in eleven years. Flip from there, perhaps, back to 1983, where a teenage Lethem confronts the beat hero Herbert Huncke at a Brooklyn bookstore. There are delightful surprises at every turn: anthems for books you might not be familiar with (Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird, for example, or Tanguy Viel’s Beyond Suspicion), radically creative anthology contributions (an essay on footnotes, for example, which itself takes the form of self-referencing footnotes), and tributes that correlate directly to Lethem’s novels (most notably, “The Original Piece of Wood I Left in Your Head,” a fictional interview between the film director Spike Jonze and Chronic City’s Perkus Tooth).

By and large, the chapter headings divide the selections according to their mission: The work in “Lost Worlds” shines light on obscure or out-of-print titles, for example, while “Engulf and Devour” collects writing about books in the canon. “OK You Mugs” amasses Lethem’s writings on media, while the selections in “It Can Still Take Me There” reflect—either directly or indirectly—on the entity of the book itself.

I see these chapters as temporary containers, though, suggested routes that I’m sure you’ll abandon to cut your own paths. Some readers may gravitate towards Lethem’s writing on one particular writer or topic—Thomas Berger, say, or the notion of amnesia as a narrative device—while others will surely look to More Alive as a partial portrait of contemporary literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Lethem completists, meanwhile, might comb these writings for biographical details—I’d direct them to Lethem’s anecdotes about his surprise visit to Chester Brown in Toronto (“A Furtive Exchange”), or the time he made Philip Roth laugh at a party (“The Counter-Roth”).

Some of the lines of motion here are more subtle. As a student of Lethem’s fiction, I found myself tracking his analysis of other writers’ styles, for example. I love his description of Moore’s “innate thingliness of words…their plastic capacity,” the way he rejects abstraction in the work of Thomas Pynchon (“…figuring out what it is like to read Pynchon is what it is like to read Pynchon. You’re never done with it.”) and his reverence for Moby-Dick—which, Lethem writes, “installs itself in your brain as a kind of second brain, bigger than that which contains it, much like swallowing an ocean of language and implication.”

Look, too, for those tendrils that run between this book and others by Lethem. In one of my favorite moments in 2012’s The Ecstasy of Influence, for example, Lethem writes that “Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality, and so forth.” Pair that with what Lethem says about Franz Kafka here—that “[he] grasped that language itself—even the very plainest and most direct—is innately metaphorical, fabulated, and grotesque. What’s worse, consciousness, being constructed from language, has that same unholy drift…” (“The Figure in the Castle”).

Finally, take note of the new, unpublished writing that appears here for the first time—the footnotes on Berger and Sylvie Selig, for example—and the spirit of restless inquiry therein. Like a detective on a case, Lethem circles back, reexamines the evidence, corrects himself and reframes anecdotes from new perspectives. It’s not the answers that drive him, after all, but the questions’ persistence—and, to borrow from his words on Philip K. Dick, the “beauty of their asking.”

In the end, I confess I was driven by my own selfish interests here; I curated a book that I myself wanted to own—one I could carry with me into bookstores, sip on the fly or gulp from in longer sittings, look to for both short bursts of insight and sustained inquiries. This book, after all, is a node, its objective to lead you to other nodes—those mentioned here, and then to other books by those authors, then to books that influenced those authors, through an infinitely expanding web of texts.

Driving these connections, though, is Lethem’s remarkable generosity of spirit and gratitude. Ultimately, in fact, I regard More Alive and Less Lonely as a love letter—one addressed to books, writers and readers alike. Lethem says as much in the pages that follow. He writes:

“I followed the higher principle of pleasure, tried to end up where I’d started: with writing I loved and wanted to recommend to someone else. That is to say, you.”

Table of Contents

Introduction Christopher Boucher ix

I Engulf and Devour

The Loneliest Book I've Read 3

Footnote on Sylvie Selig 11

Engulf and Devour 15

The Figure in the Castle 19

The Big Sleep 27

The Greatest Animal Novelist of All Time 31

The Counter-Roth 45

II It Can Still Take Me There

The Only Human Superhero 55

Forget This Introduction 59

What's Old Is New (NYRB) 65

To Catch a Beat 69

Footnote 73

III Objects in Furious Motion

Fierce Attachments 83

Attention Drifting Beautifully (Donald Barthelme) 87

Rock of Ages 91

My Hero: Karl Ove Knausgaard 95

A New Life (Malamud) 97

A Mug's Game 101

Steven Millhauser's Ghost Stories 105

IV Lost Worlds

The Mechanics of Fear, Revisited 113

On the Yard 119

Walter Tevis's Mockingbird 127

A Plate-Spinning Act 129

Everything Said and Exhausted (Daniel Fuchs) 137

How Did I Get Here and What Could It Possibly Mean? (Bernard Wolfe) 143

Twas Ever Thus (Tanguy Viel's Beyond Suspicion) 147

Russell Greenan's Geniuses 149

V Ecstatic Depictions of Consciousness

Consumed 155

Gazing at Ice 161

Dog Soldiers 165

Bizarro World 167

On Two Sentences from Charles D'Ambrosio's "Screenwriter" 171

Remarks Perhaps of Some Assistance to the Reader of Joseph McElroy's Ancient History: A Paraphase 173

VI Thomas Berger and I Have Never Met (Ishiguro, Berger and PKD)

Kazuo Ishiguro 181

The Butler Did It 183

Footnote on Ishiguro 187

High Priest of the Paranoids 189

The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike 197

To Ubik 199

Life After Wartime 201

Thomas Berger 209

Letters from the Invisible Man: My Correspondence with Thomas Berger 213

Footnote on Berger 219

VII OK You Mugs

Heavy Petting 225

More Than Night 229

You Talkin' to Me? 233

New York Characters 237

Lost and Found 241

The Original Piece of Wood I Left in Your Head: A Conversation Between Director Spike Jonze and Critic Perkus Tooth 245

Johnny's Graying Teenaged Sense of What Isn't Boring (Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002) 253

Close Reading (Ricks on Dylan) 259

Rod Serling 265

Mutual Seduction 275

VIII Fan Mail

Carved in Need 281

New Old Friend (A Toast to Kenneth Koch) 285

Eyes Wide Open 289

Something About a Slice 295

Pynchonopolis 297

To Cosmicomics 305

Anthony Burgess Answers Two Questions 307

A Furtive Exchange 311

Books Are Sandwiches 315

Acknowledgments 317

Editorial Reviews

In [More Alive and Less Lonely], we observe Lethem's signature esoteric fascination with books, records, even slices of pizza…The collection offers a comprehensive view of his evolution as a critic—from the "erratic booklust" of his teens to the distinct intellectualism and genial crankiness of his current work. To borrow from his description of Donald Barthelme, "his attention drifts beautifully." Lethem's earnestness is satisfying, but it's his vulnerability, his willingness to expose his own flaws, that endears…whether he's ruminating on Moby-Dick or Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, all of Lethem's work does what he suggests good criticism should do: It sends us back to the original texts.

The New York Times Book Review - Heather Scott Partington

02/20/2017
The title of Lethem’s varied collection of book reviews, introductions, and literary essays will surely resonate with any dedicated reader. Curious and adventurous readers will find a plethora of reading suggestions as Lethem (A Gambler’s Anatomy) talks about authors old and new. Indeed, his dedication to contemporary writers is the main note here, though he does delve into some canonical figures, such as Charles Dickens. And his incisive, colorful, and insightful encapsulations of what makes their works special are beguiling, whether he is describing Steven Millhauser’s “coolly feverish” prose or alerting readers to the “brief, elliptical, and precise” pre–Remains of the Day novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Even as a critic, he reads with enthusiasm. In his introduction to Tanguy Viel’s Beyond Suspicion, he writes, “The book’s reader will meet its opening pages with an intake of breath destined not to be completely released until its last lines have been reached.” He is particularly good at arousing interest in forgotten or obscure authors. Also running through his writing is a distinct love of his home town, New York City, and of New York authors, such as Vivian Gornick and Daniel Fuchs. An enthusiastic introduction by Christopher Boucher precedes the collection. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Lethem is literature's ultimate fanboy...[His] earnestness is satisfying, but it's his vulnerability, his willingness to expose his own flaws, that endears...Lethem's words remind of us of our own rabid fandoms.”  —The New York Times Book Review

“Incisive, colorful, and insightful...beguiling.”  —Publishers Weekly

“Thoughtful and often sly...[A] standout collection.”  —Kirkus

“Lethem is one of our most perceptive cultural critics, conversant in both the high and low realms, his insights buffeted by his descriptive imagination.”  —The Los Angeles Times Book Review
 
“Lethem is, of course, a king of sentences . . . His talent is large.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

04/01/2017
In this collection, novelist and essayist Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn; Fortress of Solitude) brings together decades of book reviews, introductions to anthologies and collected works, and other criticism that reveal his inquisitive and expansive reading habits. Lethem delivers these pieces in a relaxed, loose style, and as a novelist-critic, his language is typically articulate and sophisticated. He addresses the work under consideration with humorous and sometimes obsessive anecdotes about his own life, such as the stories told here in the selections about novelists Philip Roth or Kazuo Ishiguro. Lethem describes this approach as "more personal, more willingly subjective," and its overall effect is to bring the reader closer to the well-known (and less well-known) writers under review, and also to Lethem. The collection is edited and introduced by Boucher (English, Boston Coll.; Golden Delicious). VERDICT With such a wide variety of writings, at times this volume feels lacking in an overall coherent theme, but readers will be consistently won over by Lethem's sense of discovery. His sui generis criticism will leave readers wanting to read the books he discusses.—Doug Diesenhaus, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Library Journal

2017-02-02
One of America's most accomplished writers looks back between the pages of other writers' books.Lethem (A Gambler's Anatomy, 2016, etc.) is no stranger to books, between working in bookstores and writing regularly about them for venues like the New Yorker and Harper's. Here, novelist Boucher (Golden Delicious, 2016, etc.) fondly curates a thoughtful and often sly collection of Lethem's thoughts on books, films, and other works of art culled from the past two decades. The essays, reviews, and other ephemera are divided into sections, ranging from "Engulf and Devour" (books in the literary canon) to "Lost Worlds" (long-lost gems). One of the delights is Lethem's personal voice, often laced with arch humor but absent the jarring postmodern irony that sometimes marks writers at McSweeney's. The author also lacks literary pretension, tackling titans like Kafka, Melville, and Dickens but also penning tributes to Rod Serling and Batman. There are affectionate pieces about Walter Tevis' obscure sci-fi novel Mockingbird (1980) and the late novelist Thomas Berger. Occasionally, there's self-conscious commentary, as in Lethem's footnote on Kazuo Ishiguro in which he admits he's embarrassed by some of these pieces. He also offers a wonderful triptych of stories about Philip K. Dick, whom Lethem dubs a "necessary writer, in the someone-would-have-had-to-invent-him sense…American Literature's Lenny Bruce." There are some strange experiments—e.g., a feature written entirely in footnotes, the last of which reads "I'm not making any of this fucking shit up." Another imagines an interview between the director Spike Jonze and the fictional character Perkus Tooth from Lethem's Chronic City (2009). Fans may also enjoy Lethem's encounters with writers he admires, ranging from affectionate memories of Philip Roth to a caustic encounter with Anthony Burgess. A throwaway line from an essay on amnesia sums up this standout collection: "I followed the higher principle of pleasure, tried to end where I'd started: with writing I loved and wanted to recommend to someone else. That is to say, you."

Kirkus Reviews