Jonathan Lethem On ‘Lucky Alan,’ Sea World And Sci-Fi

The protagonist of a story from Jonathan Lethem’s new collection, “Pending Vegan,” describes himself to readers as a pending vegan. In fact, he’s privately renamed himself Pending Vegan. He’s at Sea World with his kids, who are desperate to see an orca, yet internally anguished over the cruelty of the amusement park. He’s horrified by the barbarism of meat-eating, which is why he’s chosen to become a vegan — but not yet. He’s still pending. But at least he cares, right?

Lethem’s taut, darkly funny new collection, Lucky Alan, excels at creating these moments of absurdity that exist not merely for their own sake, but on some level to expose our own tendency to accept the unacceptable, to live hypocritically, and to assuage our guilt with comforting words and superficialities rather than meaningful action.

He wrote the stories in the collection over the past decade, spanning the years in which he published the offbeat rom-com You Don’t Love Me Yet and Chronic City, the sprawling tale of an oddball group of friends in Manhattan with unexpected flourishes of magical realism. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t ever stop writing at least one short story I really liked every year, no matter what else I was doing with novels or teaching,” Lethem says, “so I think [Lucky Alan] is sort of exactly the result.”

In a recent phone conversation with The Huffington Post, Lethem talked about the process of putting together Lucky Alan, the complex family history that inspires his writing, and his thoughts on marijuana legalization, Sea World and Guantanamo Bay.

On writing short stories vs. novels:

“Novels take a while, and in their way they’re like these accidental documentaries of your life in the years it takes to write them, but story collections are even more like a kind of weird photo album,” he said, noting the wide range in form and subject matter among the stories in Lucky Alan. “They really capture different little pinhole moments in a writer’s time and attention, and for me, my different interests.”

“We’re all standing guard,” says Lethem, on how he came to write a story for his collection about the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The poignant but almost whimsical story addresses the situation with more surreality than raw politicism, which he admits may result in some readers not getting the message.

He explains, “That was the only way I could shape the sense of both absurdity and despair that I felt inspired in me again by the irreconcilable fact that I got to go to my local coffee shop and hang out with a book or with the New York Times and that this other thing [detainment at Guantanamo Bay] was going on, and they’re connected, but I can’t articulate or clarify my sense of involvement in any meaningful way.

“So I just shoved them together, I tried to shove them into one place, you know. What if the orange jumpsuit guy was in a hole in the ground in front of the coffee shop, you know. It’s just a pure assault on the distance that’s inserted between these things in our ordinary experience.”

On how social progress changes how we view the classics:

“I teach stories that seem tolerable in their explicit and their implicit content to me, because of where I’m placed in history, but my students look at them as kind of these abysmal windows into happily overturned world views. And I’m stuck in between! If I can’t teach Hemingway or Kipling, then who am I anymore that they’re still alive in my brain? When I’m faced with the ways that they’ve become bankrupt, the ways in which they’re in grave default. It’s really strange. Time is moving at different rates.”

The Huffington Post