what's there and gone

For a little less than a year, I've been aware of Jonathan Lethem. My life keeps circling around his work and connecting unintentionally with it. I was first conscious of this when I started falling in love with his recent novel The Fortress of Solitude (if you've seen me since last summer, I probably lent it to you). When I read one passage in the book, about a young boy going obsessively by himself to see screenings of Star Wars in the summer of 1977, it reminded me of a short personal essay I'd read two years before in The New Yorker and been so moved by that I saved the issue. I went back and checked -- the essay had indeed been by Lethem.

So now, Jonathan (it's pronounced Lee-them, by the way, which I don't like as much as the other option) has written another "Personal History" in this week's New Yorker (I'd give you the link, but it's not on the online edition). It's called "Beards" and anyone who's read Fortress will recognize Lethemesque tropes: an obsessive catalogging of works of popular art, grief at the loss of a mother. He can be an ungainly writer, especially when he's going on and on about some Brian Eno song you've never heard (that, in fact, is how this essay begins), but there's such heart in what he writes, and it tends to swamp you at certain moments, that you end up loving it the way you love a member of your family, annoying tics and all.

Though he's Jewish, thirtysomething and straight with an encycolpedic knowledge of both drugs and popular music, he sometimes feels like my alter ego. (I feel an even stronger connection to him after seeing him read in person at the Brooklyn Public Library.) I think it has to do with the "death of the mother" thing, which is apparently only recently emerging into the forefront of his fiction. My mother's death, or more specifically the noticeable lack of her, her ever-present non-existence in my life, has always been a hidden subject in my writing. It has been a sort of key that unlocks riddles about me generally. In this New Yorker essay, Lethem writes that all of his novels are "fuelled by loss." "I find myself speaking about my mother's death everywhere I go in this world," he says.

This New Yorker essay is almost painfully self-analytical, picking apart not only his family history but his own writing style and process. He even seems to assume of the reader some previous knowledge of his biography, or else just doesn't think it needs to be explained. I don't know if anyone who hasn't read his other work is likely to push through to the end of this one, but the last several sections (beginning with the one entitled "Fear of Music") are splendid. As in Fortress, one has to take the flat parts with the rich ones -- that's the way it works.

Here's a particualrly beatiful section, that certainly applies to a lot of other people I know who write:

Since then, I believe it would be fair to say, I've been in a hurry. Writing is another meditation that's also a frantic compenstation. As if wearing headphones, I'm putting myself to sleep, rushing to the end of my days: there's a death wish in reducing life to the twitching of one's fingers on the alphabet. I'm as pathetic as that kid watching double features alone, but also as vain. Writing's an aggression on the world of books, one reader's attempt to make himself known to others like him.

He talks in another section about the books and music in one's bedroom seeming like an "externalization" of one's brain (and then goes on to subtly complicate this idea). It reminded me of my own embarrassment about the books that currently line my shelves. Any of the people out there lucky enough to have been inside my lovely little room know it is not large. I have one small bookcase, filled mostly with the books that I've read recently, not with the books I treasure most. Looking at it now, in fact, I'm shocked by how un-representative it is of all the works I care about and the ones that have influenced me. A couple of exceptions: the First Folio is there and a volume of Caryl Churchill. And to that I can now add Fortress and The Known World.

But I get sort of uptight thinking that people who don't know me well but visit this bedroom (and there have been more and more of them recently) might get the wrong idea about that bookshelf. They might not understand the practical constraints it imposes. They also might look at my video/DVD collection and think that I don't really like movies. I'm obsessed with them, of course, but my video collection doesn't reflect it. It stopped growing somewhere around sophomore year at college. And as for DVDs, almost all of them have been gifts, since I made the digital transfer relatively recently. Can I really be reduced to Talk to Her, the Boston Red Sox 2004 Season Commemorative disc, and Volume One of Are You Being Served?

It's funny how websites like Friendster encourage this kind of reduction. Such a huge proportion of what you present about yourself comes from your movie, book, music tastes. When scrolling on Friendster looking for a date, I'm innately suspicious of anyone who's lists include one of the following: David Sedaris, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Six Feet Under, among many many others. Why? I'm not sure exactly. But anyone who likes those things seems to fit into a template too easily. Really, we're all trying to present ourselves according to a template -- with little outcroppings of individuality.

What is a list of favorite books or movies? What can it be? If I were to take my visitors through a teleportation device to my childhood home in Milton, MA, where most of my books are, they still wouldn't get the complete portrait. Yes, those are all the books I've owned and read and some of them have been formative. They'd find Chekhov and Stoppard, Kael, Durang, Nicholson Baker, Henry James and more. But now most of those are historical. That's what I did read. And the books I have now? They're only what I've been reading lately. The fact that I possess these books sort of cheapens them, makes them more like commodities. Chattel.

Because there are other influential books that I don't own or never did: ones that I read for school in library copies or obscure Thomas Middleton plays that are out of print. Or that copy of Beckett's Three Novels that got stolen from my backpack or the copy of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that I gave to Ben in Arkansas. Do you hold on most to the things that have gone away?