Жонатан Летем: Американдық жазушының өмір мен шығарма жолы

American novelist, essayist, short story writer

Jonathan Allen Lethem ('/l//iː//θ//əm/; born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College.

Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family with roots in Germany, Poland, and Russia. His brother Blake became an artist involved in the early New York hip hop scene, and his sister Mara became a photographer, writer, and translator. The family lived in a commune in the pre gentrified Brooklyn in the northern section of the neighborhood of Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Lethem's fourth grade teacher at P. S. 29 in nearby Cobble Hill was future New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, whom he called the "perfect" teacher and to whom he dedicated his first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music. Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as "thrilling" and culturally wide reaching. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars twenty one times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick's work was "as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel." His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor, an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan song "Like a Rolling Stone" in the 2003 Canadian documentary Complete Unknown.) In 2007, Lethem explained, "My books all have this giant, howling missing [center]—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone." At Music & Art he produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange, which featured artwork and writing. He also created animated films and wrote a 125 page novel, Heroes, still unpublished. After graduating from high school, Lethem entered Bennington College in Vermont in 1982 as a prospective art student. At Bennington, Lethem experienced an "overwhelming. collision with the realities of class—my parents' bohemian milieu had kept me from understanding, even a little, that we were poor. at Bennington that was all demolished by an encounter with the fact of real privilege." Lethem lived in California for twelve years, working as a clerk in used bookstores, including Moe's and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing on his own time. Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.

Lethem's first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons. The novel was published in 1994 by Harcourt Brace, in what Lethem later described as a "delirious" experience. "I'd pictured my first novels being published as paperback originals", he recalled, "and instead a prestigious house was doing the book in cloth. I was in heaven." Gun, with Occasional Music was a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award, and placed first in the "Best First Novel" category of the 1995 Locus Magazine reader's poll. In the mid 1990s, film producer director Alan J. Pakula optioned the novel's movie rights, which allowed Lethem to quit working in bookstores and devote his time to writing.

In September 2006, Lethem wrote the article "The Genius of Bob Dylan", a lengthy interview with Bob Dylan, which was published in Rolling Stone. The interview contained Lethem's reflections on Dylan's artistic achievements. It revealed Dylan's dissatisfaction with contemporary recording techniques and his thoughts on his own status. After Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem decided that "[i]t was time to leave Brooklyn in a literary sense anyway I really needed to defy all that stuff about place and memory." The novel takes its title from two (otherwise unconnected) songs of the same title by Roky Erickson and The Vulgar Boatmen. The original title was Monster Eyes, but Lethem was convinced to change it by his publisher. He later admitted to an interviewer that the association with the two songs "made it feel very lucky to me to put it on the book," and that even though the new title "isn’t my phrase, for a book about appropriated language and the way things can be repurposed, it seemed okay. And, it’s a beautifully passive aggressive title." The novel received mixed reviews. After hearing of the project, Omega co creator Steve Gerber expressed personal outrage over the use of the character without his participation, though he later discussed the project with Lethem and admitted that he had "misjudged" him. In May 2006, Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada explained that the series had been delayed to 2007, saying that "winning the MacArthur Grant put additional and unexpected demands on [Lethem's] time." The revamped Omega the Unknown series was published in ten monthly issues from October 2007 to July 2008; the issues were published in a single volume in October 2008. In early 2007, Lethem began work on Chronic City, which was published on October 13, 2009. In July 2008, Lethem said that Chronic City is "set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it's strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles G. Finney and Hitchcock's Vertigo and it concerns a circle of friends including a faded child star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost writer of autobiographies, and a city official. And it's long and strange." His essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism" (2007), is a passionate defense of plagiarism and a call for a return to a "gift economy" in the arts. He writes,

<blockquote>The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. In 2011, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Lethem, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Among other projects, Lethem published short books about John Carpenter's film They Live (published in October, 2010 as They Live) and the Talking Heads album Fear of Music. Starting in 2011, he served as the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College, a position formerly held by the late David Foster Wallace. Lethem's ninth novel, entitled Dissident Gardens, was released on September 10, 2013. According to Lethem in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the novel concerns "American leftists", very specifically "a red diaper baby generation trying to figure out what it all means, this legacy of American Communism." Regarding the novel's setting, Lethem said in the same interview that it is

<blockquote>set in Queens and Greenwich Village, another New York neighborhood book, very much about the life of the city writing about Greenwich Village in 1958 was really a jump for me, it was as much of an imaginative leap as any of the more fantastical things I've done. But really exciting, too. After changing publishers from Doubleday to Ecco, Lethem followed A Gambler's Anatomy/The Blot with The Feral Detective in November 2018, Lethem's first foray back into the detective novel genre since the acclaimed Motherless Brooklyn. Lethem's twelfth novel, The Arrest an "utterly original postapocalyptic yarn about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear powered super car," according to the publishers was published in November 2020. Lethem co wrote six out of nine songs on the Lee Ranaldo album Electric Trim, released in 2017. He wrote the introduction to David Bowman's 2019 novel, Big Bang.

In 1987, Lethem married the writer and artist Shelley Jackson; they were divorced by 1997. He has two sons.