"Context is Everything."

Monday night I was fortunate enough to spend a terrific evening listening to Jonathan Lethem interviewed by Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler at a lecture series in San Francisco benefiting a scholarship program for 826 Valencia. Lethem was outstanding and his passion for writing and reading was electric. He considered every question from Handler and the audience and whether it was original, trite, or controversial he gave long, articulate answers that made you admire his devotion to fiction and the care he weaves into the structure, language, metaphors, and emotional fabric of every novel.

What made it especially personal for me was how he kept referencing many of my favorite authors and speaking about their work passionately and often showing how it had influenced his own. He spoke about Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick of course (everyone who reads Gun, With Occasional Music must); but also about Borges, Kafka, Pynchon, DeLillo, Dickens, Vonnegut, Bradbury; even Robert Coover and Italo Calvino; plus Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson, Donald Barthelme, J. G. Ballard, Thomas Berger...the list goes on and on. It felt as if he were sitting before my library, thumbing through my favorite books and sharing his insights and their personal significance to him.

He spoke at length about the difficult choices he made when writing The Fortress of Solitude and how Motherless Brooklyn was a warm-up to attacking the autobiographical material in Fortress. He fielded questions about gender biases and race, music and film influences, genre blending and pop culture. He told a terrific anecdote about the proprietor of a used bookstore in Berkeley, and revealed that he prefers having background music or listening to a ballgame while he writes, explaining that he is most productive from May to September during the daily three hour baseball broadcasts.

I was thrilled when I discovered The Fortress of Solitude several months ago and read the recommendation from Michael Chabon. The novel then became a guilty pleasure for the next several weeks. But it all came together Monday night and will now probably send me back for a second, more careful reading. I'd also love to hear Lethem again, and the good news for all of us is that the event was recorded for later broadcast (perhaps on NPR?) so we may get that chance.

Further good news occurred to me when Lethem discussed how in his youth he would discover an author and then, like many of us, quickly devour every book in succession. That's when it dawned on me that Lethem has three novels (Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, and Girl in Landscape) and two story collections ("The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye" and now "Men and Cartoons") that I have yet to read.

But not for long. I tracked down three of those at the library today.