Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin

[Dave Monroe]

Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin
The novelist and the cosmologist meet up to talk about reality.

by Edit Staff • Posted March 6, 2007 12:00 AM


When theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin began writing A Madman Dreams
of Turing Machines it was a work of non-fiction. But she realized, as
her subjects Gödel and Turing had, that the tools of non-fiction—or
those of scientific inquiry—were insufficient for discerning truth. As
a novelist, Jonathan Lethem traffics regularly in different degrees of
truth and is similarly fascinated with what constitutes reality.
Recently the two met for lunch at the National Arts Club in New York
to talk about this elusive concept—its guises, its enchantments, and
how we know it when we see it.

[...]

Lethem: Well, one of the underrated aspects of novels per se, one of
the forms of pleasure that we readers derive from reading fiction that
is least discussed in traditional literary criticism, is factual
material. People thrive on finding great chunks of information on how
the world works in their fiction. One of the great secrets to the
crime drama is that readers are almost always inadvertently thrilling
to descriptions of how, for instance, a bank operates. These are the
sorts of things that ordinary novelists feel that they're not allowed
to talk about or get interested in—they're supposed to be concerned
with the emotional or psychological lives of their characters and
would never stop to tell you at what hour the teller counts her drawer
and moves it to the back of the bank. And yet we're all hungry for
those pieces of information about our world. We're nourished, without
even noticing it, by this genre that's devoted to telling us quite a
lot about them.

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