Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin

[Mark Kohut]

When Realism was still our [American and English] novelistic baseline, down to a good essay by Mary McCarthy in the 50s or 60s, that novels caught--or failed to put down--how things were, was part of what made them work or fail....




--- On Sun, 11/9/08, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Subject: Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, November 9, 2008, 2:52 PM
> 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.
> 
> http://seedmagazine.com/news/2007/03/jonathan_lethem_janna_levin.php
> http://seedmagazine.com/news/2007/03/seed_video_feature_jonathan_le.php