Jonathan Lethem talks to Jacket Copy about pot, virtual worlds and “Chronic City’.

Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of "The Fortress of Solitude" and "Motherless Brooklyn," comes to the L.A. Central Library on Tuesday night -- although there are no more tickets available, last-minute seats often open up at the ALOUD series. He'll be reading from and discussing his new novel, "Chronic City" which our reviewer described this way:

As "Chronic City" opens, Chase [Insteadman] visits the office of the Criterion Collection to record a DVD voice-over. There, he meets Perkus Tooth, a frantic, ageless scribbler in the spirit of Joe Gould. Perkus, who invades Criterion to write DVD liner notes on spec, is an avid collector of the esoteric cult item. In a rent-controlled Upper East Side apartment he shares with pot smoke and coffee grounds, he tries to gather "ellipsistic knowledge," reconstructing epiphanies through forgotten jazz records and dubbed VHS tapes, attempting to prove that "the horizon of everyday life was a mass daydream -- below it lay everything that mattered."...

Some of Perkus' stoned paranoiac revelations are mind-expanding, while others taper off into a deserved oblivion. But it's hard to remain unsusceptible to his euphoria, especially when he spouts brilliant mini-essays such as one calling Brando "the living avatar of the unexpressed, a human enunciation of the remaining hopes for our murdered era."

Lethem told Jacket Copy more about Brando, about characters who smoke a lot of pot, Los Angeles, a marathon New York City reading and how much "Chronic City" can contain.

Jacket Copy: Your last novel, “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” was set in Los Angeles. Did you spend any time out here when you were working on it?

Jonathan Lethem: Oh yeah, definitely. It was a period when I was traveling there, sporadically, a lot. A couple of different times I spent a month or six weeks. I like L.A., I’m very interested in it. I have, also, some kind of typical New York resistance to it. But I’m not 100% naive about California – I lived in the Bay Area for about 10 years. In a weird way, have two different layers of not being from L.A. As you know, the whole Bay Area-LA split is very strong too, in a different way. I’ve always been very interested in L.A., and I was writing about it out of a real affection in that book.

JC: You've said that you like surprising yourself as a writer, that "You Don't Love Me Yet" set up different challenges for you. Did you find new opportunities working on "Chronic City"?

JL: I'm immensely proud of this book, and I would say that it was a deliberate and controlled book for me. I really felt like, once I created the voice, I was writing something very strong in my work, that I'd worked towards for a long time. But there were also things that were completely new to me. A novel is too extensive an artifact to all be planned. You have to be improvising, and you have to surprise yourself. I prefer it that way -- it gives the thing more life. Those fugue sections, where Chase looks out the window and thinks about the birds and the tower – that was a surprise to me. I thought I was going to write a book that was all velocity, kind of like 'Motherless Brooklyn Part Two,' just Perkus running amok. Then Chase deepened for me, and that was very very rewarding. Those points where the book stops the velocity, and he just is experiencing, abiding with the strange juncture he's come to in his life. Those are very meaningful to me, and I might almost say they're my favorite parts of the book.

JC: In "Chronic City," Perkus becomes something of a mentor to Chase Insteadman.

JL: When he meets Chase, he wants to bring him up to speed on stuff. That part of him is very strongly connected to a relationship that was very important in my life, with a slightly tragic but also very wonderful, reclusive music writer named Paul Nelson who I made friends with in my 20s.  Paul – he didn't resemble Perkus in his manic energies, and he wasn't a pothead and he wasn't a dandy – he was Perkus' opposite in lots of ways. 

I was quite naive about certain parts of culture and Paul educated me all in a hurry. He made sure I understood that I had to learn about Howard Hawks and Ross McDonald and Chet Baker and a whole lot of other stuff. He opened a lot of doors for me, and that part of Perkus is a bit of a portrait of what it was like to sit at Paul's feet.

JC: I think one of the pleasures of reading your book is that experience of being culturally curated by the mind of Perkus Tooth. I wonder if that hands-on mentorship is something that is a little bit lost to this next generation, which has this vast electronic cultural curator.

JL: It is really different. You used to have to really excavate the past of American popular culture. It wasn't like there was this gigantic repository at your fingertips. When Paul Nelson wanted me to understand what was so important about an old black and white movie, like "Only Angels Have Wings" by Howard Hawks, he would dig out these VHS tapes he'd dubbed off the "Million Dollar Movie" or PBS, they'd have the commercials intact -- it was this rare essence. 

There wasn't a Criterion Collection, and there wasn't an Internet, so most things just vanished. Most people that held onto them, it was some esoteric pursuit to keep things alive. If you ran across a back issue of some old zine – it wasn't like blogs, where they all just sit there forever – you'd find some fading mimeographed zine and it would be a window, a portal into some lost moment of popular culture.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy