“being in the presence of this writer’s talented talk is like being in the presence of his novelistic voice — an exhilarating experience, instructive, freewheeling, earnest, sometimes confusing, intimidating, occasionally overwhelming, spirited, high-speed, funny, fun.”
“You start to think, well, we are all plastic in some sense, or “propositional,” the word I just used for Los Angeles. We’re subject to rearrangement.”
“Stability is an illusion, yet people live their lives on that illusion. And then the world takes things away from you, and then demands of you that you find a self that abides, right? I mean — giant spoiler alert — Bruno kind of rustles around for a new method, but as he strips away his illusions, he turns out to find only incoherent or inchoate self underneath.”
“I’m an explorer in stories. You know, the minute you ask that question I’m provoked to revert to what I think of as the John Ford/Howard Hawks model of reply: “Fuck all this analysis, I just make Westerns!””
“The image of dispossession is basic to my fiction, but I’d never dealt with it on literal terms. So I thought: Well, shit, it’s time for me to write one of those stories about the stupid American abroad.”
“A Gambler’s Anatomy is a reversal from that. I tend to follow a book with a sort of antidote, the mouthwash to the previous one. But at the same time there’s almost always some way in which I semi-consciously develop some method or motif in the previous one that frees me to do the next one.”
“You know, you write 10 of these things and you start to notice yourself — you can’t really keep from noticing yourself. One of the things I’ve realized about my work, one of the only things all my books have in common, is that I need there to be some problem of narrative authority. The voice needs to transpose into something else.”
“To be published at all is a privilege, to be read at all is a privilege. So, when I become self-conscious about these trajectories, I’m not complaining. It’s crucial to say that.”
“I happen to be a very obliging person, so when people began to be interested in my work I wanted to meet them and talk. My defaults are set to engagement. I mean, here I am teaching creative writing at a liberal arts college. And I’ve always signed the petition when it lands in my inbox, I always join the board for the arts organizations. I actually kind of like going to writers’ conferences and sitting on panels — I know it’s really appalling to say that. You’re supposed to denounce that stuff. And maybe this does, in a weird way, come out of my growing up in a commune and with communitarian ideals: I lean toward participation.”
“So I participated in my own experience. I was like, yeah, yeah, I’ll be interviewed, I’ll show up for this thing. And then one day I looked up and from the outside it was perfectly reasonable to look at me the way I, as a kid, would have looked at someone like E. L. Doctorow, say — a guy whose work was well read and White Elephant-ish.”
“As a young reader I would have said, skip those white elephants, read Philip K. Dick, Charles Willeford, Boris Vian — something more subterranean. And that isn’t necessarily to say genre. I might equally have said Beckett or Gertrude Stein. Anything but the kind of middlebrow definition that I guess, in a way, the particular nature of the success of The Fortress of Solitude settled me into. And then there I was, agreeing to write about 9/11 for The New York Times Magazine and giving endless interviews, as I’m doing with you.”
“It’s the lost, the irreconcilable aspects of experience, including my own, that move me as a reader, and that still inform my appetite for the culture all around me.”
“And maybe it’s weird that someone like me, or variations on me, the type of people who will read this interview, will probably be interested to hear you keep riffing.
I get it. I grew up reading The Paris Review interviews, you know. Sometimes I’d revere a writer’s interviews without loving their work. There would be something about the way they defined their sense of purpose, or their commitment to the craft, that would just be electric for me. That’s one reason I’m willing to give interviews. I’ve looked at results like Donald Barthelme’s collection of his interviews — which I could never hope to match — and I’ve thought, well, that is itself a thing. A body of utterances.”
“It’s a kind of live-wire essay.”
“I developed a vanity about being someone who exposes and unmakes these kind of constrictions in our perceptive framework: let’s undo the categorical imperative!”
“How totally humbling and ironic, therefore, when all this meets its perverse end point. You fight your way out just for the privilege of being regarded as bloated and middlebrow and boring.”
“Right now, what’s the principal way that I’m spoken of in a passing way? I guarantee you this is the case: I’m grouped with two other writers who have the same first name I do — the Jonathans. Could there be a more arbitrary box? It’s the stupidest trap you could fall into and it’s ironclad: that is my first name.
Who’s the other one? Franzen and …?
Foer.
Oh, really? I was going to talk about Chabon, David Mitchell, some others. I don’t see as much resonance with Foer.”