Dissident lit

I don’t really think of that as a hot-air literary morality…It’s just to me about the things that can happen, the kinds of feelings and experiences that can be enacted for the reader, inside of this structure. That’s what I’m turned on by.

Jonathan Lethem talks ambitious novels with Salon:

My appetite as a reader was more proportionate with more formally tight books, and to learn to love books that were called the baggy monsters, I had to not just read them and find examples that I loved. I was kind of scared of them for a long time. I was like, “OK, great, it’s an amazing experience as a reader, but how do you make one of those, and believe it while making it?”

And it took me a very long time to do it. I didn’t do what Norman Mailer or Jonathan Franzen think you’re supposed to do, which is write one of those things to begin with. I wrote five books that were tidier, and that’s disguised a very, very slow evolution in my craft, I guess. It wasn’t about fishing for it, or what I thought was the most important thing to do. It was about what I was capable of. And what I was increasingly interested in was this way of making something too big-time for the reader or the writer, that you fell into, that you were lost inside for a while. And I really took on those trends, as kinda like an object, almost as if I were a visual artist or something. It’s like a kind of object that started to put on weight. It was exciting.