Jonathan Lethem is concerned with time. Time as an element of narrative, yes: His new book, A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories, is a collection of stories spanning his career. Time as cultural capital or signifier, also: New and selected volumes such as this, after all, are no longer published as frequently as was once the case. “It’s an object of fascination,” Lethem tells me over Zoom on a recent Monday, “because as a young reader and book collector, I was very conscious of how authors’ books pile up on shelves. It always arrested my attention when someone had a new and selected stories. That really seemed to state something. So I feel very lucky.”
Luck comes into play for every artist, what Bob Dylan referred to as “a simple twist of fate.” The farther along I get, however, the more I think in terms of perseverance—or perhaps practice is the more accurate term. Lethem, too, has come to approach his work through such a filter. “The plot of this book,” he writes in a brief author’s note, “is persistence in making myself available.” It’s as good a description as I can imagine of a career as eclectic as any in contemporary literature.
For Lethem, that career began with a short story, “The Cave Beneath the Falls,” published in a science fiction magazine in 1989. It doesn’t appear in A Different Kind of Tension, although the book goes back nearly as far. Opening with two stories from 1990, it showcases 30 pieces spanning 35 years, including 19 that have been gathered in five previous collections. The effect is of a kind of fun-house mirror, a set of reversals and inversions, in which the author’s fascinations—his motifs, as it were—double back on one another: talking animals (“That’s my thing,” he laughs. “Animals talk in my stories. I have to keep rediscovering it”); superpowers; elements of genre; and always, always, that restless imagination, in which the most common situations come fraught with mystery, the delirious sense that anything might happen at any time.
Lethem’s 1994 debut novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, helped solidify the template; taking place in the Bay Area at some point in the future, it weaves noir and science fiction tropes into a territory all its own. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award for the 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn, which revolves around a detective with Tourette’s syndrome. Three years later, he published what may be his most ambitious work of fiction, The Fortress of Solitude, which blends autobiographical details drawn from his experience growing up in Brooklyn with more fantastical elements. The result is, if not quite magical realism, then a kind of phantasmagoric naturalism, in which the world is rendered as a place of, by turns, dangerous and beguiling wonders, which, of course, is precisely what it is.
In the wake of these efforts, Lethem turned his attention from Brooklyn, although in recent years, he has made a loose return. Brooklyn Crime Novel, from 2023, revisits and recapitulates themes and settings of Motherless Brooklyn, while “The Red Sun School of Thoughts”—the long story that closes A Different Kind of Tension—echoes, despite taking place for the most part in San Francisco, some of the dynamics that drive The Fortress of Solitude. “It plays a little weird sleight of hand,” Lethem says of the piece, which was written specifically for the collection, “by transposing the geographic setting, although, of course, the Bay Area is a place where I experienced another kind of youthful coming-of-age.” Set in 1976, and narrated by a 13-year-old whose father has left the family to take up residence with a commune “housed in a deep, ramshackle three-story Victorian on Guerrero,” the text relies on a double vision, juxtaposing the wistful naïveté of the young boy with the more nuanced perspective of the adult narrator, “a sixty-year-old man, steeped in the minute adjustments and disappointments of adult experience.”
The mature version of the character looking back, in other words.
Something similar might be said of Lethem, who at 61 is his narrator’s close contemporary. This introduces a third tier of time, which has to do with retrospection. Whatever else it does, the writing in A Different Kind of Tension traces Lethem’s development as an author, from early stories such as “How We Got in Town and out Again,” with its postapocalyptic whimsy, and “Five Fucks,” which devolves in a bravura act of authorial deconstruction, to “Super Goat Man” and “Lucky Alan,” two of my favorites among his shorter works. In its reflective impulse, the book differs from The Ecstasy of Influence, the 2011 nonfiction omnibus it otherwise resembles, not least for the depth and breadth of its scope.
“I love that book,” Lethem acknowledges, “but it’s very fitful, pugnacious. It’s full of thrown elbows and makes all these claims, and I don’t really feel this new book is troubled by the need to fight for something. It’s more like: Would you look at that? I’ve done this for 30 years, and there’s a really interesting story here, if you care to check it out.” He continues: “I’ve joked with people that you could read the book backwards and see me growing younger.”
It’s an arresting idea, bringing to mind the image of Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button come to life.
And yet, isn’t that the point of a new and selected? To see where one has landed through the lens of where one’s been? Certainly, influence is a factor also. Take, for one, those talking animals, which come to Lethem via Kafka (“the master of the talking-animal story,” he notes) and before that Alice in Wonderland, which he calls “the axiomatic moment for me as a young reader, when I start to see there’s someone behind the screen who’s playing with my brain, and I like it, and I want to figure them out.”
What Lethem is describing is the earliest moment of thinking as a writer. What he’s describing is the emergence of a creative consciousness. At the same time, in that process of emergence, influence becomes transformed—or, better yet, internalized—as we begin to influence ourselves. It’s not just all the stories, all those words and sentences, recontextualized by being brought together in a new and selected. It’s also all the voices, all our voices. All those versions of ourselves. Self, after all, is nothing if not fluid. We are always interrogating: ourselves and our fascinations, our fixations, reframing from a different angle, and perhaps nowhere more so than on the page.
“Without it being a morbid thought,” Lethem muses, “what if I died tomorrow? I mean, it would be too soon, but I’d have some stuff to show for the journey. And I thought, Well, what if I’m not embarrassed about that? I realized a book like this might be a little like the box set of a band. And I thought, OK, what if this is the box set of the Go-Betweens? What do you want in there? You want not just the hits but the B-sides. You want to exhibit the peculiarities of this body of work.”•
