December 11, 2007
Jonathan Lethem in The New Yorker
Jonathan Lethem, a guy who's writing is more nebbish than Jewish (he himself would count as both), has an interesting short story published in this week's New Yorker. The title character, the “King of Sentences,” reminds me of an older Nathan Zuckerman, although Lethem may have had any number of reclusive authors in mind. Here's an excerpt in which the narrator, who is a nerdy bookstore employee (wouldn't you expect at least one in a Lethem story), explains his and his girlfriend's fascination with the “king”:
Others might hail kings of beer or burgers—we bowed to the King of Sentences. There was just one. We owned his titles in immaculate firsts and tattered reading copies and odd variant editions. It thrilled us to see the pedestrian jacket copy and salacious cover art on his early mass-market paperbacks: to think that he’d once been considered fodder for dime-store carrousels! The newest editions of the titles he’d allowed to be reprinted (four early novels had been suppressed from republication) were splendidly austere, their jackets, from the small presses that published him now, bearing text only, no graven images. The progress of his editions on our shelf was like a cartoon of evolution, a slug crawling from the surf to become a mammal, a monkey, and then at last a hairless noble fellow gazing into the future.
The King of Sentences gave no interviews, taught nowhere, condescended to appear at no panels or symposia. His tastes, hobbies, and heartbreaks were unknown, and we extrapolated them from his books at our peril. His digital footprint was pale: people like that didn’t care about people like him. Google, for what it was worth, favored a famous painter of wildlife scenes—beaver dams, heron hideaways—with the same name. The King of Sentences only wrote, beavering away himself on a dam of quintessence, while wholly oblivious of public indifference and of a sales record by now likely descending to rungs occupied by poets. His author photograph, identical on twenty years of jackets and press clippings until it stopped circulating at all, arrested him somewhere in the mid-sixties, turtlenecked, holding a cocktail glass forever. His last cocktail, maybe.
Last summer, I reviewed Lethem's most recent novel, “You Don't Love Me Yet.” I enjoyed the book and Lethem's love of language came through in the pages, as it does in the New Yorker piece.
By the way, Lethem also had a piece included in Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2007. That book just came out a month or so ago.
There were several well-known contributors to the compilation. Lethem's was an article originally published in Rolling Stone called “Being James Brown.”