Reality Hunger (59 page)

Whaddya rebelling against?

Whaddya got?

Who is it that can tell me who I am?

If you are alone, you are wholly your own.

To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

He who follows another will never overtake him.

You can always recognize the pioneers by the number of arrows in their back.

I think “circling the wagons” and “defending the fortress” metaphors are a little misplaced. The barbarians at the gate are usually willing to negotiate a little, and the guys in the fort usually end up yelling, “We’re the only good thing in the world and you guys don’t understand it,” at which point the barbarians shrug, knock down your walls with amazingly powerful weapons, and put a parking lot over your sacred grounds. If they’re in a really good mood, they put up a pyramid of skulls.

I’ve never heard of a crime that I could not imagine committing myself.

let me tell you what your book is about

Big surprise: I love the book, love it to death. Which is what the book’s about—loving art to death/loving it against death. I thought the individual essays would intertwine, but I had no idea (neither did you, probably) how beautifully and powerfully they would build. At some point, maybe halfway through, I thought, Jonathan has to say,
I’m the disappointment artist
—how can he say this and not have it seem heavy-handed? But there it is, in the last essay, and it just explodes the book, forcing the reader to retrospectively redefine what he’s been reading all along: as bildungsroman, as often indirect confession, as serious though also very funny cri de coeur. In the individual essays, and in the book as a whole, the pattern recurs over and over: a self declares itself; a text emerges as countertext to the self; the text becomes heroic or the generator of the text becomes a heroic figure, a parental figure, an authority figure of some kind; gaps emerge; the text can’t get talked about directly; what gets talked about is the culture surrounding the
narrator, the culture surrounding the text; we keep circling self, circling text, keep searching, can’t quite access self, can’t quite access text, but we can access the space between the text and the self. That space is magical. That space is oddly redemptive. In that space Lethem will live.

Rusty’s problem is that he takes things too literally. He’s too much the romantic, too much the lover, too sweet, too full of feeling, too precise. On the other hand, this is all just rationalization for why he’s fat and drunk and alone. And I love the way these two visions compete against each other. The book is a beautiful defense of the “unlived” life, life lived in a childlike state, in obeisance to the ideals of youth. He wants to be flawless in a flawed world; it ain’t gonna happen. I found it enormously moving, especially at the end, when Rusty takes off his hairpiece and just stands naked, as it were, in front of his own life, in front of his own mortality. Confronting the abyssal within himself, he meditates upon his own isolation, his separation from love, his scary courtship of death, or at least a solitude unto death.