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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ:
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Jonathan Leatham, award-winning American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. You may know him for Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude. His more recent books are Feral Detective and The Arrest. My first book that I read was Gun with Occasional Music. And today we're gonna be talking about his new book, as well as just noir in general, Brooklyn crime novel, Mr. Leatham. Wonderful to have you on today.
Jonathan:
Thanks for having me. This is fun. And yeah, Gun With Occasional Music, that means you were there at the start, or if you didn't read it when it came out, you know about the early... You know, a lot of people treat me as if I sort of began with Motherless Brooklyn, which was my fifth novel.
PJ:
Right.
Jonathan:
So sometimes I have to kind of do this... labored rewind where I say, well, actually, there were four books before that. And actually, I wrote a whole book about a private detective before that one, you know.
PJ:
Yeah. No, I, um, so when you talk about like my favorite writers of all time, it's Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick. So of course, I,
Jonathan:
that puts you in the sweet
PJ:
there
Jonathan:
spot
PJ:
was no way like,
Jonathan:
for
PJ:
uh,
Jonathan:
Gunn with Occasional Music, which was overtly,
PJ:
yes, the algorithms. Yes.
Jonathan:
all I did really was want to see if I could kind of cross, cross-fertilize or splice those two voices together in that book. And of course there are other, there are other elements. There's, there's there are other hard-boiled detective writers like Ross McDonald in the mix. And, and James Crumley was influential on me, but But I was obsessed with Chandler and Philip K. Dick at that point. I have sort of always been. And you know, I remember when someone wanted to blurb the book or review the book saying, this is the exact midpoint between Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick. And somebody, as does happen, someone was sort of wanting to be... protective of me or defensive. They said, well, that's comparisons are, you know, beside the point. You're your own writer. And I was like, no, that's exactly what it is.
PJ:
Yes.
Jonathan:
I couldn't think
PJ:
Oh
Jonathan:
of
PJ:
man.
Jonathan:
a better thing to say. That's fine.
PJ:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, for someone who's a fan of those two writers, it was kind of like a dream come true. Even the fact that you stole
Jonathan:
Thank you.
PJ:
that line from Raymond Chandler about the kangaroo, like the bouncer at the bar or the hitman at the bar or whatever, looked like a kangaroo in a dinner jacket. And you're like, I'm just going to write a book about an actual
Jonathan:
A whole book
PJ:
kangaroo.
Jonathan:
about the kangaroo
PJ:
I
Jonathan:
in
PJ:
love
Jonathan:
the dinner
PJ:
that.
Jonathan:
jacket. Yeah. Well, you know, in a way that the movement from that Chandler quote, where he's obviously putting the kangaroo in figurative language, he doesn't mean that anyone would be confused and think it was anything other than a human being. But it's a way of talking about the way how out of sorts this guy looks in his dinner jacket. But the kind of creative misunderstanding of pretending to believe that he means it's actually a kangaroo, I think represents a really big part of how my early writing organizes itself over and over and over again, which is that I take something that in another writer's lexicon would be figurative, and I kind of concretize it into metaphor. I take it absolutely literally, and then I'm like, and what does that leave us with? And you know, you can see instances of my doing that. all through the early short stories and the first few novels where I take something that you know could be read poetically or metaphorically and I just sort of decide to act as though I don't understand metaphor in a way.
PJ:
Yeah, yeah, and there's a fascination there, you know, with metaphor, but just a fascination with language itself, which seems to come out in your writing often. That's, I think, part of the reason that people really connect it, like the reason Motherless Brooklyn was so successful is that you see, like, the Tourette's becomes this incredible exploration of, like, this inner language structure, and then we start to recognize bits of that language structure in our own heads.
Jonathan:
Well, I hope that it involves a lot of recognition. That was the source of the book for me was learning about Tourette syndrome from reading about it in Oliver Sacks essays and feeling this immense and at the time completely inexplicable sense of identification. You know, I'd never been diagnosed. I still never have been diagnosed as having suffering from Tourette syndrome. And I'm, if, if in any sense, I, I could be identified in a literal. way with that syndrome I would be one of its most fortunate sufferers because the people who cope with having it are, have a very heavy burden to carry and their families suffer and, and I don't experience any of that. But nevertheless there was something about the description of the reactivity, the way that people with Tourette's felt about their own brains and their own connection to language and the way it moved through them. that made me think, well, this is sort of a description of something in me. And so I wanted to, in a way, reverse engineer that feeling of recognition and make every reader feel that for the duration of reading the novel, that maybe they also would feel this enormous degree of empathy or even identification with the situation.
PJ:
Yeah, and I don't want to stray too far. I know that part of this, and it's just the life of the writer, is that you are here in part to push your new novel, you know, Brooklyn crime novel.
Jonathan:
Oh no, let's not push
PJ:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
anything. No pushing. We're just having a conversation. But you know, I mean, anything we might say coming out of describing first Gun of the Occasional Music and then Motherless Brooklyn will point directly to the existence of this new novel, which is so much about both Brooklyn and about the idea of the language of the hard boiled. and the way it's a form of coping, or I've come to view it as a form of coping with experiences of trauma, disturbance, criminality, culpability,
PJ:
Hmm.
Jonathan:
you know,
PJ:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
all of this stuff that for so long for me has resided kind of implicitly in the idea of my love for crime fiction, for the hard boiled narration. I tried to unpack that in a way to put it under a kind of almost put it on the you know, analyst couch in this new book to say, you know, why must I feel hard boiled about these things? Why do I want to make kind of snappy jokes about being a criminal or being a victim all the time? You know, what's the source code in me that makes this necessary? And what does it have to do with Brooklyn?
PJ:
Yeah, even in the beginning of the book, you talk about the, I wouldn't say the danger, but like you feel yourself trying to hide behind these lush metaphors, which is just like very indicative of like Raymond Chandler's writing, right?
Jonathan:
Yeah.
PJ:
You talk about like the honeyed light coming through and all of a sudden you're like the narrator halts, right? And it's like, wait, I mean, let's not let's not make this nostalgic. Let's just the just the facts, right? And But then you even turn on that as well. And was there a specific, it's always a danger with these kinds of books. You grew up in Brooklyn. It's obvious that some of this is at least some semi-autobiographical.
Jonathan:
for sure.
PJ:
And then it's hard not to read you into the novelist sitting at the bar and the wheeze is poking at the novelist, even the the take me to the bridge and the t-shirts that show up and stuff, how much of that is something that you've experienced and how much of that is invented? Or is that just a terrible question?
Jonathan:
No, it's a great question. I mean, and it's this is my first chance. This is one of the earliest conversations I will have had about the details of this book with someone who's read it and has got me, you know, sat me down for a extensive interview of any kind. And that includes people who might, you know, write a print piece or any other podcasters. So it's really my chance to figure out. what people are going to want to talk to me about, but I'm not shocked that chapter where suddenly there's a novelist who's written about his boyhood in Brooklyn and all the other characters kind of hate on him.
PJ:
Yes, yes.
Jonathan:
That's one of the things I'm going to be required to account for.
PJ:
Ha ha!
Jonathan:
My friend, dear friend, and the brilliant writer Dana Spiotta said to me when she read the people talk about punching up or punching down, and you obviously chose the third path, which is punch self, right?
PJ:
Yes, yes.
Jonathan:
So, you know, I think in a way that, I mean, I hope that scene is very funny. I felt that it was one of the funniest I'd written in any of my books. And it has a very definite source in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. which is a novel he wrote in the kind of late middle of his career where he lets his characters argue with him in person and meet him and accuse him of things. The guy sitting at that bar who wrote the book called Take Me to the Bridge isn't like a hundred percent me and Take Me to the Bridge isn't one hundred percent the fortress of solitude. But I wanted to raise the specter of this because if this book was to do. All the things I wanted it to do to be so scrupulously honest about my confusion about coming of age inside that place time and place the gentrification the racial dynamics of that neighborhood and I really wanted to lay bare everything. That I knew one of the strangest elements is that of course I enter the story as And if I'm looking at it in 2019, 2020, which is when I began writing this book, I'm looking at a place that among its defining characteristics is that a guy wrote a novel about growing up there and froze in a way, certain ideas about the gentrification of the neighborhood into place in 20 years earlier. Now, I don't mean that everyone cares about Fortress of Solitude. I don't want to suggest this is a vanity that now I'm very important to the people who live in the neighborhood. But as an ingredient in my own very complicated exploration of my feelings about this place, the fact that I tried to do it once before, you know, in a kind of monumental or panoramic, I think that's the right word, sort of. uh version which at the time I myself took as the last word I would ever need to have about it. I thought it was exhaustive and I
PJ:
Hmm.
Jonathan:
was exhausted. I didn't think I was going to write about Brooklyn again after the fortress of solitude. So here I was 20 years later forced by all kinds of circumstance but also allowed by all sorts of extraordinary opportunities among them just simply that I was still alive and working. Um to go at it again and try to get it even more the way I understood it, or the way I was newly capable of understanding it, because the time had changed me, and the time had changed the neighborhood, and the time had changed everyone's capacities for thinking about these incredibly painful realities. And I couldn't have written this book. Brooklyn crime novel. any earlier than I did, it took all of those accumulated changes in myself and in the world to make even attempting this book possible. So looking at time itself and the strangeness of living long enough with your memories that you've tried to hold them up to the light at multiple different passages in your own journey. and succeeded, failed, and in some cases made your success or your failure very public, made them part of the conversation. This had to be part of the story too. So the presence of a novelist who the people who lived in the neighborhood felt ambivalently about at best, you know, this was actually one of the things that... was my way into the book. That scene isn't an incidental, amusing, you know, like, oh, now let's go meta and be funny for a while. It was one of the sources of the whole project, was that I, you know, when I published Forges of Solitude, I went on book tour, but I used to joke it wasn't really a book tour, it was a listening tour. People who had strong feelings about the things I'd written about had a lot to say to me, and that was intensely meaningful. for me and left me with all kinds of new associations and memories and perplexities to sit with. And I see this new book as an outgrowth of that conversation and I made this deliberate in the process of beginning to write it. I talked to dozens of people I'd grown up with, people my age who lived through... the gentrification of Kiwanis in the 70s and 80s and had lots to say about it. And I put myself in a deliberate, crossfire of strong feeling so that I could write a book now that was much larger than just my own kind of pitiable perspective. But so the fact that some of the people I wanted to talk to were like, Yeah, not that impressed with The Forges of Solitude. Or hadn't bothered to read it.
PJ:
hahahaha
Jonathan:
Or liked it at the time, but now wondered how it would hold up. That was part of the feeling I had was, yeah, I'm proud of that book, but wow, you can live a lot longer than your certainties. And I had
PJ:
Hmm.
Jonathan:
done so.
PJ:
That does seem to be a common human thing is to outgrow your certainties. I'm going to try and tie together a couple strands here, so forgive me if this is a little longer, but one thing that kind of comes up is how there is a good amount of trauma in the book and the way that trauma often gets flattened. There's a conversation between And one of the things that I was curious about, even as we talk about this flattening process, as you were working through this yourself in Fortress of Solitude, is I believe it's the wheeze, or no, it's not the wheeze, it's the narrator of the book talking about how his frustration with the novelist was that the novelist had stolen all their stories and forced it into one character.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
PJ:
For the sake of the story, right?
Jonathan:
Mm-hmm.
PJ:
And so I'm curious if that is part of the reason for me, for most of the other books that I've read by you, this structure seems pretty experimental, right? I mean, you have a lot of different things going on. The storylines are really distended and non-linear, and it's very confusing at first. Not in a bad way, but it's like, where are we going?
Jonathan:
It's like
PJ:
Right?
Jonathan:
a plate
PJ:
Like
Jonathan:
spinning
PJ:
you're jumping
Jonathan:
act,
PJ:
years.
Jonathan:
yeah.
PJ:
Yes.
Jonathan:
Yeah, like
PJ:
Um
Jonathan:
when the guy's rushing over to another part of the stage with another broomstick and a plate, you might be like, well, wait, why are you going over there? Couldn't you just stay with these ones? You know, it's like, it's really, I know it's a very unusual structure, yeah.
PJ:
But is that part of your way of trying to avoid that complaint from the narrator? That the novelist flattened it into a single character by having all these kind of vignette approach?
Jonathan:
Yeah, absolutely. And you're encouraging me enormously that you're able to frame that question on those terms. It suggests at least some part of what I wanna put across is really there to be found, at least by a sympathetic reader. And that is precisely that, the way I was able with my sixth novel, The Fortress of Solitude, to write something so large. and that tackled so many different kinds of confusion and intensity was to adopt a genre, which is the method that I'd always used. I adopted a whole series of genres preceding that. I'd written Western and a science fiction novel and a crime novel. And so with The Fortress of Solitude, I also adopted a genre, and that's the one known as the Bildungsroman, the coming of age novel. And You know, this is recognizable even if one doesn't know that word in comparisons like Charles Dickens, you know, David Copperfield or Great Expectations, you know, or American novels like Call It Sleep by Henry Roth. It's usually very typically a larger novel, often written by a young man, coming of age and it can do a lot of, you know, I mean, another one that was very influential on me when I was very young, one of the first kind of big grownup novels I ever read was of human bondage by W. Somerset Maugham. You know, these books can do a lot of portraying social milieu and... and explaining time and place, but they're always centered in the consciousness and the vulnerabilities and the sensibility of this person who's coming of age. And so I adopted this method for Fortress of Solitude because it was the only way I could imagine tackling everything at that point. And it did mean that I drew a lot of... uh, different forms of experience and perception into the space of this one central consciousness, this, uh, approximate stand in for myself. Now, the character Dylan Ebdis is not me in many respects. I mean, I, I always point out. to people who seem to want the identification to be 100% that, you know, Dylan just couldn't have written The Fortress of Solitude. His limitations are so extreme and they have to do with a lot of circumstances that are, you know, blessings in my life that I sort of denied him. Dylan has
PJ:
Hmm.
Jonathan:
no siblings. Dylan lives in a big lonely house with only his father who is also socially isolated. Dylan doesn't connect with any of his teachers in school. Dylan, apart from this one crucial friendship with Mingus, doesn't have a lot of connection on the street. He doesn't have a lot of friends. He doesn't know how to form identifications with very many other people. I was, in that sense, I was his opposite. I had siblings who were also emissaries into this neighborhood. I lived in a... very abundantly social space because my house was a commune full of adults younger than my parents who were really interested in me and I was really interested in them and they taught me a lot and I connected brilliantly with a couple of key school teachers who you know at times as teachers can do it felt like they saved my life you know psychologically emotionally so I took all of these advantages away from Dylan to exaggerate his isolation and Um, but anyway, I, I bundled all of the experience into this one character. And then that act of bundling, of course, in a sense, I, I created a kind of a mythic version of my own experience. One where, uh, you know, there was only one white boy in all of Brooklyn. Well, that's not really the case. I mean, there were so many white boys, even in this somewhat reverse minority. situation that I experienced for instance in my in my public schools, you know, I wasn't one of one. I was one of seven or one of 12 in a given public school. And on my block there were plenty of other white kids around. It was a very intricate mix which is what I tried to depict in this new book. So I did want to explode that myth and distribute the book as totally as I could. And in so doing, I created another subject matter for myself, of course, which is that it examines the whole procedure of storytelling and the way memory simplifies. Because once I decided to expand instead of contract and show dozens of different characters, too many to remember or name, then I... instituted this sort of tension, the one you experienced when you called it confusing, but then you wanted to say, but in a good way. You know, I was exploding the very method that stories tend to thrive on. And in its place, I had to put other kinds of thinking, including thinking about stories and what we want from them. You know, why do we, why do we want them simplified? Why do we need them simplified perhaps in order to survive?
PJ:
I mean, I have down here, and this is a follow up question. I'm glad because it shows we're kind of the same train of thought. The perplexities that come from these sorts of things and the way that people will even project memories. But more than that, just the way things get fabricated after the fact. And I think
Jonathan:
Absolutely.
PJ:
especially, you know, you investigate this in terms of like the keening on the concrete.
Jonathan:
Mm-hmm.
PJ:
Can you speak a little bit to that? I mean, you've already talked about a little bit, but I think that's a great example of what you're talking about. This method of projection that people do with their childhood.
Jonathan:
Yeah. Well, so the more I thought about and opened myself to other voices and then sought them out and layered them into my thinking about this project, the more I realized that one of my interests, and so an inevitable subject within the book, would be collective memories. things that are understood, and not just memories, but ideas, things that float in a intersubjective social space. And I started to think about the kids in the neighborhood as a body, a kind of mental body, that even the friends and the enemies, were all in a way experiencing and thinking together. And sometimes this would lead to revelatory experiences of communal knowing. Some have this sense of super transmission of an idea, like of course we all know that we are. paying a toll. Like the money in the sock is a kind of ritual. Who started it? Who invented it? How was it transmitted? How did everyone know to do it? You know, it's like a joke. Did some kid make up the joke first? Everyone tells the joke. And then also that there were individual images of experience, trauma, conflict that would enter into collective memory and then become You know, like, sort of like the way there are... hundreds of thousands more, you know, Mets fans who believe they, they watched the ball go through Bill Buckner's legs in game six in 1986 than could ever possibly have actually done so. They weren't watching live. They weren't in the stadium. They just, but the experience was transmitted into their bodies that, that there would be legendary stories of trauma and conflict that would become transmitted and then seized up as individual experience. Or transmitted just on a one-to-one basis, like the keening on the pavement. That happened to you and
PJ:
Uh.
Jonathan:
you made me feel that it happened to me and then I spent two decades believing it happened to me and then one day, I was able to somehow re-award that experience. It's like, God damn it, it's like you spent trilloquism. memory ventriloquism. You
PJ:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
threw it into my body.
PJ:
Hmm. Well, speaking of trauma, first off, we're my family's a Red Sox family. So I just
Jonathan:
Sorry
PJ:
want to stop
Jonathan:
to bring that
PJ:
and
Jonathan:
up. I had an inkling. I was being very malicious. I'm sorry.
PJ:
No, no, all good. All good. Yeah, the Oh, that's just a whole other man. Talk about memories in the body, because I was not alive for that. But that is that is a childhood
Jonathan:
Still feel
PJ:
memory
Jonathan:
the pain,
PJ:
of that being
Jonathan:
yeah.
PJ:
retold of my dad pulling my mom onto his lap as they were watching. It's like, honey, for the first time in my life, I'll be able to look at the Yankees fan and say, we finally. Yeah, we won the World Series. And then it's just like hit, hit. And then I mean, I've heard I mean, it is family folklore, right?
Jonathan:
Yeah.
PJ:
My mom looked over at my dad and he just didn't respond at all. Just was staring at the TV and she just got up and went to bed. And he just never moved, right? He just didn't even...
Jonathan:
Yeah.
PJ:
Um, but, uh, one of the things that really comes out and, you know, there are, it seems to be some moments where the contradictions poke through, uh, through so sharply that, uh, it began to unravel and end kind of this, this shared space, this body of knowledge. Um, but really what's apparent throughout is like just the contradictions were so sharp. Even as we're talking about the dance, the way that like civil rights had happened. And the parents. know that they want their kids to be, you know, their white kids to be with the black kids. Right? But at the same time, like,
Jonathan:
We were
PJ:
and
Jonathan:
there
PJ:
here's
Jonathan:
to
PJ:
your mutt.
Jonathan:
emblematize this transformation that they all were shareholders in. So we needed not to disappoint them. Yeah.
PJ:
but you also had like, here's your mugging money, right? Like at the same time. And so, and even like the black kids are talking to you and they're like, you know, there's this weird language about it, but then it kind of ends with, and this is, you talk about, I think it's something I'd love to hear from you on. Why crimes? You know, and maybe this is the answer, right? That like, it's the crimes that were the beginning and the ends of these, like these bookends.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
PJ:
But, you know, it's the Brooklyn crime novel and you kind of start off talking about how you're going to trace the crimes throughout. And one of the clear ones is this, something that's actually quite childish, but really very disturbingly serious at the same time. That kind of happens at the end of the book. I'll, you know. I don't give away too many spoilers for your book, but can you speak to that tracing of crime throughout?
Jonathan:
Well, so if one of the things that, one of the senses in which Fortress of Solitude left an opportunity to say more and think harder was this, at the time necessary, kind of romantic conflation of experience into one little white kid's sensibility. Another form was that the book, because it was a entry into thinking about trauma and victimization. It only got a certain distance into the understanding that I began to reckon with that in a weird way, we were all criminals as well as victims on those streets. Every single one of us participated in, I mean, in a literal sense, whether it was graffiti or... or shoplifting. Or sometimes also, you didn't just because you were eligible to yoke to be yoked didn't mean you didn't also yoke someone else. You know, everyone, there's this great soul song, everybody plays the fool. You know, everybody finds somebody to bully at some point. But also we were rendered criminal Atmospherically, we were all furtive. We were all conspirators. We were all Enablers or witnesses we were all enmeshed in conspiracies of the street and This was so basic to me that I was, you know, I think it took in a funny way, it took parenting kids of my own to realize they were not growing up as little criminals. You know,
PJ:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
they might, you know, they might, who knows, they might be smoking a joint as I speak, but that's not what I mean. They weren't
PJ:
Ha ha!
Jonathan:
suffused in criminality. And it wasn't just because I'd
PJ:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
happened or, more than happened. I'd arranged for them to grow up in a, you know, on streets where they, they weren't gonna need to carry mugging money. But it was because the world had changed and that actually I'd grown up in a very strange time and place. One that was deeply exotic as the years covered it over in memory, you know, that, that this. fundamental criminality of the space we were in. The whole city was criminal. New York was a criminal and it was a crime scene and it was a victim all at once, you know, went forward, the famous headline, forward to city, drop dead. The way that galvanized identity in the city at the time was like, of course, fuck yeah, he wants us to drop dead because we're badass and we're his problem and we're,
PJ:
Ha ha!
Jonathan:
you know, it was like, The footing of existence was criminal in that time and place. And that, through all of the particular activities, whether they were gentrification or a mugging or a teenage murder attempt, one upon another, into a specific framework.
PJ:
As you talk about the knowledge of the body, you have these parents who come in, they have their ideals, and they have their identities majorly formed. And so it's pretty interesting to see just that huge gap because the parents can't even begin. They have some idea, but they can't even begin to grasp the chasm. And that's quite, that comes up quite a bit. You reference it a little bit, I think, with the millionaire son with sparkle and I can't remember what he calls his dad, you know, the idea of like families don't speak to each other.
Jonathan:
Yeah. Yeah,
PJ:
But
Jonathan:
they're just
PJ:
this
Jonathan:
the
PJ:
knowledge
Jonathan:
most egregious.
PJ:
of the body. Right.
Jonathan:
They're yeah, they're an exaggerated version of something that's really going on in almost every house on the street in that book. The the. With very, very rare exceptions, the universal law of childhood at that time was that the parents, it was not even worth trying to explain to them. the meaning of our lives on the street. And there might be motives bundled into that. We want to protect them from disappointment or from being worried about us, or we're embarrassed. We're unable to transmit their values into the space that they're sending us. But it was just a baseline condition. And even before the motives entered into it, it was like, nah, no way. They just can't imagine. They just have no idea. And that was the collectivity that formed the group mind of the kids was the certainty that they, again, whether that person was a stranger, the kid was a stranger to you or a sworn enemy, an instinctive enemy, you still were allied with them in this knowledge that the... world that the adults were projecting was a gigantic falsehood.
PJ:
I'm familiar with this from the work of Charles Taylor and he's referencing Pierre Bordeaux, or Bordeaux, if I'm probably saying it wrong. In between the mannerisms and routines and culture, there's what they call habitus. I don't know if you're familiar with the term. This
Jonathan:
I have
PJ:
idea
Jonathan:
come across
PJ:
of
Jonathan:
it, yeah.
PJ:
Yes, yeah, this idea of a collection of mannerisms and routines, and it's the habitus is so, the culture is so thick, right? This culture in the body is so thick, the way that, the difference between one sidewalk and the next, and one set of milk crates, one stoop and the next, and it's so impenetrable, and that really seems to me to... That's what I came away with is that even when that chasm, they tried to cross that chasm to a parent, right? It'd be like, uh, over and over again, you talk about, um, a child being like, actually reaching out to a parent saying, Hey, they stole this. And then the parent would follow. And of course they're just, it's not that they don't know who the parent is. Other parent is the other kid is it's just, it melts away into the street. And it's just this, uh, what looks so simple is actually so inextricably intertwined in the, not just the subculture created, but just like all the individual mannerisms and routines that I just govern, even the smallest little territories, the spaces.
Jonathan:
Absolutely. It's
PJ:
It's
Jonathan:
like
PJ:
really,
Jonathan:
a completely
PJ:
really interesting to me.
Jonathan:
inexpressible language of particular scenes and circumstances that can't, it just can't, it's inchoate. It can't be termed with the language of the parents. They don't have any framework for the knowledge that the children are experiencing on the street and transmitting one to the other.
PJ:
And this is where I think you use the term phenomenological in the book, but
Jonathan:
Mm-hmm.
PJ:
there seems to be this effort with this book to create a language for the white spaces, for the silences, for the
Jonathan:
Mm-hmm.
PJ:
gutters that
Jonathan:
Yeah.
PJ:
even happen in books, but even that was especially like what you're investigating is this hidden knowledge and trying to give voice to that. Is that a fair way to characterize the book?
Jonathan:
I like that description very much. I mean, you know, so I can be very weak on philosophical terminology, even when I fling it around a little bit myself. I think in material terms, bodily terms, I mean, in fictional terms, characters and situations, set pieces, experiences, motivations. And so, you know, which is another way of explaining the need to entrench. my first approach to this work in Fortress of Solitude in the coming of age story was it was the only methodology I had. And I've gotten both further away from that, you know, bodily knowledge from my sense of presence in that space. I'm geographically further away from it as well as it happens, which may or may not be helpful. But I also have absorbed some other kinds of frameworks. And so when you use word like habitus or point out to me that I use the word phenomenology, I think, yeah, I did, you know, I've been in academic circles now for a decade and I did bring some other kinds of tools as much as I view myself as alien to them or, you know, only coming to them, you know, the way like a cat walks through a house, like just, you know. Cat doesn't have a map of the house in their head. They just go where they go. But another term that was available to me was the idea from the social sciences of the self-ethnography. which I saw as an attractive description, but also it came with its own critique, which is that anyone who tries to do an ethnography of themselves is gonna be lost within their own assumptions and language. So I needed to try one and critique it at the same time. And this book, I think, represents an attempt to utilize. this idea of self-ethnography and shake it out of its assumptions relentlessly. That's why the book stops and contradicts itself so frequently. Or just falls off a cliff of the unknown, says, this is a place I... Sorry, I can't help you here. I'm unwilling to presume. But yes. there was a certain commitment to phenomenology. I think it's true. I was sort of deciding that if I could just say enough. with kind of remorseless, but not judgmental, precision about some of these occurrences, maybe I'd get somewhere. I didn't know where,
PJ:
Hmm. Eh.
Jonathan:
and I wasn't gonna make any giant claims for its utility, but I'd be somewhere. And you know, I also, I'm a... What I am is not a philosopher or phenomenologist. I'm also not by training, and by that I mean self-training, really by autodidactic training, I'm not a realist. What I am is a surrealist. But one of the things that makes surrealism work, if you understand it, is that it requires the introduction of elements of almost microscopically. scrupulous realism. You know, the reason Max Ernst's collages are so disturbing to look at is that he's collaging together these very, very precise engravings that are illustrations from various other stories. And so my commitment to surrealism in one sense brought me to a place where I realized if I, if I could be unsentimental. leave out the honeyed light, leave out the coming of age, and talk about this past in its particularities, in its phenomenological particularities, that it would be surreal
PJ:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
because I'd lived so long that such facts as I had in my body, if I could free them onto the page, would strike people who had not lived in that time and place as absolutely. Beyond belief.
PJ:
Um, I want to come back to that. Uh, I'm still a little bit stuck. Um, I love the idea of a cat going through the house of academia because, uh,
Jonathan:
Hahaha
PJ:
one of the things that everyone knows about cats is they have an inappropriate but undeniable sense of ownership and, uh, independence. You know, like there's something here, like, uh, you can't tell a cat what to do, but it definitely, and it has the run of the house and, um, I think there is something, I said inappropriate, but I say there's something appropriate about your use of phenomenology and the remorselessness does, I think, detail real structures of consciousness, of experience. And I don't want to push too far into this, but what do you think is the philosophical value or even if we want to really stretch the boundaries of things? What do you think is the value for the pursuit of truth in what you're doing when you write something like Brooklyn crime novel?
Jonathan:
Well, I'm going to try to circumscribe my claims very tightly because your question is a terrible invitation to pomposity and
PJ:
Hahaha!
Jonathan:
over claims. But I recognize still that there is a truth pursuit and some truth result. But I'll just say it was for me.
PJ:
Hmm.
Jonathan:
I have reoccupied my experience with a scrupulousness that freed me from fear. So it was a personal result. And I just don't know its value to others, especially pre-publication. But
PJ:
Yeah,
Jonathan:
really,
PJ:
that's true. Yeah.
Jonathan:
how can I ever secure any confidence about? what that value may be to others. I'm sure it will be disturbing in its implications, but there may be, you know, it may generate. meaning. I just say meaning for other people. I hope it does. But the truth value is for myself.
PJ:
I think there is a general, I mean, and this is a lot of my own work has been done in interpretation and in philosophy of art. And one thing I've always appreciated about your writing is that remorses pursuit of experience. The way that and I think when you talk about that, I think Of course, the experience itself is valuable, but opening people up to someone's internal processing encourages people to do the same kind of internal processing. And I think there's something valuable in just like that kind of, in the same way, you know, we talk about a novel, but when we have conversations with friends, and we have someone who's brutally honest about something, and
Jonathan:
Yeah.
PJ:
that moment of recognition is, I think, valuable. And so I think that there is something, there is something intersubjective about this subject of pursuit, if I could put it that way. So one, thank you. It was a tremendous read and it was valuable to me at least. I mean, it's pre-publication. So at least you have
Jonathan:
That's
PJ:
one.
Jonathan:
great.
PJ:
That's
Jonathan:
That's great
PJ:
funny.
Jonathan:
to hear. And this has been a really exciting conversation for me. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
PJ:
Um, uh, one more question and then we'll, we'll kind of wrap up. I want to be conscious of your time. Um, the, uh, I would love to dwell on the hard boiled language and the value of noir to yourself and what you think
Jonathan:
Right.
PJ:
it provides to kind of American culture in general, and even just the human experience. What, when you say, I mean, Clearly, you talk about this as a pursuit of truth, mainly for yourself, and there's this, you talk about the true hard-boiled and the bugs bunny hard-boiled.
Jonathan:
Yeah,
PJ:
Can you talk about a little bit that evolution
Jonathan:
sure.
PJ:
and even
Jonathan:
Yeah.
PJ:
what that provides, maybe that remorselessness?
Jonathan:
Yeah. Well, so one of the things that I am very conscious of is the transmission, the kind of echo effect of the invention of the hardboiled voice as it moves into popular culture and it becomes baroque, basically. It becomes a kind of a mannerism that is separated from its innate origins and meanings. And I'm... a great example. I think I, you know, as I've joked in a few different places, I knew about Humphrey Bogart, I mean, who is himself recursive, not a point of origin, but I knew about him through Bugs Bunny before I knew about him directly, you know. And... And as I've interrogated 20th century popular culture, which is just this field of, you know, whether it's Hollywood films or rock and roll, science fiction, and the hard boiled detective voice, and a number of other kinds of objects, Marvel comics, I'm often returned to this understanding that the, thing that I'm most responsive to. was often created by traumatized war veterans.
PJ:
Mm.
Jonathan:
Whether it's Rod Serling or Jack Kirby or so many of the early hard-boiled writers, the black mask writers, and of course, their secret master, Ernest Hemingway. And this idea that it is an encoding of a fundamental disaster of the violence of modernity, that is to say basically World War I and then World War II, from which we have never recovered the disenchantment with modernity, the shock of mechanized death that was possible. and that the detective wears a trench coat, not because it looks cool, but because he's returned from trench warfare, which at the time was named a kind of trauma that's unimaginable, almost impossible to reconstruct its vastness, and that this was what the voice was for, just as the surrealists were attempting to recover from World War I. The hardball detective voice was an attempt to manage trauma. That the story of these... forms of distortion or figuration. was they were rooted in. incommensurable experiences of pain and disappointment. with what the 20th century had presented. And that was what we were really talking about. or not talking about.
PJ:
Right, right, right. Talking around it, a
Jonathan:
Yeah.
PJ:
language creating its own spaces inside itself. As we wrap up here, one, let me say again, thank you. It's been a real joy and honor to have you on. What is something that you, what's one takeaway you would leave for our audience for this week as they listen here, or one thing you'd encourage them to do? Besides read your book, obviously, which is phenomenal. So I'll put that up one more time.
Jonathan:
Well, that's an incredible, wide open question. What would I have them do?
PJ:
Yes.
Jonathan:
Attend I'm gonna do this on Saturday if you if you've even heard of this thing attend a sound bath and you can look it up. RETUNE your
PJ:
Yeah,
Jonathan:
instrument.
PJ:
attend a sound bath.
Jonathan:
The tuning fork deep in your body is hungry for this experience and you don't know it.
PJ:
It feels like an ending as enigmatic as your book. I really appreciate that.
Jonathan:
And
PJ:
I have no idea what a soundbath is. I'll
Jonathan:
if you
PJ:
have
Jonathan:
can't
PJ:
to go look it
Jonathan:
find
PJ:
up later.
Jonathan:
your way to a sound bath, go to a hardcore punk show and get in the mosh pit because it's similar. Different, but similar.
PJ:
Yes, cathartic.
Jonathan:
Go see
PJ:
Yes.
Jonathan:
some live music. Much simpler.
PJ:
Love it. I'll look up some Beth later. Mr. Leatham, it's been a joy. Thank you.
Jonathan:
My pleasure, this was great. Thanks for reading the book.