The Brooklyn Rail

Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture and A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories, Jonathan Lethem’s two recent collections spanning decades in his writing life, form a dual capstone that is at once heavy and light, their mood reminiscent of the surreal symbolism of transactional exchanges—like the bricks perpetually hurled by Ignatz Mouse at Krazy Kat in George Herriman’s classic comic strip, meant as hostility but received as love. Memoir writing that insists upon a community. Short fiction that embraces genre, surrealism, the iconoclastic, and the mundane.

Cellophane Bricks is a collection or assemblage that pays fierce homage to the art in which Lethem’s essays act like diptychs—with his language positioned beside each work of art as mirror image or commentary. Described by the author in interviews as a cornucopia of “word paintings” and “eccentric reframing,” with pull-out, full-page color images of plates, foldouts, and gatefolds, Lethem’s writing draws inspiration from the visual and plastic arts, graffiti and comics of notable practitioners Larry Sultan, Nan Goldin, Jim Shaw, Raymond Pettibon, Chester Brown, Charles Long, and Manny Farber, among others. A Different Kind of Tension is a box-set–style confabulation of Lethem’s short fiction drawn from previous collections, as well as B-sides and deep cuts and a hundred pages of new and previously uncollected material.

MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and author of Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and most recently Brooklyn Crime Novel (2023), with no less than thirty-one books under his belt, Jonathan Lethem is so prolific, I am half-moved to pastiche selections of his writing and critical reviews for an audience who is no doubt familiar with his past hijinks in fiction, novel and hybrid arts, and music writing—a delightful if not painstaking exercise that would also serve as an ironic nod to the author himself and his watershed essay of pastiche, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” first published in the February 2007 issue of Harpers. Gen X, the first generation gifted this attribute, often defaulted to irony, though Lethem has always seemed more interested in testing its limits than hiding behind it.

This time-honored technique and a myriad of others are on display in the collation of Lethem’s arts writing that survey works published in art catalogues, monographs, or exhibition materials, along with comics, book covers, and personal photographs and arts works. A direct descendant of modernist Donald Barthelme, whose short stories are known for their fragmented forms, ironic pastiche, and playful collisions of high and low culture, Lethem goes even further, emulating the changes in media—from two-dimensional print and static text to immersive, multi-platform storytelling shaped by film, television, comics, and algorithmic feeds.

Last November, when I shared excerpts from Cellophane Bricks with undergraduate design students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture , I discovered the lasting appeal of its techniques. Lethem’s myriad approaches to arts writing are as instructive as they are dizzying, where bouts of controlled mayhem meet restrained introspection and fictive glee.

A longtime fan of Lethem’s memoir, arts writing, and literary criticism, I jumped at the chance to interview the writer for the Brooklyn Rail about a career that proves the path from artmaking to novels (to short story) to criticism and memoir is far richer than the market admits.

Claire Phillips (Rail): I had hoped to get to this interview months ago, but as you know, my house in Altadena burned down in the Eaton Fire and I’ve been consumed with a deluge of administrative tasks. The night of the fire, I packed only a very few books, expecting to return the next day—a return that proved impossible. Fittingly, I carried out a photograph of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena at night ominously aglow with treacherous flames during the destructive 2003 Station Fire—Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Station Fire, Pasadena 2009, from Connie Samaras's art catalogue Tales of Tomorrow, alongside my corresponding essay. Like you, I turned to fiction within an art catalogue, drawing on a lineage that runs from Walter Benjamin’s insistence on the enduring power of story, to Norman Klein’s Tales of the Floating Class, to Mike Kelley’s Foul Perfection, and Sophie Calle’s narrative-driven projects like Did You See Me? and Take Care of Yourself to Meg Onli’s Colored People Time. I can’t think of anyone else who’s written as many fictive works for individual artists as you. When did you first realize fiction could inhabit an artist’s world? And whose examples shaped that leap?

Jonathan Lethem: So terrible about your house. I’m conscious that in writing for our friends in Brooklyn we’re emissaries together from a distant geography. It can be difficult to explain how much the fires are still with us here. Along with the simple, material, immediate—and simply tragic—losses, the psychic spectacle of the absolutely razed community connects helplessly to the witnessing of genocide in Gaza, and to the recent ominous commemorations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which seem to struggle to place something in the past which is in fact not in the past.

My writing about art began as a social practice. It fell out of my yearning to spend time in my artist friends’ studios, and to embody some meaningful connection to what they were doing, which still felt to me like something I ought to be doing. I’d given up making paintings and drawings and sculpture at age nineteen (after doing it for longer than I can remember, and attending two art schools) in favor of writing fiction, to which I applied myself exclusively for decades. Abandoning those—activities? behaviors?—turned me into an instant vicarious wannabe. The first artists I wrote about directly—Perry Hoberman, Fred Tomaselli, and my father—reflected whose studios I was hanging around. The results surprised me. I sensed a path of interesting work ahead of me, and so I started cultivating further occasions, by hook and crook. The results also seemed to please people, so occasions found me. This will sound bad, but I didn’t have examples of “art writing,” per se, that excited me. I dug a lot of music writing and film writing, including some examples (Lester Bangs, David Thomson, Paul Nelson) where the critic shifts into fiction, or into some prose-poetical fugue (Manny Farber). Donald Barthelme was out there as a sidelong case, and also the odd fictions by the actual Surrealists—Giorgio di Chirico, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst’s collage narratives. I mostly wrote against what I imagined was dull about art writing, encouraged by the artists who expressed weariness with “artspeak,” though I had grown up liking to read Peter Schjeldahl in the Village Voice. But I didn’t want to do criticism anyway—I always began by explaining to the artists that I’d write a story instead. Of course I was eventually humbled to read excellent things I’d missed by Frank O’Hara, Dave Hickey, and others. I also was thrilled to discover Robert Smithson’s writings.

Rail: An obvious literary influence in your collection appears to be Donald Bartheleme. One of my favorites, “BLACK KRYPTONITE: A Script for Pettibon”—from the section in Cellophane Bricks, “Graffiti and Comics”—is in keeping with Barthelme’s experiments with form and the porous boundary between text and culture, from the ironic title to the hybrid form of script as fiction. Of course, Pettibon is in on the joke, making you collaborators or co-conspirators, if you will. Did he commission this work for a specific show? Or did you choose to write an accompanying piece after the 2012 collaboration No Title (the opening krazy)? Which, if any, of these works were written expressly for this collection?

Lethem: The Pettibon collaboration was actually commissioned (I used that word without recalling whether it involved any money—if so, not much) by McSweeney’s. I’m sure I said something like, “If he’s in, I’m in.” I’d been staring at Raymond’s album covers and books of drawings for a long time at that point, and I was gratified when it turned out he liked Girl in Landscape. I conceived the four artworks as a four-panel comic page, based—yes, absolutely—on Superman and Krazy Kat, but using the Ad Reinhardt cartoons about Abstract Expressionism, and Reinhardt’s own black paintings, as “content.” So, less Barthelme in this particular instance than a bunch of other denominators—and, given Raymond’s demonstrated interest in all those people, common ones. So, all four paintings, including No Title (the opening krazy), were created after I’d handed Raymond a script—and they were meant to be kept together, hung as a quartet.

Rail: For years I would assign MFA students in my thesis writing class at UC Irvine your essay “Ecstasy of Influence.” The students adored the fact that it was a pastiche. I adored the piece as a necessary antidote to the days of Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence” and its heavy dictum of originality, preferring the punk rock tactic of Kathy Acker, who always wrote with another author’s book in hand—be it genius-level dime-store porn or “classics” like Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. This summer, one of my students wrote a compelling pastiche through the unwitting use of AI, and I came to see the necessity of teaching “Ecstasy of Influence” again with its instructive footnotes as a means for addressing the flagrant use of AI and other outside sources. These are the commons: a shared cultural space and the source of all ownership you make note of in your influential essay. I’m curious to hear about your approach to the use of AI in your teaching given its ubiquity now.

Lethem: I’ve been delighted at how that essay has stuck around and leaped onto syllabi. My impression is that it’s taught in art schools more than writing schools, however. My sense is that the culture of literary writing remains, on the whole (and with important exceptions, obviously), lagging behind visual artists in their grasp of those collage and appropriation gestures underlying almost all expressive and cultural languages, no matter what level at which they’re sublimated or acknowledged or even worn on the sleeve. The only thing I can say with confidence about AI is that it hasn’t clarified anything! And the present conversation about student use—a conversation which is fervent and mostly despairing inside institutions like mine—doesn’t make enough sense to me. Still, I try to listen to other people’s anxieties, and my own. Steeped in the cautionary science-fiction of the Galaxy cadre of writers (Robert Sheckley, C.M. Kornbluth, William Tenn, Philip K. Dick, and others) which pretty much predicted everything, I’m a political Luddite. That’s to say: I don’t like capitalist machines; alas, we live inside one. I’m also really skeptical about moral panics. College students had a lot of methods available to them already for doing cursory or received work, and now they’ve got a new one. (A lot of what is published in scholarly journals and newspapers and also a lot of novels might also qualify as cursory or received.) Every situation is what you make of it, and so far I’ve usually asked the students the same question I ask of myself: what’s your goal here, and what’s your policy for yourself? The answer might not be the same every day, and it might not be the same in every room. Sometimes the goal might be to get a passing grade and get out of that room in order to go do something else. I can respect that. I didn’t even finish college—at least in part because the tasks seemed uninteresting to fulfill. I was a haughty lad.

Rail: “Jim Shaw Kills,” your closing piece for the section “Fictions of Art” in Cellophane Bricks, employs AI generated text along with Wikipedia entries to enact a hilarious surreal, speculative body horror with a miniaturized Jim Shaw implanted inside the lifeless shell of a past president. Fantastic Voyage meets “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” meets episode one from season three of The Boys. What was your process for generating the text for the Jim Shaw piece, and how did the process differ for the pastiche of “Ecstasy of Influence” beyond length and polemic?

Lethem: I made collages from comic book panels before I made collages with other writer’s words. Behind “The Ecstasy of Influence” lies a breadcrumb trail leading back to my teenage activities with a literal scissors and glue-pot. When I published that essay, it had a secret twin: a fiction about a traffic jam called “Always Crashing in the Same Car” (to add to the fun confusion, at least two books have subsequently titled themselves with that same David Bowie reference), which mashed up a Julio Cortázar story, a J.G. Ballard novel, a John Kessel story, an Italo Calvino story, and some descriptions from the published screenplay of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. Good collage is damned hard—often harder than writing. I spent about six months making the essay, and another few weeks on the accompanying story. Mostly, then, I went back to the kind of appropriations that are more typical for novelists—not sentences, but motifs and underlying structures, and not only from texts but from any source I liked. For instance, A Gambler’s Anatomy was for me a reworking of certain horror films—David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, etc. Now along comes ChatGPT, which is a weird tool, not just for its speed and glib facility, but also because it’s actually more like a superpowered autofill-generator: one which is obsessed, for tragically absurd, corporate ass-covering legal reasons, to disguise all its collaging and appropriating tendencies. So it dreams up bullshit when asked to quote anything. The internet is presently filling up with quotes ostensibly from books that actually don’t appear in the books in question—that’s stupid, and funny, if you’re not offended. However, in my opinion, all the real energy and vitality in collage comes in the interference or slippage between different registers, modes, images, tones—the smoothing-out does nothing for me at all. So, in those six or seven instances, now, where I’ve fooled around with collaborating with the machine, I do my best to seek awkwardness, tonal interference, and error. The key seems to be forcing it to revise itself with contradictory instructions. I’ve, for instance, asked it to take a story idea and make it more “abstract,” more “depressed,” more “philosophical”—and then to “take all the abstractions out.” And then (usually last) “put in some jokes.” The text in question breaks down. Then I revise it heavily to make it more interesting syntactically, and to mix up the predictable vocabulary. I doubt I’ve published more than three or four sentences by ChatGPT without imposing my own hand on them in the end. They’re relentlessly dull sentences, but if you work hard you can wrench them into a form of strangeness unattainable by other methods.

I’ve done this, as I say, a handful of times—always, as it happens (I didn’t have a rule when I set out), in collaboration with or response to a visual artist: the Jim Shaw piece in the book; subsequent brief pieces on Pui Tiffany Chow, Michael Prettyman, and S. Emsaki; and a substantial collaboration with Mark Allen of Machine Project. I’ve got one in progress now with Nick Cave and Bob Faust. It feels to me that this might be what it’s for, for me. And the artists get it. There’s no static.

Rail: Like J.G. Ballard, you navigate between the most delirious, destabilizing visions and the most deliberately seductive narratives. I adore the piece written to accompany the jacket illustration for This Shape We’re In (2000), by “one of our greatest—one of our greatest ever—cartoonists, or comic book artists, or graphic novelists, or whatever we are calling them,” Chester Brown. It’s a bemusing, quasi-sordid tale in an era where sordid is eclipsed by spectacle, and it’s as precious to me as the final piece from the section “At Home”: “On a Photograph of My Father,” an ode to your primary influence—your father: painter, poet, political activist and the leader of the gang. Looking back, what feels more pronounced now when shaping a work that spans a lifetime? In what ways has your approach changed since your earlier nonfiction collections?

Lethem: The Disappointment Artist was a deliberate cycle of memoir-essays—the memoir disguised behind cultural-critical topics, until by time of the last essay, the mask falls away, and the book reveals itself as a reasonably coherent short memoir. Cellophane Bricks much more resembles The Ecstasy of Influence (the collection bearing that title, not the essay itself), in that it only became a book because I wrote a tremendous amount of interstitial material to weave among the disparate pieces, and to galvanize them into some kind of unified form—even if a very ungainly one. But then I’d say that in so doing, each of those books—Ecstasy and Bricks—became, helplessly, memoir as well. The “pardon-me” explanations of why I’d written this and that became confessional, and interesting to me as a path into self-study.

Rail: On the topic of your recently curated art show at Pomona College’s Benton Museum of Art, critic Anthony Miller writes:

Parallel Play is a Lethem theme park where one can find a pizza box adorned with midrashic looking commentary by David Bowman, Robert Jiménez’s Ubik spray cans, Tom Sandford’s portrait of Chronic City’s fractious cultural critic Perkus Tooth, Hampton Fancher’s détourned Eisenhower stamps, Jean Redpath’s eerie exploration of her marriage to writer Thomas Berger, and a phantasmagoric fable by Sylvie Selig. It is a walk through the author’s imagination amongst talismans he has collected and written about over the years. The cartoonish, the urban, the chimerical, and the uncanny are all on show.

Since the works came from your personal collection, how did you approach designing the exhibition’s layout? Did you collaborate with anyone in shaping its spatial flow?

Lethem: Oh, absolutely. The museum show was billed as a collaboration with Solomon Salim Moore—but really, by taking me by the hand, Salim taught me on the fly what a museum curator does. He was generous in sharing credit.

Rail: In your latest novel, you resist selling the neat packaging of Brooklyn as a marketable cultural product through an eroding, fragmentary storytelling style I deeply admire—a literary echo of the 1960s dematerialization of art, where the “story” becomes a conceptual gesture rather than a fixed artifice. Brooklyn Crime Novel loops and backtracks through time, full of snippets of dialogue and half-vanished crimes. Its elegiac abrasion of time both distills and memorializes the neglect, exploitation, and displacement of Boerum Hill and its neighboring streets: an all-too familiar accelerated pattern of gentrification and real estate boosterism for us denizens of today’s “star cities.” In 2023, you published a long “Letter from Brooklyn” on gentrification that resonated with me, having lived on Dean Street in 1990 in a brownstone remodeled so thoughtfully by its working-class Puerto Rican owner, just as the neighborhood’s gentrification was beginning. Did writing that piece shape the novel’s form and its excavation of lived time—what Sven Birkerts calls the effort “to stop the flow, to recollect the past in order to see the present more clearly”—or were the two already unfolding in quiet conversation from the start?

Lethem: The reverse: the “Letter from Brooklyn” was an afterbirth of Brooklyn Crime Novel, and a kind of reward for myself, after I’d finally solved (to my own satisfaction, at least) the formal puzzle posed by my crazy intentions for that book. Since one of the requirements of writing that book was to know everything that had gone down but not ever to say it directly, it was a great relief to allow myself a voice that could say (some of) it directly. In that sense, the “Letter from Brooklyn” relates to the Disappointment Artist essay-cycle, the majority of which testified to facts about my childhood that I’d utilized, but only in a distorted, sideways manner, in The Fortress of Solitude; particularly, the true lives of my parents, which I feared would be misrepresented if a reader took that novel as literal, rather than figurative. In both cases I was relieved to be allowed to blurt out the facts of the case.

Rail: In early 2024, after Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar speech warning against “the weaponization of Jewish identity and the memory of the Holocaust” in the war on Gaza, you signed an open letter of Jewish creatives defending him against repression. That spring, you published “Multiple Worlds Vying to Exist: Philip K. Dick and Palestine” in the Paris Review, reading Martian Time-Slip, with its Elon Musk–type colonization as a mirror of US land grabs and Middle East interventions. You share that PKD:

principally employs the Israelis in Martian Time-Slip as an anonymous and implacable counterpoint to the abject ineptitude of the US colonists—to highlight the haplessness of their attempts to farm and irrigate the harsh Martian desertscape. As in the excerpt above, the Israelis present a mirror for shame.

You confide, “I learned the word Kristallnacht before I can remember. I was in my fifties when I first heard the word Nakba. Ideally, one goes on learning.” In a time when political narratives fracture and reality itself feels unstable, what role can literature—and PKD in particular—play in helping us navigate the dissonance of political upheaval, or at least recognize that we may already be living inside one of his unstable worlds?

Lethem: I’m daunted by the question. I’ll try to take it simply, by saying that literature, ideally, is entirely consonant with life, and consciousness, and solidarity with all that is human. That’s to say: other people. This actually connects to my long, possibly incoherent campaign against the Promethean image of the solitary novelist, in favor of the thought that despite the suffering solitude of the novelist’s material practice, the results—the books—all depend upon each other as sources, and for contextual meaning. No single novel is enough to matter; if there was only one it wouldn’t mean anything. If we’re all in literature together, we might also notice that we’re all in everything together. But I try not to get too puffed-up about the special political role of the artist. When I supported Glazer, or any other time I manage to get off my ass and make any kind of political enunciation, I’m doing it as a person, a citizen, a human. Not as a writer, per se. If my mild notoriety makes someone pay attention, that’s lucky. But that’s not where my political gesture originates, or why it’s natural and necessary—when, as I say, I find my voice. I could do it more often, I’m sure.

Philip K. Dick is a life companion for me. In many respects my own art needed his to grow inside, even if it may appear that I’ve wandered outside the boundaries of his method (for better or worse). I still see how I rely on him. I’ve also had the luck of becoming implicated with his posthumous career—literally, in the handling of his literary estate (though I’m not the executor). I got to edit some of his unpublished writings, and also preside over his being placed in the Library of America. This close proximity and long exposure also means that, like a biographer, I can feel awfully let down, as vividly as one sometimes feels let down by a parent. (I’ve read a lot—too many—of his letters.) Yet, if you take his (now more than forty-year-old) intuitions as to the operation of power in the postwar US hegemony as a beacon for illuminating the present, you’ll rarely go wrong.

Rail: Upholding the allegorical and fantastical tradition of Dino Buzzati, A Different Kind of Tension, your latest collection spanning nearly forty years, is full of darkly playful, witty, socially aware stories. For example, “The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock at the Door” (2002), a hilarious depiction of an obsessive authorial rivalry, feels like a direct homage to the master of the “feuilleton,” and standard bearer of modernist or existential fantastic. How much do you count this genre-bending author as an influence?

Lethem: In fact, I came very late to Buzzati, but then it was like discovering a lost friend. I was reading around a Buzzati-shaped hole in my knowledge of twentieth-century fantastic and surreal short story writers, the hunt for whom I thought I’d concluded after assembling my personal Avengers of Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, Anna Kavan, Stanisław Lem, Angela Carter, Jorge Luis Borges, J.G. Ballard—and of course Franz Kafka. Then Buzzati appeared and seemed to insert himself into my influence-field retroactively. It was perhaps lucky I didn’t find him sooner, since if I’d read his short novel The Singularity when I was younger I might not have written As She Climbed Across the Table—it would have seemed too close.

Rail: Always, there is much in-fighting in the literary and sci-fi/fantasy scenes over the “correct” term to capture the work of the moment. Buzzati was labeled a “magical realist” in his day, yet that term seems ill-suited to the stories in your collection, which often hinge on uncanny time slips and near-future technologies, like in “How We Got into Town and Out Again” (1996), where you anticipate strange virtual-reality contests offering cash prizes, prefiguring twenty-first-century spectacles like MrBeast. What term, then, do you use to describe a fantastic mode in which the marvelous appears in a more absurdist or unsettling vein? Bruce Sterling’s “slipstream” no longer suffices, given its appropriation of Native slipstream and Indigenous futurisms.

Lethem: I was once terribly concerned with finding the right name for what I wanted to do, or for what I began to do once I started. The conversation felt urgent because there was still a strong residual stigma against fantastical writing in English, because of the embarrassment felt at the milieu and context of writers who’d come up through the pulp magazines—as if hackwork should be stuck to them more than any other individual artist. There’s hackwork everywhere. All of this was completely annoying and stupid, but it bent so many libraries, bookstores, and publishing efforts into weird shapes, trying to maintain the distinction. “This book has something futuristic or fantastical about it, but don’t worry: it isn’t science fiction. It’s actually good.” And within the field, which had become a parallel realm of canon and distinction-making, there were these weird euphemistic boomlets—like, “Hey, let’s call it ‘speculative fabulation,’ maybe! Or, no, ‘slipstream!’” I wasn’t exempt from worrying about this, but it seems long ago and far away.

I’m a surrealist. It seems simple to me. Lower-case, since I wasn’t part of André Breton’s club, but I think it’s a right-enough term. It speaks to what I avow, which is that the strangeness runs deep in reality, rather than being sprinkled on top for seasoning. The strangeness runs deep in us and in the world, both. And the two make uneasy mirrors for one another. I’ve always disliked the term “magic realism,” except possibly as the accepted name for a specific historical movement in Latin American writing, because it suggests we all know and agree what the “real” is, but now and again enjoy having a little spell of magic cast over it to render it more enchanted and fun. I don’t agree that we have a stabilized real from which to digress.

Rail: Can you share the origin of the title for A Different Kind of Tension? I often find the tension in these stories, for example the troubled, erotic desire in “The Speckless Cathedral” (1992)—so relatable and out loud funny.

Lethem: First, I stole the title from the Buzzcocks. I love that album. And the title presents a conundrum, because the form of tension isn’t indicated. Anyway, different from which other kind? I adopted it for the title of this book because it seems to me it gathers up so many possible implications—perhaps it describes the tension between long and short, novels and stories? Between the fantastical and the mundane? I love your remark and agree that it is absolutely also the tension between irreconcilable lovers, two people stranded from one dwelling in parallel worlds. That’s precisely the metaphor I play with in a trilogy of stories lurking inside the book: “The Speckless Cathedral,” “Five Fucks,” and “Vivian Relf.” In each of those (otherwise very different) tales, lovers face the choice of having one another, or having a coherent world to dwell in. They can’t have both—a theme that I extended, too, in both Chronic City and As She Climbed Across the Table.

Rail: In the not-so-recent past, the denigration of fiction seemed common. We’ve long been told it’s on the verge of collapse—think of the late aughts and David Shields’s Reality Hunger. It’s a strange claim, given what fiction can do. I’m thinking of your short stories “Access Fantasy” (1998), “The King of Sentences” (2007), or “Narrowing Valley” (2022) that bend time, unsettle identity, and explore desire in ways reality can’t. How do you see the short story continuing that work in the future? Are we coming back around finally to the pleasures of fiction?

Lethem: I love Reality Hunger, but I think in the end it’s a confessional book, rather than a polemic. It’s a memoir, a book about David’s relation to the literary space he came of age inside, and how that betrayed him—how he ran out of road, like the coyote, and looked down and found there was nothing under his feet but air. And then it becomes a declaration of what he wants to do instead. Which is what he’s gone and done ever since.

Forms stick around, despite the regular catastrophes that tempt us to declare an endpoint. In banal terms, we still listen to the radio, go to plays, send faxes, fly kites. New forms clutter up around the old ones. But it is also a great temptation, maybe an indulgence, to declare endings at a time of catastrophe. The great joy and sorrow of the world is that there will still be a world after you die, or after the particular flavors and arrangements that you recognize—that make it agreeable to you—have been eroded or erased. No end, just change, sacrifice, discovery, suffering. I tried to get at some of this in The Arrest: we’re cursed to go on, just like David Shields, so we’d better find something worth doing. Norman Mailer has that quip: “The novel will be at your funeral.” The degradation of the particular arrangements we hold dear—the razing of the old neighborhood hangouts where we used to bend an elbow—may be at times unbearable. Yet I believe the mode of story is congruent with our very brains, our very hearts. If it has an outside to it, or can be permanently discredited or exhausted, you’ve come to the wrong person, because I just can’t see it.