I think this all sort of starts with [the fact that] I've always been a very avid fan of music and also have been a fan -- as I sort of say in the letter -- of the great rock writers. I'm always kind of in awe of them. But I've always shied away from trying to do it myself, precisely because I think that the best ones are the ones who've really devoted themselves to it as, you know, their main work. And I just wouldn't want to be a dilettante. It's something that, you know, someone like Greil Marcus is doing so, so brilliantly.

But I want to write about a character who kind of becomes a rock critic and a writer of liner notes. Maybe not on the level of accomplishment of a Lester Bangs or a Greil Marcus, but I want to sort of get inside of a character like that. And think about that alternate world writing career that I might have had, taking my passionate relation to music and marrying it to my writing.

I've written about music a couple of times. I wrote about The Clash for The New York Observer... I did, in Motherless Brooklyn (1999), give Lionel Essrog kind of the taste in music that he's got. He's really into funk, and he's really into Prince.

I sort of realized that there was a way that I could write about music in fiction that was really inviting. With this new book, I'm trying to create a vehicle for letting some of that [music-related] impulse sneak back through the kitchen door into my fiction.

I was drawn in, more than anything else, by Laura Miller at Salon. [She's] an editor, and also a friend, who encouraged me to write my first book reviews and film reviews. I began to discover I had an essay voice that I could use. And so I started accepting invitations that I'd previously been turning down to review books here and there. Of course, at this point, the majority of what I've done in journalism has been book reviewing -- which is what novelists tend to get asked to do.

I might do [sporadic reviews] now and again just for the free books and for keeping my name out there. The non-fiction that would interest me enough to keep going would be [in the form of]... a big personal essay.

And I did actually just write one that's going to be published in a magazine called Tin House in the winter. December or January. It's a long essay about my kind of obsessive relationship with a John Ford film called The Searchers, which was one of the sources for Girl In Landscape (1998). I think it's the best piece of non-fiction that I've written. It's certainly the most personal.

Sometimes [the stories are] very literal -- you get bonked on the head with a brick and you don't know who you are. Other times there's more of an amnesiac aspect to the fiction, a kind of blank spot somewhere at the level of the text.

I fantasized that I would do work that would demand those kinds of comparisons. I'm certain I wasn't managing to do it at the beginning, but I was pointing in that direction anyway. I was trying.

He's got people he talks to about it who seem to see some progress... Of course, I'm enormously excited at the idea that Edward Norton would play the part [of Lionel Essrog, and possibly co-produce the film as well]. And there's nothing I know that's gone wrong with the project so far, so cross your fingers.

The trick with Hollywood is that you don't know what they're going to do because they don't know what they're going to do. They're trying to put deals together. They're trying to find a director and a screenwriter, and put together a package that will work. And they often don't know if they've got one until the very last minute.

Some of the earlier novels still have a chance of coming together [as films]. There's a director named Matthew Jacobs who's working on a version of As She Climbed Across the Table (1997). That seems very promising right now.

I think I've been lucky in some ways, in that films demand so much of your attention and can overwhelm the perception of a writer's career. It's been very freeing for me in that there hasn't been a prominent film event, that the books are allowed to kind of be the main subject of conversation for the time being.

I think, for example, if there'd been a Gun, With Occasional Music movie a year or two after that book -- which at one point there seemed to be some danger of -- I would have been a much more well-off person. But I think, as a writer, my freedom to do the many different kinds of things that I wanted to do would have been hampered if that book was so much of its hard-boiled, Blade Runner-ish kind of thing [as a movie].

People, even just from reading the book, were very, very disappointed that I was wasn't going to do that kind of book again. Or at least not right away. If there had been a film that reinforced that expectation that that was the only kind of writing that I was interested in, that feeling would have been so much stronger. I mean, particularly if it had been a successful film, or one people really liked. So it's probably increased my license and my freedom to do what I want to do in some ways because nothing's come along quite yet [film-wise]. But it'll be fun when it does.

But in a much longer term way -- yeah, sure. We've talked about it, and there's all sorts of things that might mean. I just don't know what it would mean yet, but I can imagine finding a way for us to fool around on a project together.

I have an unusual career in some way. It shouldn't be an unusual career -- it should be a more common experience -- but it isn't regarded as a possibility anymore. [My career] built up very slowly. I think the cliché about publishing these days is you either break big right out of the gate, or you're in trouble because no one will ever pay attention. There is no mid-list in publishing, and I think that -- for whatever set of really lucky reasons -- I got to be a mid-list writer for awhile. Just sort of poke along and do what I'm doing, get respectfully reviewed and build an audience book by book.

With the big stuff that came with winning that award, it felt like I'd reached the top of the ladder that I'd been steadily climbing. It was much less disruptive than if all that had happened with a first book -- if I'd been thrust into so many interview situations when I hadn't ever done them before. It's been really a gentle ride for me.

You know, Toronto's interesting and I feel it affecting my work in subtle ways. But I don't think it's likely to turn up as a subject matter anytime too quickly for me. I really actually feel engaged in that psychological return to Brooklyn, and the new book is set there again although it's a very different book [from Motherless Brooklyn] in other ways.

The Bruce Sterling story is that he and I were in a very interesting and intense workshop setting together called Sycamore Hill. And he was doing a diagnosis, a kind of X-ray of my fiction [of the sort that] he's prone to doing. He's very, very into these deep meta-analysis' of another writer's work. He said, 'You know, Lethem, any time anyone has sex in your fiction, they're punished. The world seems to have to be destroyed just because they got laid.'

It was very funny, but I thought it was insightful and provoking. I guess, in a way, I wanted to look at and kind of go towards that tendency in my fiction. And write the ultimate, you know, 'getting laid destroys the world' story. Just to get it out of my system, and sort of examine the material. You know, kind of a Judo response to Bruce's criticism.

But there's a lot else in there. In some ways, it's a very playful Borges or Calvino kind of story where I'm kind of drawing Baroque patterns on the page for the pleasure of the eye. And, in other ways, it's a very personal story, too.

Before that story ("Five Fucks") was written, as Bruce was pointing out, I'd been doing certain things over and over again. The story was a kind of consolidation story before I was able to move forward to other kinds of material.

And Motherless Brooklyn has, in some ways, a very traditional and tidy ending. It really comes together. So I feel more like there isn't some policy on endings.

There's a kind of a search that's one of the most basic voyages any novelist is ever on, because an ending is the hardest thing to get right and it's the mark of the greatest books when you find a good one. I'm not sure if I've found more than one ending that is completely satisfying for me -- and I won't say which one that is -- but I know that the reaching, the groping around for a great ending is part of the project of writing a novel.

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