For Jonathan Lethem, curiosity is central to the writing process.
I sat down to interview the novelist and professor who’s spent a lifetime crafting prose that feels alive in its own skin.
At Pomona College, that curiosity defines both his teaching and his work. Lethem came to Pomona in 2010, succeeding David Foster Wallace as the Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing.
A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction, Lethem is best known for “Motherless Brooklyn,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and “The Fortress of Solitude,” a coming-of-age story rooted in the streets of Brooklyn. His most recent novel, “Brooklyn Crime Novel” (2023), returns to that borough to map the intersection of memory, gentrification and identity.
But his impact at Pomona stretches beyond his books. Last year, Lethem co-curated the Benton Museum of Art’s 2024 exhibition “Parallel Play,” which explored the intersection between visual art and written narrative.
His mentorship has shaped emerging writers like Tom Lin PO ’18, whose debut, “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu,” won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and Francesca Capossela PO ’18, whose novel “All the Way to Summer” grew out of early drafts written in Lethem’s fiction workshop.
My conversation with Lethem drifted from the present to the past, from the stillness of Pomona’s campus to the streets of Brooklyn, the borough that shaped him.
“Brooklyn was a very different place in the time that I was a kid,” Lethem said. “The diversity, the chaos, the juxtapositions and the energy of the street life at that time were just astonishing.”
The city, as he described from his childhood in 1964, seemed to refuse coherence. Scribbling down notes, I tried to keep up with the pace of his memory as he reminisced about the sensory overload of his hometown, which found its way into his fiction before he could even name it.
Describing what first drew him to writing, Lethem didn’t mention some extreme epiphany. Instead, he talked about his mother and how reading was simply part of life, something ordinary that turned out to be essential.
“The talk in my house was great, the books were exciting and the two things became one thing for me,” he said. “I was always in a conversation with my mother about the books that I was reading and pulling off her shelves.”
There was no single moment that made him a writer; there was just constant exposure to language. He grew up reading across genres, without hierarchy or hesitation, and the eclecticism stuck.
“The right word for it is love,” he said. “I was writing towards things that I was excited about, things that seemed irresistible and bottomlessly rich and strange.”
The word “love” lingered for a moment before he continued, widening the scope of his affection beyond the page itself.
“I’m just permanently awake to my own sense of amazement and desire in respect to things that interest me,” Lethem said. “The existence of art to me is a matter of permanent awe.”
For Lethem, curiosity is a way of being.
“I’m excited by the existence of a world, a subcultural world built around the same things and enthusiasms that I have,” he said.
It made sense that he’d find a home in teaching, another way of being surrounded by people who care deeply about things.
In his introductory fiction seminars, students begin with exercises that dismantle conventional storytelling — rewriting scenes from different perspectives, removing dialogue to test rhythm or fusing two incompatible genres to see what emerges in the collision. In his advanced workshops, the focus shifts from imitation to transformation. Students circulate full-length short stories or chapters of novels each week, their peers responding with meticulous written feedback.
“The existence of art to me is a matter of permanent awe.”
The classes are less about technique than about perspective: how to see a story’s structure, how to listen to its language and how to recognize when a piece is trying to become something else.
“I’m very grateful for [teaching] because it keeps me from settling into certainties about what matters or what operates,” Lethem said. “Because of my students, I read more young writers and I’m more able to understand what they are doing.”
He smiled. “Every time I mention something in the classroom that I think goes without saying, and I see the blank stares, I have to revise my sense of reality. And that’s a very healthy moment for me,” he said.
As an answer to what he wants his students to take from his classes, I was surprised when he talked about permission.
“Permission, fundamentally, to play, to experiment,” he said. “Even if it seems very deep and important, it’s got to have this polymorphous freedom underneath it — to self-invent, to pretend, to put on masks.”
Highlighting the importance of experimenting while crafting fiction, Lethem also regards reading as the foundation of starting out as a young writer.
“Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read,” he said. “Every chance you get, even as you’re trying to write or being a college student. Don’t ever let go of it.”
His approach to writing quietly dismantles the idea of it as a solemn pursuit. Imagination is something to be used, stretched and molded. That same openness extends to how he teaches.
“I don’t take it for granted, nor do I expect my students to read my fiction,” he said. “I’m here as an instructor, and I have to meet the student on the terms that are meaningful to them.”
It’s rare to hear a writer talk about his work without trying to make it the center of the room, and rarer still to hear one place the act of listening above the act of speaking. Perhaps that’s what keeps Lethem’s work, and his presence in the classroom, from ever feeling static: the sense that he’s still learning how to look at fiction.
“It’s changed a lot in 15 years here at Pomona,” he said. “The world is remorseless in its transformations. It won’t sit still. And so I always know that I’m entering into that space on new terms every time.”
For him, teaching, like writing, is about adjustment, the ongoing work of helping his students amidst these transformations.
“[The current political moment] is not something you can exclude,” he said. “The world is going to make itself a part of that. You have no option, really.”
Art isn’t an escape from the world, but a reaction to it.
“Art clings to the edges of the fact of existence and tries to make a home there,” he said.
His novels have long been deeply rooted in the political state of the world. He described “Brooklyn Crime Novel,” for example, as partly in reaction to the 2016 transition from the Obama to Trump administrations.
Right now, he’s currently crafting a novel set in Southern California.
“Each one [of my books] is a corrective to the one that goes before it. ‘Brooklyn Crime Novel’ takes place over four decades,” Lethem said. “This one is all set in one night, from dusk to overnight to the next morning, like an overnight movie. Maximum concentration on one ticking clock.”
Each book rewrites the rules of the one before it — a lifelong case of creative restlessness. In an age of endless content and quick consumption, what do novels still do that nothing else can?
“It’s the art form that is the most outside of time structures,” he said. “You operate at your own pace. You enter into them and you swim like in an ocean of language until you’re tired and then you crawl onto the beach and then you go back in.”
As both a reader and a writer, novels let you experience the importance of failure.
“All novels are imperfect,” he said. “By its nature. It’s full of little signs of its making, flaws, interruptions, inconsistencies.”
Lethem acknowledged that imperfection is the writer’s natural state.
“Failure is a risk,” he said. “It’s about inhibition, not being willing to dive in because something might be rejected. Failure is a feeling in the body of the writer.”
Lethem seems to value a single reader understanding exactly what he means more than a crowd applauding something that he didn’t.
“In the doing, in the process [of writing], I learn things. It’s always in itself a sensation of surprise — and a wonderful one,” Lethem said.
He speaks the way he writes: alert, generous and unwilling to pretend that the world makes sense, but endlessly compelled to keep looking anyway.
And perhaps his curiosity is what makes his presence — both on the page and in the classroom — so magnetic. He isn’t trying to explain the world, he’s simply learning, with the rest of us, how to live inside it.
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