The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Looking closely at this silent terrain, I realized that the entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges. These encircled the vehicles like the walls of a crater several miles in diameter. Here and there a driver shifted behind his steering wheel, trapped uncomfortably in the hot sunlight, and I had the sudden impression that the world had stopped. Gradually I realized what I’d seen in the rearview mirror. The car was a maroon Cutlass, identical to my own. I looked slowly to my left and saw my own face in the car next to me, glassy-eyed, mouthing words. I could read the words. They were, “Go back. Go back.”

  A police car sped down the descent lane of the flyover, headlamps flashing, the rotating blue light on its roof flicking at the dark air like a whip. Above me, on the crest of the ascent lane, two policemen steered the traffic streams from the nearby curb. Warning tripods set up on the pavement flashed a rhythmic “Slow … Slow … Accident … Accident …” I cranked the window down to see what it was that interrupted my way. Lines of cars moved past a circle of police spotlights. It was a horrible smashup of forty or fifty streamlined multi-cylinder automobiles; and each of them must have been traveling well over two hundred miles an hour to achieve, even in combination, such a terrible mass of wreckage. Ambulances and policemen were all about, and so were doctors and nurses and interns. Arc lights that flared over the sites of major collisions, while firemen and police engineers worked with acetylene torches and lifting tackle to free unconscious wives trapped beside their dead husbands, or waited as a passing doctor fumbled with a dying man pinned below an inverted truck. Scores of newspapermen were there interviewing onlookers and victims and taking flashlight photos of the mess. By each wrecked automobile there must have been six or seven insurance adjusters and nine or ten lawyers. A tremendous crowd of curiosity-seekers had gathered; the thruway was blocked completely from curb to curb. There was no way, of course, of getting out behind, because even as I stopped, the traffic piled up in back of me for ten or fifteen miles.

  I got out to stretch my legs. Close by, I found a mobile saloon mounted on a truck and two trailers; its personnel had rushed it to the scene, let down the sides of the trailers, and set up shop where they did a remarkable business. A crowd was gathering on the sidewalks, and on the pedestrian bridge that spanned Western Avenue the spectators leaned elbow to elbow on the metal rail. The smallest of the cars involved in the accident, a yellow Italian sports car, had been almost obliterated by a black limousine with an extended wheelbase which had skidded across the central reservation. The limousine had returned across the concrete island to its own lane and struck the steel pylon of a route indicator, crushing its radiator and nearside wheel housing, before being hit in turn by a taxi joining the flyover from the Western Avenue access road. The head-on collision into the rear end of the limousine, followed by a rollover, had crushed the taxi laterally, translating its passenger cabin and body panels through an angle of some fifteen degrees. The sports car lay on its back on the central reservation. A squad of police and firemen were jacking it onto its side, revealing two bodies still trapped inside the crushed compartment. I moved around through the crowd, inspecting the corpses and standing by different wrecks whenever I saw they were about to be photographed.

  The thruway was jammed, a horizontal Christmas tree of flashing red lights. Anyone could look at their watch, but it was as if that time strapped to your right wrist or the beep beep on the radio were measuring something else—the time of those who hadn’t made the blunder of trying to return to the city on the southern thruway on a Sunday afternoon and, just past the suburbs, had had to slow down to a crawl, stop, six rows of cars on either side, start the engine, move three yards, stop, talk with the two nuns in the 2CV on the right, look in the rearview mirror at the pale man driving the Caravelle, ironically envy the birdlike contentment of the couple in the Peugeot playing with their little girl, joking, and eating cheese, or suffer the exasperated outbursts of the two boys in the Simca, in front of the Peugeot. I even got out at the stops to explore, not wandering off too far (no one knew when the cars up front would start moving again, and you’d have had to run back so that those behind you wouldn’t begin their battle of horn blasts and curses), and exchanged a few discouraged and mocking words with the two men traveling with the little blond boy, whose great joy at that particular moment was running his toy car over the seats and the rear ledge of the Taurus. It didn’t seem the cars up ahead would budge very soon. I observed with some pity the elderly couple in the Citroën ID that looked like a big purple bathtub with the little old man and woman swimming around inside, he resting his arms on the wheel with an air of resigned fatigue, she nibbling on an apple, fastidious rather than hungry. I decided not to leave the car again and to just wait for the police to somehow dissolve the bottleneck.

  At one point (it was nighttime now), some strangers came with news. The pavement had caved in around Yonkers, and five cars had overturned when their front wheels got caught in the cracks. The idea of a natural catastrophe spread all the way to the pale man, who shrugged without comment. The first to complain was the little girl in the Datsun, and the soldier and I left our cars to go with her father to get water. In front of the Simca, I found a Toyota occupied by an older woman with nervous eyes. No, she didn’t have any water, but she could give me some candy for the little girl. The couple in the ID consulted each other briefly before the old woman pulled a small can of fruit juice out of her bag. I expressed my gratitude and asked if they were hungry, or if I could be of any service; the old man shook his head, but the old lady seemed to accept my offer silently. Later, the girl from the Dauphine and I explored the rows on the left, without going too far; we came back with a few pastries and gave them to the old lady in the ID, just in time to run back to our own cars under a shower of horn blasts.

  The boys in the Simca pulled out inflatable beds and lay down by their car; I lowered the back of the front seat and offered the cushions to the nuns, who refused them. Before lying down for a while, I thought of the girl in the Dauphine, who was still at the wheel. Pretending it didn’t make any difference, I offered to switch cars with her until dawn, but she refused, claiming that she could sleep in any position. Night would never come; the sun’s vibrations on the highway and cars pushed vertigo to the edge of nausea.

  Something would have to be done in the morning to get more provisions and water. The soldier went to get the leaders of the neighboring groups, who were not sleeping, either, and they discussed the problem quietly so as not to wake up the women. The leaders had spoken with the leaders of faraway groups, in a radius of about eighty or a hundred cars, and they were sure the situation was analogous everywhere. The farmer knew the region well and proposed that two or three men from each group go out at dawn to buy provisions from the neighboring farms, while I appointed drivers for the cars left unattended during the expedition. There was a coffee-and-doughnuts man threading his way through the traffic even now, but coffee was beyond my means.

  Nobody kept track anymore of how much they had moved that day; the girl in the Dauphine thought that it was between eighty and two hundred yards; I was not as optimistic. In fact I couldn’t remember seeing a car move recently. I never even saw a car move, just heard them. That night I’d dreamed another start-up, or perhaps it was real, a far-off flare that died before I’d even ground the sleep out of my eyes, though in the rustle of my waking thoughts it was a perfect thing, coordinated, a dance of cars shifting through the free-flowing streets. Perhaps the start-up was only a panic begun by someone warming their motor, reviving their battery. What woke me in the morning was the family up ahead cooking breakfast. They had a stove on the roof of their car and the dad was grilling something. The old lady in the Impala had given up, spent most days dozing in the backseat. Her nephew from a few blocks away came over and tinkered with her engine now and again,
but it wasn’t helping. It just meant the nephew was at his wheel for the start-up, another dead spot, another reason not to bother waiting to move. “Not Responsible! Park and lock it!” the loudspeakers at the tops of the poles in the vast asphalt field shouted, over and over.

  Suddenly I felt gripped by a gust of enthusiasm: It was wonderful to know that freedom exists and at the same time to feel oneself surrounded and protected by a blockade of solid and impenetrable bodies, and to have no concern beyond raising the left foot from the clutch, pressing the right foot on the accelerator for an instant and immediately lowering it again on the brake, actions which above all are not decided by us but dictated by the traffic. Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, was something I could not change. At that moment, something unbelievable was happening five hundred, three hundred, two hundred and fifty yards away. There was a start-up, a fever of distant engines and horns honking as others signaled their excitement—a chance to move! The boy was pointing ahead and endlessly repeating the news as if to convince himself that what he was seeing was true. The elated lookout had the impression that the horizon had changed. Then we heard the rumble, as if a heavy but migratory wave were awakening from a long slumber and testing its strength.

  In the morning we moved a little, enough to give hope that by afternoon the route to New York would open up. You could feel the line of cars was moving, even if only a little, even if you had to start and then slam on the breaks and never leave first gear; the dejection of again going from first to neutral, brake, hand brake, stop, and the same thing time and time again. By night, speeding up, the lanes could no longer stay parallel. From time to time, horns blew, speedometer needles climbed more and more, some lanes were going at forty-five miles an hour, others at forty, some at thirty-five, a mad race in the night among unknown cars, where no one knew anything about the others, where everyone looked straight ahead, only ahead.

  We had been cruising along pretty well at twilight, my father concentrating on getting in another fifty miles before dark, when they were cut off by the big two-toned Mercury and my father had to swerve four lanes over into the far right. My parents later decided that the near-accident was the cause of my premature birth. They even managed to laugh at the incident in retrospect, but I always suspected my father pined after those lost fifty miles. In return he’d gotten a son.

  When I was six I got to sit on my father’s lap, hold the wheel in my hands, and “drive the car.” With what great chasms of anticipation and awe did I look forward to those moments! My mother would protest feebly that I was too young. I would clamber into Dad’s lap and grab the wheel. How warm it felt, how large, and how far apart I had to put my hands! The indentations on the back were too wide for my fingers, so that two of mine fit into the space meant for one adult’s. My father operated the pedals and gearshift, and most of the time he kept his left hand on the wheel, too—but then he would slowly take it away and I’d be steering all by myself. My heart had beaten fast. At those moments the car had seemed so large. The promise and threat of its speed had been almost overwhelming. I knew that by a turn of the wheel I could be in the high-speed lane; even more amazingly, that I held in my hands the potential to steer us off the road, into the gully and death.

  When I was seven there was a song on the radio that my mother sang to me, “We all drive on.” That was my song. I sang it back to her, and my father laughed and sang it too, badly, voice hoarse and off-key, not like my mother, whose voice was sweet. “We all drive on,” we sang together.

  You and me and everyone

  Never ending, just begun

  Driving, driving on.

  These days I have stopped paying attention to the cars going in my direction and I keep looking at those coming toward me which for me consist only in a double star of headlights that dilates until it sweeps the darkness from my field of vision then suddenly disappears behind me, dragging a kind of underwater luminescence after it. How, I began to wonder after a few lifetimes of this constant circling, traveling from country to country, never stopping except to sleep briefly in the car before going on again, my mind increasingly distracted, nerves increasingly unstrung, how can one ever be certain of anything? Once you start driving, how can you ever stop? A perverse idea hit me: Maybe it was only the pressure of our dead traditions that kept people glued to their westward course. Suddenly twelve lanes, which had seemed a whole world to me all my life, shrank to the merest thread. Who could say what Eastbound might be? Who could predict how much better men had done for themselves there? Maybe it was the Eastbounders who had built the roads, who had created the defenses and myths that kept us all penned in filthy Nashes, rolling west. What if I crashed across the twelve lanes of Westbound to the Median, the beginning of no-man’s-land? Beyond that, where those distant lights swept by in their retrograde motion—what?

  I am always moving. I am forever transporting myself somewhere else. I am never exactly where I am. Tonight, for instance, we are traveling one road but also many, as if we cannot take a single step without discovering five of our own footprints already ahead of us. Now we are traveling as if inside a clock the shape of a bullet, seated as if stationary among tight springs. And we have a full tank of fuel, and tires hardly a month old.

  Every chance that I take, I take it on the road. Do not ask me to slow down. Hands off the wheel. It is too late. After all, at 149 kilometers per hour on a country road in the darkest quarter of the night, surely it is obvious that your slightest effort to wrench away the wheel will pitch us into the toneless world of highway tragedy even more quickly than I have planned. And you will not believe it, but we are still accelerating.

  At least you are in the hands of an expert driver.

  —Bowie, Hawkes, Evenson, Calvino, Kessel, Finney, Cortázar, Shiner, Ballard, Lethem

  —Conjunctions, 2007

  Against “Pop” Culture

  In the termite phase of my career the term “pop culture” made sense to me. It seemed an approximate cover for loose bushels of enthusiasms: rock and roll, movies, comics, science fiction, and crime writing. Once I got lashed to the mast of my private canon, the word “pop” looked squishier and squishier to me, and lately I seem to want to blow it up whenever it’s offered to me.

  Pop music or pop art: fair enough. These seemed specific enough to matter. But “pop culture” seemed like a password to a clubhouse (for those who identified) and a term of quarantine (for those championing what they believed remained outside—or above—the radioactive area). The snobbish grudge against pop culture was that those who cared for it cared for all of it equally, and the problem was that this grudge was too often justified in the values-suspended vale of fandom. Having admitted to seeing Star Wars too many times as a thirteen-year-old, should I have to subsequently pretend I thought the movie was much good, once a decade of Kurosawa, Hawks, Kubrick, and Lang had straightened out my thinking? Couldn’t I talk about comics as an intoxicant while expressing exhaustion at the measly narrative or visual chops in the ’70s comics that had intoxicated me?

  Well, I could try, but I wouldn’t necessarily be heard. The superb critic John Leonard (as much a personal hero of my teenage years as Leonard Nimoy), acting precisely in the role of the notorious “gray eminence” from David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibus Pluram” essay, spanked my cumulative life’s work in the New York Review of Books for being uncritically pegged on iconography he found wearisome. The same month another man named John Leonard devoted his television column in New York magazine to defending the ’70s television program Kojak against the insult of an inferior remake. Except it was the same John Leonard. My Fetishes, Okay, Yours, Not So Okay.

  Another lie “pop culture” embeds: pop-as-in POPular. I usually preferred Unpop: comics canceled for lack of readers, bands sans career, paperback-original novelists who’d filled word counts behind interchangeable covers. I began to resent on the behalf of these losers (in whose company I wishfully numbered myself) the canard that they were tainted by
commerce. The science-fiction writers I knew functioned like poets, mining for tribal rewards, names unknown elsewhere, and no thought of quitting their day jobs—yet you’d still hear literary novelists slight “commercial writing.” At least poets (and literary novelists) could chase tenure. Anyway, the creators I adored tended to want to claw their way out, whether they succeeded in their lifetimes like Chandler and Ballard or flopped like Highsmith and Dick. I was a tormented snob dressed in PopCult garb because it made the nearest-to-hand defense of what I loved, but it wasn’t my defense, and vast continents of category fiction and television didn’t stir me at all. I felt dubious from all sides, in a Jews for Jesus or Log Cabin Republican kind of way. Even in the Radisson bar no one was certain where I stood, while out in the main convention hall the pop-culture revelers guiltlessly browsed Telly Savalas figurines. In this jumbled zone, the line “pop culture” drew wasn’t worth the time spent erasing it.

  Anyway, wasn’t the novel itself once upon a time a suspiciously “pop” form? I liked “vernacular culture” better, if only because it wasn’t automatic—it raised questions, instead of shutting them down. Just so long as you noticed that vernaculars (film, jazz, and the novel) are routinely shanghaied for ivory towers. Within a year of my discovering Philip K. Dick, his “pulp” context evaporated, overwritten by native kinship with Franz Kafka, Talking Heads, and Giorgio de Chirico—at least in the fantasia of my curiosity. Was this really an interest in “pop”? Couldn’t we just say culture?

  Pynchon V. Pym/The Fallacy of Lateral Influence/My Hideous Formality

  Writers’ memoirs are supposed to wear you out with: And Then I Wrote. I wanted to wear you down with: And Then I Read. Certain names, though, seemed impossible to get into the conversation—was I embarrassed to say I’d rather be stuck on a desert island with the collected works of Barbara Pym than those of Thomas Pynchon? (And was I totally crazy to suspect Pynchon would say the same?) Or was it that when I pointed to certain of my enthusiasms tape recorders broke down out of boredom? Anthony Burgess, Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, Penelope Fitzgerald, J. B. Priestley, Anita Brookner, Elizabeth Bowen, L. P. Hartley, George Gissing, Muriel Spark—for whatever reason, I’d located a century of not-exactly-high-modernist U.K. fiction that I couldn’t quit reading, and that formed my sense of what novels should feel like when I set out to write them. I felt fashionable being asked about Pynchon and DeLillo, and was awed enough when I read them to gladly flatter myself claiming them as totems, but really had already gleaned what I’d need of political paranoia from Graham Greene (as well as from Iron Curtain dystopias by Orwell, Lem, the brothers Strugatsky), and it was Greene’s sense of form, of how a novel was proportioned and how to present a character, that seeped into my writing muscles. I first thought I never wanted to write a long novel at all; when I changed my mind, I modeled on none of the modernist or postmodernist versions of amplitude, but on Great Expectations and Another Country. I’d grooved to the postures of the Beats—what bookish-hippieish kid of my generation wouldn’t have?—but was seduced, embarrassingly enough, much more by the writing of the Angry Young Men. I still prefer Kingsley to Martin, and, if I live awhile, stand a chance to be the last human to know the difference between John Wain and John Braine.