This Week in Fiction: Jonathan Lethem: The New Yorker This week's story, "The Gray Goose," follows the adventures of seventeen-year-old Miriam Zimmer over the course of one New York night, in 1958, after she hears the folk song that marked her childhood, Burl Ives's version of "The Gray Goose," performed in a teeming, smoke-filled club in Greenwich Village. Was this a song you heard as a child? When did you first think about using it to form the frame for this night in Miriam's life? At some point it occurred to me that in the pantheon of folk-music superheroes I'd grown up listening to - some specifically as children's entertainers - nearly every one of them had some very complicated relationship to the history of the American left. Pete Seeger and Burl Ives, for instance - the two of them fell out over blacklisting and naming names. For me it was like learning that Kermit and Grover were no longer speaking. The discovery stood for all I didn't know about the tormented alliances and disalliances shading the world I took for granted as a child. So, yeah, this feeling about "The Gray Goose" came pretty early in my conception - that a child wondering about the song's symbolism might view it, in the same way, as a sort of trapdoor into the mingled shame and pride of a family's political past. Miriam has traded one young man, a forgettable date, for a more memorable Columbia student named Porter. After they've failed to find a place in Manhattan where more than Miriam's coat can come off, she takes Porter back to her home in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. On the way, she promises him "something you've never seen before." That something is the curve on the Queens-bound 7 subway train as it jackknives into Queensboro Plaza. Have you been thinking about using that particular subway ride in your fiction for a while? So much of the city described in the story still exists today, including that bend on the 7 track, but so much has been lost, too - how much research did you do to conjure up New York in the fifties? I doubt that stretch of track ever offered itself to me as a fictional subject before I'd put those characters on the train, no. But I can't recall any hesitation before inventing Miriam's exaggerated claim for it as a marvel. Without wanting to too much flash my street-cred, I guess this really is an area where I lean on my deep somatic memory of being a body moving through New York's various times and spaces - I can't count how many times I've been on that train, but perhaps more important is that I've certainly been on it in four, perhaps even five decades of my life. My grandmother, who lived in Sunnyside, probably first told me to stand, rather than sit, so I could appreciate that view, sometime before I can quite remember. And I also recall showing it off to some girl on a date, claiming it as my own, much as Miriam does in the story. So who needs research, right? Oy. I've never done so much research in my life as it took to make myself secure writing about the fifties (let alone the thirties). Hope never to do so much again. A lot of it consisted of partly-reading quite boring long books of sociological or political stuff. Other times of reading novels written in the period, ones which seemed to catch the feel of being alive then (but what do I know?). A few texts became talismanic - Anatole Broyard's "Kafka Was The Rage," for instance. Or a three-page story by Leonard Michaels, called "In the Fifties." Vivian Gornick, again and again. You hate to cop to research, because it guarantees people will fault you for putting too much in. Who knows, I probably did. But you have no idea how much I left out - how much I never ever considered putting it, but somehow needed to absorb anyhow, just to attain a footing on my own material. The story is taken from your new novel, "Dissident Gardens," which will be published in September, and follows Rose and Miriam, and various husbands, lovers, children, and cousins, from the nineteen-thirties to the present day. All the characters are marked by radicalism in one form or another. Miriam, for example, joins a commune and eventually travels to Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas. In some ways, you're writing an alternative history of the United States, one that takes place at the farthest reaches of the left. Did you know the novel would have this large a scope when you started working on it? I enjoy those characterizations of the book, which come safely afterwards - "alternative history of the U.S." or "large scope" - but of course they had no place in getting started, or even in the process of carrying forward with a project so full of eccentric specifics as this one. I wrote my way into the book with images, like two argumentative heads bobbing on waves in the ocean on a hot day; with language problems, or voices I wanted to tackle, like that of an Irish-American folksinger discovering he's no Bob Dylan; and with weird personal questions about the mystery of my own grandmother's unilluminated (to me) emotional dark matter. I began to intuit the size, and briefly fell in love with the idea of my own ambition - I went through a few crazy months where I thought the book's page count, based on what I'd written so far, would be in the two-thousand range. Then I ran for the cover of specifics again, centered myself on the peculiar stubborn images and voices, and it got mercifully back in proportion. A better way, I think. "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Fortress of Solitude" are two great Brooklyn novels. Manhattan takes center stage in "Chronic City." Did you set out to write a Queens novel with "Dissident Gardens"? Should your readers expect you to extend your tour of the five boroughs? Not "set out," but it pleased me, as soon as I knew I was going to do it. The feeling for Sunnyside, specifically, was native in me; it's really important to say I wouldn't put any claim on the vast reaches of Queens generally (nor, for that matter, on the vast reaches of Brooklyn!). My publisher advertised "Chronic City" as "Lethem Does Manhattan," as though it might be a surprise I'd ever been there. Now I think I'd better declare the three books a trilogy (with "Motherless Brooklyn" as "The Hobbit"), fast, so no one needs to be anticipating (or dreading) "Lethem Does Staten Island" and "Lethem Does The Bronx."