12 Questions for Christian Lorentzen
The legendary NYC critic on Nostalgia, AI, Nuclear Families, the Sex Scene, and more.
It was bizarre getting the number of a writer I’ve read for years and years on end, having spent many hours in his company within the margins of those marquee publications like the New York Times, Harper’s, New York Magazine, The London Review of Books, among others. I’ve spoken with famous people before—actors, musicians and such—but engaging in a cold dialogue with a writer whom, as a reader, you’ve built that very intimate one way relationship with, is something else entirely. Their voice is never what you think it’d sound like, their rhythm of speech is usually different than the carefully crafted lyricism of their text, their awkward conversational style inimical to the deeply felt insights and perspectives with which they address their readers. Unless I can meet them in-person and have a long-form, closely acquainted, perhaps private conversation where you can attempt to know and get a sense of someone, I’d like to avoid unnecessary interactions with the writers who’ve influenced me… I write because I read, and I read because I’m sensitive to and fascinated by the perspective of others in contrast to my own disposition, sense of self, of being. This interplay is integral to my identity, and I prefer it to not be fucked with.
A talented musician who ends up quite boring in-person and is bad at performing in front of a crowd is missing something, the whole is mediocre. The same is not true of writers. The public persona is of no significance. This is why, with authors, the written interview is always superior to the conversational, often salacious expose of the heavily edited phone call or coffee chat. I’m not so interested to see a writer caught off guard, this is something that happens to essayists, critics, polemicists, and novelists on a daily basis, usually when they look at their account balance. Writers construct their persona best on the page. The friction between who one wants to be and who one is, the tension between one's actions and ideals, is better suited for literature, a more comprehensive arena, than the short-form interview. In this series, where I ask writers questions that they can then go off on their own and answer in peace, in whichever way they’d like, I’m more interested in the illusion of voice, the one space of a writer’s life they have under control, what exists between them and the page, between them and their edits. What I want to see is the very personal construction of form, the result of years spent toiling and crafting. If that inner-personal tension is revealed, naturally, then that’s all for the better. But to be able to see any of this in the first place, I must ask the writer, in-person or over the phone, if they are willing to engage.
“Uhhh, I’ll get around to it if I feel like it.” Christian said when I called him.
Fair enough, I thought. This interview is never going to happen. I emailed him my questions, never expecting an answer, went about my business and forgot about it. Though at 5:30 am the next morning, I got a response from him, before receiving two more throughout the day, new versions with some edits to what had previously been answered. Delighted and surprised, I read through his answers, before writing back:
Christian, I can’t describe the pleasure I had in reading your responses. As you might know choosing to devote your life to literature while trying to survive can be awfully stifling, difficult, causing one to question and by corollary hate oneself for not just, like, having the capacity to have gone and done something within the confines of socio-economic acceptance, and then you have those moments where you read something about something or you participate in a ’thing’ and you laugh very hard for the first time in a long time and simultaneously you become sentimental and feel tinges of happiness and self-worth, and you say “ah, right, that’s why I do this, I’m in just the right place.” So thanks for giving me one of those very rare and valuable moments. I’m very excited to publish this and will send you a copy beforehand.
And Christian responded:
Glad you like the interview. I tried to have fun.
A few hours later, Christian mentioned that he was performing a reading that evening. He was initially going to read something else, but he’d actually like to read from the responses he wrote to the questions I’d asked. Would I like to come?
I shuffled my plans around for the evening to make it happen. And then on the walk over to the venue, he texted again, “You wanna read your questions out to me?”
When I arrived I found Christian sitting in a group of admirers, having to look at an image on my phone to identify him. He was upset that I’d found him to introduce myself and would have preferred we met for the first time when he’d call me up to the podium at the beginning of his reading. It would have been a better spectacle, he said, the public witnessing of our meeting in-person following an interview that was simultaneously intimate and anonymous. I’d ruined that, but it still went well, with laughs and some genuine receptiveness from the crowd, reactions which can be scant at a reading, where, in my opinion, people usually show up for the before and after, to take a look at the writer, but then to tune out during the event itself… the experience of watching most writers read aloud is too often like having a joke explained, the idea is present yet without purpose, integrity, or magic. There are writers, though, like David Sedaris, or apparently Charles Dickens in his day, who specialize in the performance of reading. They know (and in Dickens’ case knew) all the beats, which passages the audience will respond to, what sentences would only resonate if someone is reading it on their own. Christian is one of those readers. His voice sped past the bits he was aware no one would have patience for on a drunken Friday evening. It would slow down, with great emphasis, on the turns of phrase he knew would get laughs and jeers. He was a string-puller, an amusing entertainer with an element of intellect. When the reading was over, we both sat back down in our respective sides of the room and watched the rest of the writers perform. Some were good, but it wasn’t show business.
Afterward, as the crowd mingled and I grew exhausted, Christian and I exchanged a few words, a cigarette.
“I thought we had a good rapport up there!” He said, jovial.
“Yes!” I responded, before leaving shortly after. I knew the worst thing I could do in this scenario is overstay my welcome. You don’t want to be that guy most people don’t know, lingering for the sake of connection-making. Social comfortability in a new milieu takes time, a repetition of shared experience that can’t be contrived. If it’s forced, it’s disgusting. And regardless, I’m more interested in reading, probably in my home, on the subway, or at a cafe, whatever it is Christian publishes next. I think that’s where the real connection resides.
Our interview is below, enjoy.
GG: What do you think it means, today, in the United States of America, to be a person of the left in a way that’s true, and, sorry to use this word, authentic?
CL: As an American, to be a “true” and “authentic” “person of the left” today means being an activist. Activists do honorable work. I’m not an activist. If I tried to be an activist, it would be counterproductive. People would find me off-putting, and it would repel them from whatever cause I was working for. I don’t like being part of formal groups or talking to strangers. I like to spend most of my time alone reading books. Maybe that’s shameful, but it’s the way I am.
From an intellectual point of view, there are many excellent writers of the left. I think especially of Alex Press on the labor movement; Branko Marcetic and Vincent Bevins on international politics; Malcolm Harris, whose books are becoming more and more ambitious; and Adam Shatz and the political scientist Corey Robin, both of whom I was lucky to work as an editor at the LRB. (If I were to make a list of brilliant young critics, it would be very long, but their left politics isn’t usually the thing I find most salient about their writing.) Mike Davis was a great writer, and he was a great loss because he still produced some of the best work around, not least his clarifying regular postmortems on US national elections, but he also inspired two generations of writers. The left has the best magazines—New Left Review, Jacobin, Baffler, n+1, the Point, the Drift, and so on up to the old warhorses like the Nation and Harper’s. The liberals have the New Yorker, the NYRB, Liberties, all worth reading. The right has basically nothing worth reading regularly, maybe Christopher Caldwell and, if you count him, Edward Luttwak, more analyst than ideologue. The New Criterion hasn’t been worth looking at since Hilton Kramer retired. Otherwise, what have they come up with lately aside from some bozos who plagiarize Machievelli and Nietzsche in baby talk? It all devolves soon enough into diet books.
Some of the worst problems in the world today, involving massive amounts of bloodshed, occur on the fringes of America’s de facto military empire. If there were such a thing as a good empire, it would protect and enrich its minority (or perhaps the right word here is client) populations, and prevent them from killing each other, while eschewing predatory invasions of its own, whatever the pretenses. America often fails miserably in those departments. Unfortunately, our elections don’t have much effect on the conduct of the American empire. I’m interested to see if current protest movements change things, but I doubt a future President Harris, a future President Newsom, a future President Buttigieg, a future President Whitmer, or even a future President Ocasio-Cortez will pursue policies much different than President Biden. The task of the left seems to be transforming the Democratic Party—as the left writer Seth Ackerman has shown, there’s no getting around that—and I don’t know how that will happen. It’s bound to happen someday but I’ll probably already be dead.
Do you believe there’s any real dignity to be found, in any corner at all, in contemporary American culture?
“Real dignity” would seem to me to lie in not having your bank card declined, not having to beg for or borrow money, and not being evicted from your dwelling. Writers and artists who can avoid these problems should consider themselves lucky. Anyone who can avoid these problems should consider themselves lucky. These problems are too common in America, and I blame the government and those with massive wealth. We could have better social arrangements here, and it would be better for the culture.
All creative work these days is going to involve an amount of personal shilling that seems undignified. Really, that’s just show business, and things could be worse.
You moved to New York in 2000. I moved to New York 1994, when I was born in St Vincent’s Hospital, which is now a luxury condominium. What do you miss most about what no longer exists here? People love to romanticize and have nostalgia for the past when in fact, surely, they’d have been even more miserable than they are in the present. Is there any change you appreciate?
I don’t think the city has changed very much since I moved here. It was better when you could smoke inside bars and restaurants, and when most citizens did not consider themselves fully deputized enforcers of those bans. Bloomberg was a bad mayor in terms of accelerating the process of making New York a city just for rich people. Otherwise, there are a couple of old bars I miss, like Great Lakes and O’Connor’s in Park Slope. But mostly the experience of living here now is not so different from what it was in 2000. People stare at their phones, which is lame, but the phones also make it easier to meet up. The real break with the old gritty bohemian paradise seemed to occur during or just after the 1980s. Of course, and here I think I can speak for most New Yorkers, we would have preferred if 9/11 had never happened.
There are still a lot of young people who show up in New York and start magazines from nothing. That’s the best thing going on, and it’s happening a lot right now.
Do you think it's the writer's place to tell their readers how to live?
Absolutely not. People should figure that out for themselves.
Where’s this new AI boom taking us? Do you care? With all the new tech dominating every single facet of our lives, is it worth it for a writer to spend time caring, like in a Walter Benjamin sort of way, about how it’s affecting us? Alternatively, if a writer doesn’t care, or spend time considering it, does their work risk drifting into a space of anachronism?
I don’t care about computers. I don’t think the predictive text software that’s currently being called ‘artificial intelligence’ presents any threat to writers who do more than collate information, and information is generally the least interesting aspect of writing. I read with my ear and computers have no ear, nor are they even being trained to have an ear. There will never be any demand for writing by computers. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read it because the pleasures of reading just won’t be there. Reading is ultimately a hedonistic activity, and if you don’t enjoy it on some level you just won’t bother. In the 1970s, J.M. Coetzee attempted to use computers to “write” poetry. He quickly realized his efforts were going nowhere and abandoned the project.
Some writers have done interesting work on contemporary technologies, but really it’s just one topic among many. It would be great to have more science fiction like Void Star by Zachary Mason, a literary genius who happens to have a day job in the artificial intelligence sector.
I don’t think technologies that have emerged recently have fundamentally changed human nature.
Is there anything you learned at Harvard that you wouldn’t have been able to learn somewhere else? Do you think there’s any true benefit, anymore, to an Ivy League education?
I went to Harvard because the financial aid package was extremely generous. There were four professors who meant a lot to me: James Russell, Philip Fischer, Marc Shell, and Brad Watson. Aside from studying with them, or in Fischer’s case merely attending his lectures, the best thing I did was to spend all my free time reading novels and poetry for fun.
If there’s anything good about the Ivy League, it’s that it can provide generous financial aid to some students and then provide them time to study at a place with enormous libraries and good teachers. Of course there’s a lot of bullshit involved and a lot of rich kids around, many of whom happen to be fun to hang out with personally. Others are careerist assholes. Sometimes both can be the case. That’s America for you. Things are different in other places, perhaps better, but everywhere has its problems.
All good writers are naturally curious, searching people, but when I read you I find your curiosity to be insatiable, endless — where does this capacity for curiosity come from? What made you this way?
One day in the sixth grade, our teacher, Mr. Wexler, asked us what our goal in life was. My answer was: “To know everything.” I have failed miserably in pursuit of this goal, and as I have grown older there are all sorts of things I find myself less and less curious about. I wish I had had more musical talent and pursued it with more rigor as a boy. I enjoy acting and I wish I had tried it earlier. I wish I had learned more languages and hadn’t let the ones I did learn (Latin, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek) rot in my head. I would like to relearn Modern Greek and teach myself Albanian, but so far I haven’t had the discipline, though I spent most of the summer in Albania.
So I would evaluate myself generally as insufficiently curious and woefully undisciplined, in terms of living up to the way I would like to be. If I relay the impression of having an insatiable capacity for curiosity, as you say, it’s probably something of a byproduct of an intolerance for boredom. The most embarrassing thing to me is to be boring, but I have bored a lot of people in my time and I’m ashamed of myself for it. I apologize to anyone who is growing bored reading this.
I took pleasure in reading your piece about the fate of the book review in the age of the algorithm, and I was wondering whether, with social media and all, if you think 'the hit piece’ still has any leverage? What about with film? I can’t personally think of a critic with enough clout to destroy the reputation of a film, or, for that matter, a TV series. What does destroy a film/tv-series/book, these days, are the moral (sexual) or ethical (financial/sexual) improprieties of anyone involved in a project’s creation… This is a long-winded way of asking — is criticism’s effect/consequence dead? Would you say it’s still true that all press is good press?
Unless they’re sadists, I think most critics are indifferent to the commercial fate of the things they pan. If a book I dislike sells really well and is popular, good for the author, who has suffered no harm from me, and good for me, because I am the dissenter, which is cooler than being a member of the chorus of adoration. Critics aren’t interested (or shouldn’t be) in getting things canceled or destroying things but rather in accurately describing and analyzing things, perhaps arriving at certain insights others haven’t yet had. Evaluation is an important part of the job but more for the sake of telling one thing from another rather than as an adjunct to the process of consumerism.
Moralizing about improprieties has nothing to do with criticism. As a critic, I’m not interested in people; I’m only interested in literature. Other people’s lives are none of my business, and I’d rather not know about them. It’s weird to me that people want to destroy things and people. The only twinge of a feeling I’ve had that is similar came once when I was reviewing a novel that I still believe to be the worst novel I’ve ever read and largely disgusting. I thought that if younger writers read this book and adopted it and some of its tropes as models for how to do things it would be an absolute travesty for American literature. Sure enough I have started to see fiction coming out that seems to be written under the spell of this awful book. Oh well, I did what I could.
What do you think it would be like to have a four-way with the Brontë sisters? If you don’t want to answer this, can you tell me a bit about your thoughts on how writers should and shouldn’t approach the sex scene?
I’m not interested in having sex with dead women, no matter how august their literary achievements, or with members of the same family at the same time, especially if they’re dead, nor do I fantasize about such scenarios.
I haven’t read the Brontes since I was in high school—I read both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights during the wonderful summer of 1994, when I read many canonical works of the 19th and early 20th centuries that were on the school reading list—and I preferred Wuthering Heights. Maybe my opinion would be different now, but I doubt it and it doesn’t matter. They’re both great novels and everybody should read them. Namwali Serpel recently wrote a great piece in the NYRB linking them to a recent wave of anglophone novels.
As for sex scenes, I don’t make prescriptions for fiction writers. The best writers will probably do the best sex scenes, especially the writers who are funny. So writers like Gary Indiana, Lydia Millet, Paul Beatty, Sam Lipsyte, Lexi Frieman, Josh Cohen, Nell Zink, Tony Tulathimutte, and Travis Jeppesen, whose new book Settlers’ Landing is extremely ambitious and funny. The sex scene in Raven Lailani’s novel Luster where she invokes the postmodern maximalist novel as an allegory for the man the narrator is fucking is really good and also funny. An example of a brilliant writer of sex scenes that aren’t funny at all or trying to be is Garth Greenwell. Bad writing about sex is like any bad writing, except perhaps more embarrassing, because the characters are naked, and so in a way is the author.
What was the lowest point for you as a writer, and how’d you come out of it?
The lowest points in my life have been when two of my friends died, Matt Power and Gian DiTrapano. I loved Matt dearly and lived in a house with him for a year. He was a great magazine journalist with literary flair and his best work was all ahead of him when he died of heat stroke in 2014 while doing a story around the headwaters of the Nile.
I wasn’t the closest person in the world to Gian, but we had some good times together. He did great work as an editor of Tyrant Books, and the culture is worse off without him. Like Mike Davis (and I don’t think there are many other similarities), he seems to have inspired a lot of young people.
Otherwise the low points in my life have all involved my girlfriends leaving town or otherwise breaking up with me. It takes me a long time to get over things. Maybe I never do.
I don’t get emotional about writing. As long as I can find the time and solitude to concentrate, I enjoy it and I try to do a good job.
Are all good writers layabouts?
I can’t speak to the personal habits of other writers. It’s none of my business. If you were to surveil me around the clock it might look like I spend most of my time lying around reading with the radio on. In fact, during these hours, I am engaged in deep contemplation and am hard at work.
Do you think the nuclear family is still a realistic ideal? Was it ever?
I was born into a loving family, and in that way I was very lucky. Unfortunately I did not enjoy being a child, except for reading books and listening to records and certain athletic activities I pursued by myself, such as running long distances and practicing free throws.
It hasn’t been my fate to have a family of my own. I’m not a very domestic person, so I don’t care about family life. I hope people who live together as families are happy and treat each other well, but again, it’s none of my business.
How do you navigate decision making? Are you a “trust the gut” kind of fella, or more adherent to empirical logic?
I’m a fatalist. The decisions I make seem to me obvious and intrinsic to my nature, even, or especially, when they are bad decisions.
Joan Didion or Eve Babitz? Philip Larkin or James Fenton? Michel Houellebecq or Emmanuel Carrere?
Binary preferences don’t mean very much to me, but since in these cases all the answers are straightforward, I’ll play along.
I’ve read all of Joan Didion’s books, some of them a few times, and I have a lot of admiration for her work, especially the later essays for the NYRB. She had an amazing ear, as indicated by the passage in Blue Nights where she includes drafts showing that she planned out the rhythms of her paragraphs before filling in the words. Eve Babitz is a cool writer and figure. I used to have all her books. I skimmed them and then gave them to one of my ex-girlfriends after she dumped me.
Philip Larkin is a great poet, if not much of an innovator in the modern sense. I read all of his poems when I was in college and go back to them sometimes. The acid quality of his writing was the right thing to encounter for me after the sweetness of Auden. I enjoyed Larkin’s rather innocent novel Jill, though he was clearly better as a poet and not as good a novelist as his friend Kingsley Amis. I’ve read many of James Fenton’s essays in the NYRB but never read his poetry. I’ve always been curious about his reporting on the Vietnam War, and it’s great that he made so much money from the musical Cats. All of us should be so lucky.
I’ve read all of Houellebecq’s novels and his poetry and his book on Schopenhauer and his book of letters with Bernard Henri-Levy and I’ll probably read them all again someday, except for the letters with BHL, who has always struck me as an unfunny clown. I spent a delightful afternoon interviewing Houellebecq in 2017. He was very happy when I suggested we take a break to smoke on the street outside his art gallery. I think he’s a genius. Carrere I’ve never read, though I edited a piece Gary Indiana wrote for the LRB on his Limonov book. Gary also told me to watch a TV show Carrere wrote about a village where a bus full of children who died in some catastrophic bus accident come back to life seven years after the fact and then return to the village the same age they were when they died. I think the music in the show was by Mogwai. I watched a couple of episodes and then lost interest. I have a hard time getting into television shows, especially when they’re in French.
What and why, in your opinion, is the most irritating of all terms of contemporary expression?
I don’t think irritation is a literary value, so if something in a piece of writing irritates me I try to figure out if it’s part of a deeper flaw in the writing itself or whether I’m just in a bad mood and should perhaps go for a walk. By “terms of contemporary expression” I assume you mean usage, and though I’m not a snoot in the DFW sense, certain recent usages that have become more and more common do strike me like fingernails on a chalkboard. Particularly the use of the word “gift” as a transitive verb. It happened in the new Scorsese picture and it struck me as both an aberration and an anachronism. People ‘give gifts’ (a nice example of the cognate accusative), they don’t ‘gift’ things. However, these things happen and there’s no stopping them. My irritation doesn’t matter. None of my feelings matters.
Why do you write? Is this something a writer should know about themselves?
Other writers’ relationships to their motivations are none of my business. I started writing a lot when I was in sixth grade because Mr. Wexler made us write a short story every week. Then many of mine were printed in the town newspaper, the Hopkinton Crier. In high school I started writing reviews for the school newspaper, mostly of records during the heyday of Grunge. One of my old bosses once said that I was difficult to control because I’m motivated more by vanity than by money. That’s probably true. I also find writing fun when the conditions are right. It’s best to be able to smoke cigarettes at my desk, so I might move back to Albania.