“No-one really notices you until you’re on the floor”
Edition 6: Publication Day Special — An interview with author Jonathan Lee
In the 1980s, a slight, blond boy with a big imagination was growing up in a drizzly village orbiting London, England, living with his Mum and Dad in a house that backed onto the old Brooklands race course: close to the ghosts of speed and glamour, but left with the quiet. He liked to consume chicken nuggets, Bryan Adams, and books — lots and lots of books.
Today, that boy is a very busy man. Up at 5 am most days, Jonathan Lee is the critically acclaimed author of three previous novels: Who Is Mr Satoshi?, Joy and High Dive. His work is celebrated by discerning reviewers around the world for its ability to combine artful prose with gripping plot, including in The New Yorker (“Masterly… Achingly good”) and The New York Times (“Inspired… It takes almost a monk’s restraint not to flip to the end of the book before you get there.”). He is also a screenwriter represented by LA’s famous CAA agency, and the Editor-In-Chief of Catapult books, New York’s boldest independent publishing house with a reputation for spotting and supporting the best emerging talent from around the world. Plus, perhaps most exhaustingly, he is my husband and father to our two small children.
However, Jonathan (‘Jon’ to me, with apologies to my mother-in-law who always insists on the full three syllables) can afford to put his feet up early today and sip a home-made negroni while Trolls: World Tour whines incessantly in the background to keep the kids occupied, for today is the publication day for his fourth, luminous novel, The Great Mistake. Before you ignore everything that follows on the basis that I am definitely not an impartial voice when it comes to the matter of Jon’s talent, the book is already garnering rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, with The Guardian going so far as to say, a little cheekily: “The best American novel of the year is written by a Brit.”
The Great Mistake is a moving, intriguing and often amusing story of the life, loves and murder of Andrew Haswell Green: the visionary behind some of New York City’s most famous public experiences — including Central Park and The Metropolitan Museum of Art — and the mastermind behind the joining together of Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1898, and yet someone who has largely been forgotten by history. Jon himself had never heard of Haswell Green until, nine years ago, he happened to choose as his lunch spot the stone bench in Central Park that commemorates ‘The Father of Greater New York.’ From there began an exploration of historical records that lay the groundwork for leaps in imagining that became a beautiful novel.
Amidst all the hard work and creativity that musters a book into being, and echoing Haswell Green’s quest for access to more green spaces, Jon and his family (hi, that’s me) moved out of Brooklyn last year after almost a decade, and have settled in a home near Accord, NY. This is the first book of his that has been published while Jon is living outside a major metropolitan center, and it is interesting to observe how more space and immersion in nature is impacting his work.
So, on this celebratory day, let’s hear from Jon.
The US and UK versions, published by Knopf and Granta respectively
AJL: Happy Publication Day! After many years of work, how does it feel to finally be bringing Andrew Haswell Green’s story to the world?
JL: I feel tired. Very tired. But that’s not Andrew Haswell Green’s fault. It’s been cool seeing his story appear this last week or two in lots of places — The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal (his first appearance there since 1903!), the Times, NPR, the BBC and even Entertainment Weekly, where I’m pretty sure he’s never been before. It’s a bit surreal that it’s because of my book. I’m not sure what his ghost would think of all this. Possibly he was quite happy and well-rested in some higher place of privacy before I started stirring things up?
The books stands alone as a riveting story, but there are larger themes woven throughout, some of which show up again and again in your fiction — such as the tension between people’s public persona and their private world, and how the true self can perhaps fall in the gap in between. Tell me more about that.
A New Yorker reviewer pointed out that I seem to be obsessed with falling. I’d never really thought of it before. But my first book starts with an elderly woman (a stand-in for my own grandmother) suffering a fall that puts the whole story in motion. Then my second book was all about a lawyer who fell from a great height. And then High Dive had a high diver (naturally) and The Great Mistake has this real historical figure at its heart, re-enduring what actually happened to him in life: shot dead unluckily on Park Avenue at the age of 83 on Friday the 13th (spoiler: he then falls over.) I’m not sure why I keep making people fall over. But I do think that when people fall or fail is when we most notice the tension between their public persona and their private world. America and England are two countries where no-one really notices you until you’re on the floor — then they’re like, Huh, look at him. He’s on the floor.
Jon signing books on the porch at his home upstate
You wrote this book when we lived in the City. Given Haswell Green’s dedication to green spaces, does it feel like some sort of kismet to now be surrounded by trees when the novel comes to fruition?
I do think studying Andrew Haswell Green’s life for these last few years has given me a new appreciation of trees. I mean, it’s not that I had arguments with trees before — except maybe those ginkgo trees that smell like bad stuff. But being in the company of trees was one of the main pleasures of Green’s life, and that has been infectious for me during this pandemic. There’s this image that has stayed with me of him keeping a box of leaves under his bed when he was growing up in Massachusetts in the 1830s, varieties from trees he’d met on his walks. English elms. Tulip trees. Linden and Sycamore. Oak. He would try and work out the position each leaf had occupied on the tree, and also why they had grown in that direction. Knowing that adds to the joy I get from staring out at trees in our garden (just having a garden is pretty great). I’ve also enjoyed a lot of tree books lately, like Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, and the nonfiction book The Hidden Life of Trees — it explores the ways in which biologists have come to understand that trees are social beings. They work together in networks and share resources, to increase their resistance.
This is your fourth novel. Your first was published in 2011, when we still lived in London. Has your approach to writing changed over the years?
I think I give myself less of a hard time now if something on the page isn’t working. I used to just hammer away at that problem area for weeks, getting frustrated. Now I just abandon that particular problem, and come back to it later. It’s taken a while for me to realize that certain problems work themselves out in your subconscious. Spinning your wheels makes you feel like you’re working hard, but you’re just depleting energy better spent elsewhere.
Your last novel, High Dive, was inspired by historical details about the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, UK in 1984, and The Great Mistake is also inspired by real life events. What is it about history that allows you to be creative?
I like that real events offer a framework of fact that I can write within, but there are still gaps that I can imagine myself into. Somehow, lately, it’s comforting and productive for me to have the architecture of an actual event to work with — or, in the case of The Great Mistake, a real but mostly-forgotten historical figure. Lots of people say “write what you know,” but that seems boring to me — if I already knew it, I wouldn’t want or need to write it. I am hoping to discover something with each book.
A bookshelf of Jon’s novels, translated into several languages around the world
Speaking of history, let’s go back in time a little. Where did your desire to be an author come from, and who and what influenced you?
You’re reminding me that I had this whole life before you, all of it devoid of meaning. [Editor’s note: Obviously.] I remember some of it vaguely. I remember studying English at university and spending a lot of time — between the prescribed texts — reading Martin Amis novels in a branch of Starbucks on Park Street in Bristol. I’m not a megafan of his any more, especially, but reading Amis’s sentences, the sprint and stop of them, definitely made me feel being a writer could be fun, and I think that might have been when I first started trying to write my own fiction in any meaningful way. Although, saying that, I do remember being 12 or 13 years old and giving my mother a “novel” I had written and asking her to help me figure out how to send it to publishers. I got a rejection note back from Penguin Random House, which I think she still has somewhere; an intern must have had to type a pile of them each day. And now, nearly three decades later, I have a book coming out from that same publisher. The moral is: keep spamming people.
So, you were a fan of Martin Amis when you were growing up. Which authors are you inspired by today, and why?
I think my head is full of New York stories right now. Joseph Mitchell’s Up In The Old Hotel is a book I keep coming back to. That’s the collection of various stories and New Yorker profiles he wrote over his lifetime. He got in trouble because it turned out some of the ordinary New Yorkers he would profile in the magazine turned out to be made-up people or composites of characters he’d met on his travels. (This was before New Yorker profiles focussed only on famous people — at which point they became less interesting.) One line I remember is: “It takes almost a lifetime to learn how to do a thing simply.” And I just looked up this opener from another piece he wrote in 1956 called Mr Hunter’s Grave: “When things get too much for me, I put a wild-flower book and a couple of sandwiches in my pockets and go down to the South Shore of Staten Island and wander around awhile in one of the old cemeteries down there.” Isn’t that great? He’s sort of a ghost haunting his own bits of reportage.
After spending the best part of two decades living in two of the biggest cities in the world, London and New York, how does it feel to now be based in the countryside?
I think I’ve been surprised how good it feels to have space, and walls that don’t touch anyone else’s walls. I thought it might feel isolating but it actually feels freeing. I’m enjoying engaging with the bookstores and small businesses up here, but even more so the people. All change comes at a cost, but there’s a really vibrant and seemingly ever-expanding community of artists and writers and musicians up here — as this newsletter highlights. I think happiness is an outward thing rather than an inward thing, and that being up here has, for me, facilitated that outwardness so far, even during a tough COVID winter.
Since moving upstate, the sounds of car alarms and sirens have been replaced by birdsong and lawnmowers. How has the shift in surroundings influenced your writing?
I noticed that in my fiction right now, my sentences are getting longer. Maybe because there are less interruptions? Or, I turned 40 and got more long-winded. I can hold a thought a little bit longer up here, I think — before the kids wake up.
Jon as a kid in Surrey, England
With small kids to entertain, we have tried to explore a lot of the area since we moved last Summer. What things and places in the Hudson Valley are you most drawn to?
Black Dot in Stone Ridge for coffee. Arrowood Farms for Porch Beer. Hasbrouck House for cocktails and cauliflower. Kelder’s Farm for big bouncy trampoline-like membranes, Milkshake the llama, and fake cows to milk. Westwind Orchard for cider. Benny’s for pizza (I hope Benny reads this, I want to be his friend.) Marbletown Town Park for soccer. Roost for quesadillas. Rough Draft in Kingston for books and sausage rolls. Soy in Rosendale for Japanese home-cooking by a lovely chef. And always BjornQorn for popcorn — a key part of my daily diet.
You always have a lot of projects on the go and new ideas bubbling away. What can we expect to see from you next?
I’m hoping to write some more TV scripts, and maybe find time to write a bit more nonfiction too. I recently wrote an essay for the New York Times about the ways in which new types of historical fiction are emerging that capture how we live now in fascinating ways, and I enjoyed the break from fiction-writing that it offered. And I have another nonfiction piece I’ve been writing, about Andrew Haswell Green’s Central Park and public space in general, that’s due to come out in the New York Times too — the magazine. I’m also busy right now in my job publishing other people’s books at Catapult, including editing a fantastic novel by the Omani writer Jokha Alharthi, whose last novel Celestial Bodies was a lot of fun to work on too, even though the New Yorker said it was a book about “marriage and its miseries.”
Thank you Jon and congratulations again on novel number four! I will try not to read too much into that last comment. See you in the kitchen shortly.
You can get yourself a copy of The Great Mistake here — if you can, order online from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores, or drop into Rough Draft in Kingston for a signed copy. Plus, you can hear Jon tonight conversation with author Nicole Chung at an event hosted by BOMB magazine (register here).
Other chances to hear Jon speak at virtual events: Greenlight Bookstore on June 16th, Magic City Books on June 17th, Green Apple Books on June 23rd, Harper’s Magazine x Mark Twain House on June 24th.
More summer installments of the Catskill Culture Club to come, with movie makers, musicians, designers, writers, artists and much more. Subscribe to stay connected.