Best of both worlds Author Lethem is accustomed to dividing time both in life and writing

Jonathan Lethem lives between two worlds. On the one hand, he’s a fiction writer, whose 1999 hit detective story “Motherless Brooklyn” reveals the skill for keen observation he developed growing up in New York City. On the other hand, he’s an essayist, whose newest book, “The Disappointment Artist,” a collection of nine nonfiction works, digs deeper into his teen years, eccentric family life and literary fixations.

While his regular readers may expect him to stick with fiction, Lethem puts all his work into one category: “literary writing.”

“I’m not much of a purist,” said the writer, who was born in 1964 to Bohemian, artist-activist parents. “In the last few years of my fiction writing, I’ve been accessing my personal life more and more. I’ve been very free about putting information into my fiction, and there are parts of these essays that are confabulation, too. For this book, by the time I saw the rhythm being created from essay to essay with the last one as a capstone, I was hoping the book would give an overwhelming sense of epiphany.”

Lethem has written nine novels (and is at work on a 10th) and has contributed many essays to magazines. (The final essay in “The Disappointment Artist” was printed earlier this year in The New Yorker magazine.) The juggle between writing categories, however, is not the only split in his life. For the last two years, he and his wife, Amy Barnett, a filmmaker, have been dividing their time between an apartment in Brooklyn and a house in East Blue Hill. Lethem’s father, Richard, who is a painter, lives in Berwick, and Lethem has been visiting the coast of Maine for many years. While “Motherless Brooklyn,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is set primarily in New York City, the denouement takes place in Maine with fishermen, urchin divers and Down East accents.

Most of Lethem’s time in Maine has been spent in the southern region of the state. But a few years ago, he and Barnett were wooed to the Blue Hill peninsula by friends who had forsaken the urban setting for a quieter, less complicated family routine in Maine’s Brooklin. Their hosts, who are also writers, made the rural experience seem workable, and soon the Lethem-Barnetts were looking at real estate.

For a boy from the heart of New York’s trendy borough, Lethem has found the new country digs a respite from the city and an inspiration for his writing. Having spent time at artist colonies removed from urban distractions, he was ready for the part-time Maine relocation.

Sitting in the sun-washed farmhouse he and Barnett are renovating room by room, Lethem still wears a New York attitude – and a baseball cap. He is to the point, smoothly articulate, ready with his answers. On the urban-white walls of his office are shelves of books, including those by his Brooklin friends as well as large art books, a testament to the field Lethem once thought he might enter as a painter.

Although Lethem was a devout reader from an early age, his parents also prized visual arts and Lethem, it turned out, was gifted in more than one field.

“I took art quite seriously for a while, and I was good at it,” said Lethem. “But the art world didn’t attract me at all. The writing world did. And that was always the giveaway: how much more interested I was in writers than in artists.”

Writers, filmmakers, musicians and pop figures populate “The Disappointment Artist,” a celebration and reflection of Lethem’s childhood era in which pop culture gained credence in philosophical and academic realms. (He tried college and dropped out.) Among the ranks of his heroes were John Wayne, Stanley Kubrick, C-3PO, Philip K. Dick, comic book characters and underdogs.

“I’ve always preferred dark horses and underrated things,” said Lethem, who will return to Bennington College in Vermont, his almost alma mater, in June for the ultimate drop-out vindication – he’s giving the commencement address. “I’ve been fascinated by lesser writers. It helps you know the writing world, not just the peaks. I thought I’d always be the dark horse. I thought I’d be reprinted out of neglect. When ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ found its place in the world, I couldn’t occupy that stance anymore. I wasn’t underrated or neglected. I was kind of in fashion and had an unexpected, pleasurable amount of operating room. I learned there wasn’t much to cherish about neglect and struggle. I wondered instead what kind of work lesser-known writers would have done had they been better cared for.”

In “The Disappointment Artist,” Lethem’s characters are his family members, especially his mother who died when he was an adolescent, his parents’ lovers, his school friends, subway riders (as well as subway stops), neighborhood boys and the city itself. He explores his own sentiments and experiences as a teenager. Though not quite memoir, the book is nevertheless a form of autobiography that morphs into cultural commentary.

In the spirit of writer Philip Lopate, Lethem prefers to call the book a collection of “personal essays.”

“I was coming of age in an unusually fervent family, in an unusually fervent social milieu, in an unusually fervent time and place in this country,” said Lethem. “I lucked into on the one hand chaos, and on the other hand richness, access and opportunity. I embraced it like a drunkard. I can’t say how many times as a teenager I thought I was luckier than anybody I knew. I had a thrilling childhood.”

Yet Lethem repeatedly points out in the book that his tendency was to look backward rather than into his own generation for connection. In the essay “Identifying with Your Parents, or The Return of the King,” he writes: “We ’70s kids couldn’t have been issued a clearer message: We’d missed the party.”

“People our age did kind of grow up with a generation that was hard to follow, and it was difficult to blame them for any version they chose. I’m mostly fascinated with my parents’ generosity and bravery,” said Lethem. “I always identified with the adults around me and grabbed at their cultural material instinctively. But I also think I’m instinctively drawn to the specifics of the 1950s and the flavor of discovery of American culture that was very alive for me. There’s a self-consciousness of loving pop culture and the freedom to acquire it as a way of life.”

It’s unlikely that Maine will provide Lethem with pop culture material. But he’s not living on a sparsely populated road overlooking a quiet bay for views of the city and its characters. Of those, he has had plenty. And it’s not as if he finds Maine boring; he was “sweetly surprised” that the East Blue Hill scene is a “really bubbly one.”

Will he ever set a novel – or perhaps an essay – entirely in Maine?

“I’m very slow to write about new places,” Lethem said. “New York is the only place I’ve demonstrated my belief in fiction. I’m a pretty urban writer. But it’s probably inevitable that I’ll write about Maine.”

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.