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| Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro / Source Photograph by Graeme Maclean |
Elevador Pitches
by Jonathan Lethem
My hero / Karl Ove Knausgaard by Jonathan Lethem
A life in Writing / Jonathan Lethem
Pending Vegan By Jonathan Lethem
It’s a meet-cute: they get into the same self-driving car at exactly the same time. They’ve noticed each other before. Like “You’ve Got Mail” with no mail, just raw instinctive loathing. They’re stuck there. This kind of car has no windows, the inside is nearly featureless, nothing but a panel with buttons so you can request your destination. Then there’s nothing more to do but wait and either acknowledge the person beside you, or not.
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Horror movie, called “The Emperor’s New Flesh.” Half the people in the world get flesh-eating bacteria, but it isn’t considered polite to mention it.
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College roommates at Harvard, one from L.A., the other from New York City. One, the son of a famous artist, grew up in an atmosphere of underground celebrity. The other is from money, his father’s a rich financier. Things don’t go well. By the third week of the semester, the hipster kid has created a barrier of broken shards of glass on the carpet between the two sides of the room. You can take it from there.
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She’s conservative sexually, but promiscuous. Don’t touch that, don’t put it there, I don’t dig variations. But do it, do it again and again, do it hard, and then get lost. You’re just one of many, my friend. Him? He’s a solid citizen, a happy camper, and he stays the course with her, rides all the crazy changes. Until, one day, he doesn’t.
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This is a dystopia, but also a post-apocalypse. The dystopia survived the apocalypse, nobody can get their head around it—too bad! You can do post-apocalypse things, survivalist stuff, rationing, killing, new tribalism, but you can also go the dystopia route, struggle against the decadent lords and masters, smash the seductive machine that’s controlling your head. Just because you’re crazy doesn’t mean you’re not also stupid, and neither precludes the possibility that you’ve got your boot on the neck of someone even worse off.
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An abject postwar apartment building. The windows are aluminum-frame, the brickwork alternating yellow and ash-gray, the air-conditioners built in beneath the windows—as standardized as a Nazi or Soviet apartment block, really. None of the details are attractive—nobody likes the building—but it’s New York City, hey, you’re lucky to find an apartment at all.
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A game show, called “You’re Eating a Steak!” Vegetarians answer questions about cuts of meat. At the end, the contestant with the worst score eats a steak.
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He’s dead, she’s dead, everybody’s dead. But that’s just the beginning.
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Fourteen years into their extramarital affair, children from both families grown up and gone off to college, they’re as unhappy as an old married couple. It’s become a sexless secret affair, with all its own baggage by now—for each of them, like being in two bad marriages! But they can’t end it. So the cheaters go to secret couples therapy to try to break it off. A comedy.
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A bunch of people who work in the same building find one another mildly amusing, but not deeply interesting.
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A couple, two genius rock musicians, who can communicate effectively only through guitar solos. Nothing else—texts, e-mails, actual conversation, all fall flat. Sexually, she’s indifferent to him. We’d call it “Shred.”
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Workplace comedy meets reality show meets game show. We follow a number of different people on their way to their real-life workplaces. Scrupulous attention to their morning routines, the bitter struggles no one speaks of, get the kids off to school, the dog walked, survive the commute, the subway ever less congenial, the abject gobbled bagel—these early sequences have the grit of a Frederick Wiseman doc. But, when they arrive, they find their offices colonized by a roving game show called “You Fired Me!” A garish plastic set has been hurriedly constructed in the middle of the common area, the coffee-machine or copier room, whatever. Obnoxious, seventies-style crass game-show host, big hair, big style, doesn’t really have your best interests in mind. He sticks a microphone in their faces, asks their names. The workers we’ve been following then compete in a game show, answering questions about the relevancy of their daily activities to the bottom line. The winner fires the loser.
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Slower than ever, grinding of gears, weird whining sounds. One of these days, they’ll fix it, sure. Or it’ll plummet, pray you’re not aboard. You could be like the frog in the pan of water slowly coming to a boil, never complaining, never noticing how bad it’s got. Or make that two frogs, each pretending they’re alone.
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It’s called “Objection!” Lawyers from an enlightened future arrive in time machines, to sue us for being assholes. The judge is played by Sandra Bernhard.
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An elevator appears where there never was an elevator before. The doors never open. Some people start a religion based on what might be inside the elevator. Others just take the stairs.
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Sure, the old clown-car routine, we’ve seen it a million times, but get this: we do it from the perspective of the clowns this time. From inside the car. It’s swollen with clowns—this is a ragged-ass, sweaty gaggle, they’ve been working together for years, nothing funny about it at all, just get the fuck out and make the people happy already. Only here’s the twist: the door won’t open.
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You and me, stuck in here, going down.
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Jonathan Lethem teaches creative writing at Pomona College. His new book Brooklyn Crime Novel”
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