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Lennon’s latest explores shared psychic burden of war

By John Kenyon

J. Robert Lennon capped a nice novel-every-two-years schedule with the 2003 publication of his critically acclaimed fourth novel, Mailman, and then seemed to vanish for six years.

He didn’t, of course. Anyone who followed his career at all knew he had published a collection of 100 very short stories in the UK in 2005, and that his follow-up novel, Happyland, was dropped by his publisher because it feared a lawsuit over its protagonist’s not-so-thinly-veiled resemblance to the founder of the American Girl doll company. That book eventually ran as a serial in Harper’s magazine in 2006. But as far as one could tell from U.S. bookshelves, he took a long break.

“In a way I’d be happy to let them believe that,” he says of readers. “I think there’s some cachet to being off the scene for a while and returning. You get publicity for a comeback.”

You also get publicity for publishing two books at once, which is what Lennon has been able to do this year thanks to Graywolf Press. The St. Paul-based independent imprint finally gives U.S. readers the chance to read that story collection, Pieces for the Left Hand, and his latest novel, Castle. He reads from Castle at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. in Iowa City.

Lennon says he would love for someone to publish Happyland in its full state at some point, and would consider publishing a crime novel he also wrote over the past few years.

“I’ve never been a great-selling author,” he says. “So it’s hard to convince someone to do something like that. Maybe (the crime novel) will come out some day in some form. Maybe under a pseudonym.”

In the meantime, there is Castle, which tells of Eric Loesch, a man who moves back to his hometown in upstate New York, buys a large piece of land and a house, and soon discovers that a castle sits on a small parcel in the middle of the land that he doesn’t own.

Over the course of this short, occasionally disturbing, occasionally funny book, Lennon reveals what led Loesch to this spot and uncovers the provenance of the castle and its connection to Loesch.

Like Mailman and, to an extent, an earlier novel, The Funnies, Castle deals with a male protagonist who has trouble fitting into the role society proscribes.

“I never thought about my work as being consistently about that subject, but I think you’re right,” he says. “My life is very nice now. I have a decent career, a good job, married, friends. But that adolescent feeling of not fitting in, I ended up being bananas about that. It was a formative period of my life. The idea of men not able to live up to the expectation of others of them as men, I find that funny, and it has a pathos to it.”

In this case, he says, the book is less “an exploration of masculine failure than it is about the necessity of someone being supported by a system and the failure of that system to lend the support that person needs.” Loesch was in the military for years, but when his latest assignment to build a prison in Iraq leads to less-than-desireable results, he is cut loose.

“I feel like the novel as a whole is a way of explaining to himself what happened,” he says.

The castle and what happens there then become an allegory of sorts for the war and the way Americans have been desensitized to the things being done in their name.

“My intent overall with the book is that, even those of us who didn’t agree with what our government was doing during the first years of the Iraq war, we share collectively in the responsibility, because we are Americans,” he says. “Not many people are really talking about that. It’s a psychic burden that’s probably going to last far beyond the end of the war. I wanted to talk about that in the form of a single character.”

Lennon may have trouble continuing to tap into the feeling of “masculine failure” he mentioned above. As he says, he has a family, a good career and, for the last couple of years, a good job teaching writing at Cornell University in Ithaca., N.Y.

He says the job has restricted when he can write, but that the university’s expectation that writers on its faculty will actually write has been nurturing.

“The work is not taxing, as, say, manual labor would be,” he says. “It’s intellectually satisfying. For a long time I didn’t want to teach creative writing. I had seen other writers who weren’t doing as much good work because they were teaching all the time. But I came around to thinking that I might have something to say. After four novels, I felt less like an imposter.”

Lennon has other outlets for his creativity. He keeps the blog Ward Six with his wife, the writer Rhian Ellis, where they write about literature and writing. He records music as a one-man band under the name Inverse Room and says he also likes photography.

“I sort of feel it all comes from a similar place,” he says. “Trying to apprehend fleeting things and capture them. Writing is the thing I’m most serious about. You can do it alone. Nobody bothers you.”

To read more from John Kenyon's interview with J. Robert Lennon, visit Kenyon's blog, Thing's I'd Rather Be Doing.