As I expected, he was thoughtful, wise, and occasionally funny. He spoke mostly about his new novel, Chronic City, which I haven't read yet. But I've followed him since his first book, Gun, with Occasional Music, hit the speculative fiction world. I read the next novel and lots of short stories, but lost track of him until Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, two love letters to Brooklyn.
Motherless Brooklyn is a straight detective story with a memorable, Tourette's-afflicted protagonist (and is scheduled to be an Edward Norton-written, -directed, and -starring movie next year). The Fortress of Solitude is semiautobiographical, touching on the sixties, racial tension, music, class -- and, oh yeah, there's a magic ring that lets the main characters fly.
I most enjoy his nonfiction. At last night's talk he mentioned that his alter ego in The Fortress of Solitude grows up to be a rock critic, which seemed to cause a lot of people to remember the work he'd written for Rolling Stone -- something he'd never done. Among the seemingly fooled were the editors of Rolling Stone, who out of the blue gave him plum jobs like interviewing Bob Dylan and spending a week in a James Brown recording session. (They're great articles, despite his inexperience.)The Disappointment Artist is my favorite of his works, comprising a set of critical essays on things like John Ford's The Searchers, Edward Dahlberg, and the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station in Brooklyn. But, really, these are each fragments of a memoir, his own life reflected through his pop-culture obsessions and discoveries -- explicitly so in the the last piece, "The Beards," which jumps back and forth in the '70s and '80s, using albums, films, and books as framing devices for memories of his mother, before, during, and after her illness and death.
Recommended: his tour de force article on plagiarism in Harper's, The Ecstasy of Influence. If you read this, you must continue to the very end.
I had no questions to ask last night -- I'd prefer to have a long dinner with him -- but if I did, it would have tried to draw a line between his comments about "remix" culture, which he supports fully (see his Promiscuous Materials), and his creations of alternate, plausible histories, like his new novel imagining a Werner Herzog film in which he chases Marlon Brando around, asking questions that Brando only echos back at him. That is, on the one end the creation of new works largely using fragments of old works, and on the other inserting new fictions inside nonfictional settings.
