By Elizabeth Greenwood

At the New York Public Library late last month, Paul Holdengraber spoke with novelist Jonathan Lethem on reality - virtual or otherwise. Both wore blazers and jeans, and spoke to each other through headset microphones, like managers at the Gap. 

When Holdengraber, the library's public programs director, asked Lethem how he felt about relocating to California, Lethem mused that he saw more similarities than differences.  

"Madison Avenue and Hollywood are where the idea arises of selling the sizzle without the steak," Lethem said.  The author dropped the sizzle and served the audience rare New York sirloin all evening. 

Critics often categorize Lethem's fiction as "magical realism," a description he resents.  

"I have a hostility to the term that I'm often too polite to express," he said. "Like realism is this sturdy, universally recognized thing, and now we're just going to sprinkle some magic on it. Magic and realism.  I don't want to get anywhere near those two words together."  

Though Lethem's most recent work, Chronic City, contains elements of the absurd, he doesn't see it as separate from everyday existence. 

 "I don't think anyone has the luxury of living in a real reality anymore," he said. "The anxiety is making a meaningful life inside this fact."  

Lethem's quest for an authentic life took him on some winding paths.  He started out as a painter, though describes his work as "obnoxious." His film obsession led him to watch Star Wars twenty-one times.  "That was a mistake.  I should have stopped at nineteen." He flirted with spirituality, leading Quaker youth groups and developed skills that would later help him in his teaching career:  

"That's where I learned how to sit in a group and act like I knew what they should do," he said.

Lethem has always been interested in momentary utopias, like Fortress of Solitude's idyllic birth of hip-hop in Brooklyn. But these days he's more interested in creating sustainable culture.  

Lately, he's finding nourishment at home with the kids, as he settles into what he affectionately calls "the complacent middle age phase."  

Holdengraber echoed the sentiment, revealing that he bought his first pair of jeans in over two decades after his recent 50^th birthday. Lethem may find that overlap of the domestic and the cerebral at his new home in California, where he is looking forward to building a wireless keyboard into a treadmill, so that he may write and exercise simultaneously. Perhaps he will carve out a sustainable utopia from the carcass of reality after all.