Wit & Attitude Quote by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem is confessing a craft addiction: the recurring urge to build a little trapdoor in the novel where reason can fall through and language gets to misbehave. “Allowed” is the tell. This isn’t simply about depicting eccentric people; it’s about authorial permission slips, the ways fiction polices speech and then occasionally grants a character diplomatic immunity from coherence. The self-mockery of “to put it idiotically simply” is doing double duty: it deflates the lofty idea of “the irrational” while also signaling that the urge is basic, almost bodily. He’s embarrassed by how persistent it is, which is another way of admitting how necessary it feels.

The subtext is that “talking crazy” is often where the good stuff hides: buried desires, cultural static, illicit truths that a well-behaved realist voice can’t say without sounding like a sermon. Lethem’s work, steeped in genre hybridity and pop detritus, has always treated the novel as a place where the sanctioned and the disreputable rub shoulders. A character who can rant, digress, hallucinate, or speak in broken registers becomes a pressure valve for the whole book, letting it smuggle in social critique, comedy, paranoia, and tenderness without announcing itself as Important.

Contextually, this reads like a writer thinking aloud about repetition and signature. Many authors deny their tics; Lethem names his. He’s also hinting at the ethics: who gets labeled “crazy,” who gets listened to anyway, and how “craziness” can be both a caricature and a kind of freedom. In his hands, it’s less pathology than a narrative loophole: a way to expand what a novel is permitted to sound like.