Chloe Aridjis and Lynne Tillman in Conversation

“I like magic acts, they raise the question of distraction and attention—paying attention, but to what?”

Optical instruments can:
Amplify or magnify
Get in the way of seeing something clearly
Induce and include spectacles

Every now and then I’m reminded that transmissions between London and New York can be volatile and erratic, and any signal fault may result in important elements of the literary conversation not making it overseas. And so it was that I came to Lynne Tillman not via her books but through our close mutual friend the English writer and artist Stewart Home. He would mention her often, thought I’d really like her writing, and reckoned we would have a lot to talk about were we ever to meet. Lynne Tillman. Her name began to resurface, courtesy of other friends too, and my curiosity grew. I read her miniature essays in frieze and ordered her books at the library, immediately struck by the tremendous control over the prose, the captivating experiments with form, the way in which a certain downtown jauntiness was melded with high erudition. I’ve always resisted the contemporary but wondered whether through her eyes I would finally come to embrace it. Then last autumn Tank magazine asked whether I’d accept to be in dialogue with her here in London, she was about to arrive, they said, to discuss her new novel, Men and Apparitions, and before long we found ourselves—Lynne, Stewart and I—sitting in a row facing a room full of people. Our first dialogue was public, and then moved into quieter spheres.

This year sees the much deserved reissue of Lynne’s 2006 novel, her fifth, American Genius, A Comedy, a dystopian monologue delivered by a female former American historian, doing time at (perhaps) a mental institution, the narrative as densely woven and patterned as the textiles that fascinate her. The essayistic digressions are like runaway threads but nothing unravels, nothing unspools, on the contrary, it all feeds back into the greater whole, and from the mass of observations and the loops and routes of an obsessive mind emerges an intricate and enthralling weave.

—Chloe Aridjis

CHLOE ARIDJIS: What is your favorite optical instrument and why?

LYNNE TILLMAN: First, I’d have to say my glasses. I can see without them, so, if there were a war in NYC, say, and if they broke, I could get by. (But what about my antidepressant?) The zoom lens on a camera draws me. Its artificiality also disturbs me. To get close up and yet be far off appeals to my voyeurism, and ever since seeing Antonioni’s Blow Up, which affected photography,...