Jonathan Lethem, Brooklyn Ex-Pat, Feels Right At Home In LA

Brooklyn Jonathan is acclimating well to his life as LA Jonathan.

Lethem, that is, famed Brooklyn scribe who in the fall announced he would be moving to California for a writing post at Pomona College -- the same post that David Foster Wallace held before his death.

The author, whose books "Motherless Brooklyn" and "Fortress Of Solitude" chronicle the quotidian life of Boerum Hill and Park Slope, recently told the LA Times that New York had become an impossible place to live and write.

"I do love New York, but it's also unbearable to me in some ways, and I compulsively leave it behind," Lethem says. "It's not the best place to write. The mental traffic level is very high there. Here you have traffic problems; there, you have mental traffic problems."

Writing is a solitary existence, Lethem says, and all the noise and distraction made it impossible to write -- let only flourish in a sea of competing writers. "Brooklyn is repulsive with novelists, it's cancerous with novelists," Lethem said. "That can sometimes be too much."

Head over to the LA Times for the full profile.