Understanding Jonathan Lethem Understanding Contemporary American Literature Matthew J
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UNDERSTANDING JONATHAN LETHEM UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor Volumes on Edward Albee | Sherman Alexie | Nelson Algren | Paul Auster Nicholson Baker | John Barth | Donald Barthelme | The Beats Thomas Berger | The Black Mountain Poets | Robert Bly | T. C. Boyle Truman Capote | Raymond Carver | Michael Chabon | Fred Chappell Chicano Literature | Contemporary American Drama Contemporary American Horror Fiction Contemporary American Literary Theory Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926–1970 Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970–2000 Contemporary Chicana Literature | Pat Conroy | Robert Coover | Don DeLillo Philip K. Dick | James Dickey | E. L. Doctorow | Rita Dove | Dave Eggers John Gardner | George Garrett | Tim Gautreaux | John Hawkes | Joseph Heller Lillian Hellman | Beth Henley | James Leo Herlihy | David Henry Hwang John Irving | Randall Jarrell | Charles Johnson | Diane Johnson Adrienne Kennedy | William Kennedy | Jack Kerouac | Jamaica Kincaid Etheridge Knight | Tony Kushner | Ursula K. Le Guin | Jonathan Lethem Denise Levertov | Bernard Malamud | David Mamet | Bobbie Ann Mason Colum McCann | Cormac McCarthy | Jill McCorkle | Carson McCullers W. S. Merwin | Arthur Miller | Stephen Millhauser | Lorrie Moore Toni Morrison’s Fiction | Vladimir Nabokov | Gloria Naylor | Joyce Carol Oates Tim O’Brien | Flannery O’Connor | Cynthia Ozick | Suzan-Lori Parks | Walker Percy Katherine Anne Porter | Richard Powers | Reynolds Price | Annie Proulx Thomas Pynchon | Theodore Roethke | Philip Roth | Richard Russo | May Sarton Hubert Selby, Jr. | Mary Lee Settle | Sam Shepard | Neil Simon Isaac Bashevis Singer | Jane Smiley | Gary Snyder | William Stafford Robert Stone | Anne Tyler | Gerald Vizenor | Kurt Vonnegut David Foster Wallace | Robert Penn Warren | James Welch | Eudora Welty Edmund White | Colson Whitehead | Tennessee Williams August Wilson | Charles Wright UNDERSTANDING JONATHAN LETHEM Matthew Luter The University of South Carolina Press © 2015 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ ISBN 978-1-61117-512-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-513-4 (ebook) Front cover photograph by Fred Benenson For everyone who has ever recommended a book, movie, or record to me and for those loved ones of mine for whom I have done the same CONTENTS Series Editor’s Preface ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii Chapter 1 Understanding Jonathan Lethem 1 Chapter 2 Motherless Brooklyn Self-Aware Influence and Stylized Genre 27 Chapter 3 The Fortress of Solitude Experience and Interpretation 48 Chapter 4 Chronic City: Ecstatic Appreciation and Its Discontents 79 Chapter 5 Recent Lethem: The Critic and the Realist 104 Notes 115 Bibliography 119 Index 123 SERIES Editor’s PREFACE The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931–2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature. As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, “the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed.” Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers—explicating their material, language, struc- tures, themes, and perspectives—and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion. In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli’s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word. Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I must first express my appreciation to Linda Wagner-Martin, for support, encouragement, and irreplaceable editorial insight throughout the process of creating this book, and to Jim Denton and Linda Haines Fogle at the University of South Carolina Press for the opportunity to have my work appear in such an esteemed series. Many thanks to my family and their continued interest in what I am reading and thinking. Though they may not remember it as well as I do, when I was in college and graduate school with no great amount of pocket money, they often bought me new books by Lethem in hardcover to spare me the impatient wait for the paperbacks. Please consider this book a return on your investment from several years ago. Thanks as well to the many close friends who have checked in on me, cheered me on, and, sometimes, cheered me up as I have researched and written this book, including several who have become fellow Lethem readers. Cliché as it is to say, I could not have done it without you. My appreciation to my colleagues and the administrators at the Webb School of Knoxville for helping make it possible to complete a book while fac- ing the challenges of starting a new job on a new campus in a new city. I have also had the good fortune to teach Lethem’s work, particularly The Fortress of Solitude and “The Ecstasy of Influence,” to bright and talented students at UNC–Chapel Hill and Davidson College. Their reactions, insights, and good-humored class discussion have been invaluable to me as I’ve formed, shared, and tested my own interpretations of Lethem’s work—my thanks to them. Thanks go to all of the critics, readers, and reviewers thinking aloud about Lethem in print, and especially James Peacock, for starting a wonderful critical on-the-page conversation that I feel honored to continue here. And to Lethem himself, for Conrad Metcalf, Sergius Gogan, and everything in between. ABBREVIATIONS Textual references to Lethem’s work and to his statements in interviews are cited parenthetically in text using the abbreviations below. CC Chronic City Conv Conversations with Jonathan Lethem DG Dissident Gardens FoM Fear of Music MB Motherless Brooklyn TDA The Disappointment Artist TEoI The Ecstasy of Influence TFoS The Fortress of Solitude CHAPTER 1 Understanding Jonathan Lethem Jonathan Lethem’s popularity with critics, reviewers, and readers has steadily increased over the two-decade period he has been publishing fiction and essays. His versatility as a critic and wide range of artistic interests make his world- view particularly appealing to culturally omnivorous readers, those who see no cognitive dissonance in reading high modernism by day and watching horror flicks by night. Examples of his culturally omnivorous output would include music writing for Rolling Stone, a 2007–8 ten-issue revival of the 1970s comic book Omega the Unknown, a pseudonymous sports-novel-parody about the New York Mets, and a book-length sort-of-academic study of a 1980s satirical action flick that starred a pro wrestler. As a result of this eclecticism, Lethem’s body of work can seem unwieldy and even intimidating to new readers, how- ever, so a goal in this book is to arrange Lethem’s major fiction and essays so that a few key recurring concerns can be highlighted and traced over the course of a career. The body of criticism about Lethem’s work is currently small but rapidly growing. For all the attention that Lethem’s work receives in the literary press and for all his status as a major contemporary American novelist, there is as of yet only one previous book-length study of Lethem’s work. James Peacock’s monograph Jonathan Lethem (2012) uses genre as a lens for interpretation of every Lethem novel up to and including Chronic City. Given that Lethem began his career and found his initial literary successes as a writer of science fiction, Peacock’s focus on genre is apt. By all means, that critical lens is useful, given how adeptly and frequently Lethem has borrowed the conventions of various forms of genre fiction: the western, sci-fi, the detective novel, dystopian fiction, and the coming-of-age novel, just to name a few. He knows these popular forms well, and he defends and reinvigorates them in his own work, all the while 2 UNDERSTANDING JONATHAN LETHEM refusing to consider these popular modes of fiction less significant than the grand tradition outside of which they usually operate. He writes for posterity and takes literary history and criticism seriously, but he has also written and spoken frequently about the formative experience of voraciously reading—and unapologetically loving—genre fiction, particularly sci-fi and detective novels. Borrowing openly and promiscuously from earlier traditions both high and low, Lethem displays a career-long interest in questioning what literary origi- nality means in a postmodern age.