Word: lethem
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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David Foster Wallace is 44 years old. Jonathan Franzen is 46. Jonathan Lethem, 42. Michael Chabon...
...people who think about such things, anyway--think of as the young American novelists. And even by the notoriously elastic standards of the literary world--the only place on earth where you can still be a wunderkind at the age of 30--42 is not especially youthful. Wallace, Franzen, Lethem and Chabon may be great writers, but one thing they are not is young writers...
...literary critics' darling, JONATHAN LETHEM spends a lot of time pondering guys in capes. His novel, The Fortress of Solitude, set in Brooklyn, N.Y., and various short stories include lovingly written passages on superheroes. Lethem is penning a Marvel comic, Omega the Unknown, due in 2006. "Marvel dared me to put my love on the line," says the author, who is reviving a little-known character from the '70s. Omega is "kind of a meta-superhero," he says, a "bewildered visitor to the Planet Earth" with--yes--a cape. Next we'd like to finally see that Philip Roth...
...have great, funky, unclassifiable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, Susanna Clarke and David Mitchell. And like Chabon, who in addition to writing The Final Solution has edited an anthology of hybrid highbrow-lowbrow tales, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (Vintage; 328 pages). And like Jonathan Lethem, who has just published Men and Cartoons (Doubleday; 160 pages), a collection of highly literary stories about, among other things, superheroes...
...land between popular and literary fiction is fertile, but it can be perilous. Lethem is no stranger to it. He won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn, which is basically a hard-boiled mystery retrofitted with great writing and highfalutin themes. Most of the stories in Men and Cartoons play in the nerdier realms of comic books and science fiction--one revolves around a mysterious aerosol spray that reveals lost belongings and lost lovers; another recounts the sad, seedy later life of a retired comic-book hero named Super Goat Man. But while Chabon builds...