Word: lethem
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...determined school of writers who are carefully, lovingly grafting the prose craft of the literary heap onto the sinewy, satisfying plots of the trashy one to produce hybrid novels that offer the pleasures of both. Writers like Donna Tartt and Alice Sebold, Neal Stephenson and Iain Banks, Jonathan Lethem and Margaret Atwood, writers whose work will most likely define--more than anything by brilliant mandarins like Wallace or Franzen--what will be known to later generations as the 21st century novel. The next literary wave will come not from above but from below, from the foil-covered, embossed-lettered paperbacks...
...Lethem said, is the physical manifestation of childhood imagination. “The superhero image in the book, the yearning to be able to fly…I’ve related to. [They’re] adolescent feelings, wanting to disguise yourself, transcend yourself. For me, it wasn’t that big a jump to interject superheroes in the book...
...setting, an intensely detailed Brooklyn in a vital and specific time, Lethem explains that “I was letting it lead me through the book…I wanted to really let myself write about the place that moved me.” Perhaps noting the critical strain that has resulted from such a jam-packed style—a style dubbed “hysterical realism” by some critics—he added that “I think there are a lot of pages of scenery, but I hope it’s as emotionally...
...Lethem, who was born and lives in Brooklyn, was asked how much of the novel is autobiographical. “There’s a lot of me in Dylan,” he said, though he added that “my autobiographical sentiment covers more of the book than Dylan.” He described some of the incidents in the book as “experiences I know about but never...
...Lethem said he usually begins writing a novel with an image: “What I hold in my head is an image of a book I want to write—what I know are codes, the image of an ending,” and beyond this, he said, he must fill in the gaps. Writing is an endless process of decision-making, and the author must always be “bridging across these dark zones to the next node of light...