Word: lethem
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Following a side trip to Los Angeles indie-rock land in You Don't Love Me Yet, novelist Jonathan Lethem returns to the territory that has proved particularly fruitful for him this past decade - his home town of New York City. Yet, unlike Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, his latest, Chronic City, is set across the East River, in a Manhattan just a few degrees askew from reality. Lethem spoke to TIME about the American obsession with its own pop culture and why book readings are typically a snore...
...same. His seemingly infinite naïveté parallels our own; his paranoia is ours; and when revelations unfold, they’re for us, not just Chase. But in spite of this gambit, and the inherent ambition behind any setting as complex as this one, Lethem spoon-feeds the reader tropes from contemporary literature instead of developing anything uniquely satisfying, rendering “Chronic City” otherwise insubstantial.The novel begins as Insteadman’s meets one Perkus Tooth, an aging, roving-eyed rock critic and strikingly disparate figure whose hovel on 84th street provides the setting...
...ascendancy in the mass market publishing industry, Dovey sees the cards as stacked against female novelists of a more literary inclination. “I suppose there are young female authors who are taken as seriously as, say, the Jonathans—you know, Jonathan Safran [Foer], Jonathan Lethem, or Jonathan Franzen—but not many of them. I can’t think of any right now,” she says, pausing for a moment. “Nicole Krauss, but she’s married to one of the Jonathans.”For Dovey, then...
...what if-just for argument's sake-you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world-Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them- and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list...
...policed. Now there's an attractive trend toward hybridizing high and low, grafting the brilliant verbal intelligence of high literature onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction. "That used to be a real novelty act, or something that was done with kid gloves or with heavy irony," notes Lethem. "Now, a lot of writing has a very natural degree of engagement with the vernacular culture." Look at someone like Sittenfeld, whose Prep, a wildly readable account of a Midwestern girl floundering at an lite Eastern boarding school, became a surprise best seller. Is she a literary writer...