This innovative series reflects the breadth and diversity of writing over the last thirty years, and provides critical evaluations of established, emerging and critically neglected writers - mixing the canonical with the unexpected. It explores notions of the contemporary and analyses current and developing modes of representation with a focus on individual writers and their work. The series seeks to reflect both the growing body of academic research in the field, and the increasing prevalence of contemporary American and Canadian fiction on programmes of study in institutions of higher education around the world. Central to the series is a concern...

What do you get if you cross detection and science fiction? What happens when you stage a sci-fi picaresque inside an animal’s body? And what happens when a kangaroo develops the power of speech and starts wielding a gun? The punchlines are all to be found in Jonathan Lethem’s writing, and they are only partially comic. This book proceeds from the broad and frequently rehearsed observation that Jonathan Lethem’s novels and short stories subvert established fictional genres in some way, and that the frequent intermingling and clashing of genres is reflected in the bizarre characteristics displayed by many of the...

The paratextual features of Lethem’s debut novel,Gun, With Occasional Music(1994) enact their own ambiguous evolutions, and this chapter begins by unpacking sets of significances from these features that will then be applied to the novel as a whole. Patterned with crosshairs, the cover of the most recent Faber edition unashamedly declares the hard-boiled, noir credentials of the narrative within. Indeed the cover design, visually indebted to the famous shot in John Huston’s film adaptation ofThe Maltese Falconin which Sam Spade’s partner Miles is murdered, can be regarded as a distillation of noir into some of its...

Amnesia is a kind of immobility. To obliterate connections between past and present is to preclude the possibility of movement or change in the future, to condemn oneself to the anaesthetised drudgery of the endless present. It is appropriate, then, that Jonathan Lethem so often employs spatial metaphors in his interrogations of the condition of American amnesia. InAmnesia Moon(1995), which collides the road narrative with dystopian science fiction, the road performs this metaphorical function. Mikhail Bakhtin cites the road as an example of a literary chronotope, something he defines as ‘the primary means for materializing time in space...

As these words are written, Humanities scholars across the United Kingdom are engaged in urgent dialogues about the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework, or REF. Chief amongst their concerns is the increased emphasis on ‘impact’ outside the academy. According to the Higher Education Funding Council for England, ‘significant additional recognition will be given where researchers build on excellent research to deliver demonstrable benefits to the economy, society, public policy, culture and quality of life’ (2009).¹ While it is easy to conceive of the impact medical research or stem cell research or structural engineering research might have, it is perhaps harder to...

So far it has been argued that there is a high degree of correspondence between form and content in Lethem’s work, and that the genre decisions he makes are integral to his view of the world as a series of semi-imagined subcultural groupings or, to reprise Rick Altman’s term,‘constellated communities’(Altman, 1999: 161). In the eccentric family unit formed at the end ofAmnesia Moonand in Alice Coombs’ parallel campus world, one sees a yearning for workable mini-utopias congruent with the implicit (and sometimes explicit) ties formed between readers of genre fiction. Genres reflect, initiate and are complex...

In interview, Jonathan Lethem has repeatedly evoked the idea of ‘dreaming his way back’ to the borough of his birth. His tendency to divide his time between Brooklyn and other places such as Toronto or Maine he explains like this: ‘Dreaming my way back to Brooklyn seems to be a necessary part of loving it for me – continuing to also love it from afar’ (Birnbaum, 2004). Elsewhere, in ‘Patchwork Planet: Notes for a Prehistory of the Gentrification of Gowanus’, he remarks: ‘In the neighborhood of Gowanus, Boerum Hill, I’m forever a child’ (www.jonathanlethem.com). It is true that Lethem’s three...

Jason Picone compares the author ofThe Fortress of Solitude(2003) to its protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, and says: ‘Much like Dylan, who cannot escape the confines of 1970s Brooklyn even after moving to 1990s California, Jonathan Lethem is always staying home’ (Picone, 2004: 29). Despite Lionel Essrog’s exhortations at the end ofMotherless Brooklynto ‘Put an egg in your shoe, and beat it. Make like a tree, and leave. Tell your story walking’ (Lethem, 1999: 311), the first part ofThe Fortress of Solitudereturns us, in dreamily descriptive, nostalgic prose, to the streets of his Brooklyn childhood. Indeed,...

In Chapter 4 it was noted that a feature of the novel in all its abundance is the misleading opportunity it appears to afford for interpretive success. ‘Come and get me’, it seems to say (it is no coincidence that Frank Kermode dubs reading for the obvious primary sense ‘carnal’ (Kermode, 1979: 9)), before closing the door and taking refuge in its own secrets. That so many scholars are still analysing Henry James stories is testament to the texts’ continued determination to deceive and to keep their secrets. If we do not make allowances for this, Kermode implies, if we...

Anyone who has read ‘Five Fucks’, ‘Sleepy People’ (both 1996) orThis Shape We’re Inmight find it surprising that Lethem claims to be an ‘extremely traditional writer’ (Personal Interview, 2009). He is ‘so devoted to the traditional means’ of ‘scenes and characters and dialogue and paragraph and plot’ and although he sometimes makes ‘intertextual jokes’, he believes there is nothing in his work to ‘threaten anyone short of the mandarins who just don’t want the Fantastic Four ever to be mentioned inside a novel’ (Personal Interview, 2009). Citing as a specific example the insertion of the ‘Liner Note’ into...