Understanding Jonathan Lethem

Matthew Luter

Description

Understanding Jonathan Lethem is a study of the novels, short fiction, and nonfiction on a wide range of subjects in the arts by American novelist Jonathan Lethem, who is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for Motherless Brooklyn, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Gun, with Occasional Music. Matthew Luter explores the key contemporaries of and influences on Lethem, who is the Roy Edward Disney Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College.

Luter begins this volume by explaining how Lethem's innovative and provocative essay on creative appropriation, "The Ecstasy of Influence," differs from other writing about influence, suggesting an artistic mode that celebrates thoughtful borrowing. Readings of Lethem's three major novels follow: taken together, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City present a novelist coming to terms with the joys and downsides of artistic influence. Luter concludes the edition with an examination of Lethem's third collection, Lucky Alan: And Other Stories.

Borrowing openly and promiscuously from earlier traditions both high and low (experimental fiction, comic books, art film, detective novels), Lethem displays a career-long interest in questioning what literary originality might mean in a postmodern age. Some suggest that such borrowings indicate a literary well that has run dry, making writers such as Lethem mere patchwork artists. Luter argues instead that Lethem's propensity for wearing his influences and obsessions on his sleeve encourages new thought about originality itself. Out with "it's all been done" and in with "look at all that's been done, and all that we can still do with it!"

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• América
• Junie
• The Realist
• First appearance
• Originality
• Jonathan Lethem
• General officer
• A. A. Milne
• Ray Bradbury
• John Barth
• David Foster Wallace
• General
• American
• Manny Farber
• James Agee
• Alan Alexander Milne
• Don DeLillo
• Robert Siodmak
• Warren Zevon
• J. D. Salinger
• Nicholas Ray
• Jonathan Franzen
• John Huston
• Jane Jacobs
• D. H. Lawrence

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611175134
• Langue: English

Extrait

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
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Chapter 1
Understanding Jonathan Lethem
Chapter 2
Motherless Brooklyn Self-Aware Influence and Stylized Genre
Chapter 3
The Fortress of Solitude Experience and Interpretation
Chapter 4
Chronic City : Ecstatic Appreciation and Its Discontents
Chapter 5
Recent Lethem: The Critic and the Realist
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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, structures, 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. Clich 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 facing 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 worldview 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, however, 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 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 prom