On Influence and (Un)Originality. A Review of Matthew Luter’s Understanding Jonathan Lethem

Abstract

On Influence and (Un)Originality.A Review of Matthew Luter’s Understanding Jonathan Lethem David Coughlan (bio) Luter, Matthew. Understanding Jonathan Lethem. U of South Carolina P, 2015. Just the second monograph published on the work of Jonathan Lethem, following James Peacock’s 2012 volume, Matthew Luter’s Understanding Jonathan Lethem is issued as part of the University of South Carolina’s Understanding Contemporary American Literature series. It provides an engaging and accessible account of Lethem’s three most high-profile novels, Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and Chronic City (2009), together with an analysis of selected short stories and essays. Luter’s welcome book is an enjoyable and illuminating read, and its author has a clear appreciation and enthusiasm for Lethem’s work, as can be seen in the way he burrows out the references and allusions buried in the texts. The particular strengths of the book lie in the clarity of the structure and especially in its choice of an effective and fitting approach to Lethem’s work, focusing on the writer’s “career-long interest in questioning what literary originality means in a postmodernist age” of “collage, pop art, pastiche, remixing, or sampling” (2). The book’s introductory chapter, in addition to providing a short biography, situates Lethem in the context of three studies on literary influence: Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence (1973), which provides a “definition of influence that Lethem has spent an entire career rejecting” (Luter 9), given its emphasis on the anxiety of the text, cultural belatedness, and “a poet’s melancholy at his lack of priority” (Bloom qtd. in Luter 9); “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967) by John Barth, with whom Lethem shares an appreciation for the work of Italo Calvino; and Michael Chabon’s “Fan Fictions” (2008), in which Chabon concludes that “all novels are sequels; influence is bliss” (qtd. in Luter 12). Luter suggests that Lethem “sounds most like Chabon when he discusses his vision for himself as a writer.” He illuminates Lethem’s perspective with a detailed analysis of his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” (2007), “both a brilliant defense of creative appropriation and a call for a new, more generous understanding of copyright” (13). Luter then identifies two of the most significant influences on Lethem, sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick and American film critic Manny Farber, before moving to discuss a number of Lethem’s earlier short stories, particularly “Vanilla Dunk” from The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996), drawing attention to the ways in which Lethem recontextualizes and reuses elements from earlier texts and, therefore, providing a useful starting point for the following considerations of influence and originality in the novels. The second chapter is about Motherless Brooklyn, a book that Luter describes as “Lethem’s breakthrough novel and a book as much about hard-boiled detective fiction as it is a hard-boiled novel” (27). Luter argues that Lethem’s adoption and adaptation of the rules of the genre as set out in Raymond Chandler’s essays “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944) and “Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story” (1948) result in a novel that is an “excellent exercise in accepting the weight of literary history without being visibly burdened by it” and an “example of purely joyful quasi-fan fiction” (29). Initially establishing its indebtedness to its precursors and their “vibrant, hostile, punning, impossible language” through the heightened style of its own language, the novel is not so much about a detective as it is about a fan of detective fiction who then becomes a detective; Lethem’s protagonist, Lionel Essrog, understands his experiences in terms of the conventions of the noir genre even as Lethem constantly invokes that genre through references and citations in his framing of Essrog’s world (Lethem qtd. in Luter 30). Throughout this chapter, Luter pays welcome and effective attention to the patterns of language both of the hard-boiled detective novel and of Essrog’s speech, which is affected by his Tourette’s syndrome, thereby addressing the question of how the influence (of a genre or of a syndrome) expresses itself and then shapes, or is shaped by, representation...