Jonathan Lethem Research Articles

Functional Interdiscursivity and Linguistic Conventions in Neuronovels

This study aims to challenge, both theoretically and practically, the concept of genre in translation studies. First, starting from the conceptual delimitation and theoretical boundaries between text type, genre and register, this article presents the characteristics of these concepts and their applicability in relation to the translation process. Secondly, by exploiting the functionality of interdiscursivity and hybridisation of genres, the present analysis proposes a discussion of how the neuronovel fluidises the boundaries between literary genre and neuroscientific discourse through the “neurologisation” of vocabulary, style and narrative strategies, and of the particularities that the translation of neuronovels or literary neurotranslation reveals. The study concludes with a case study of the translation into Romanian of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999), focusing on the translation strategies of simple and complex vocal tics and on the translation difficulties imposed by the atypicality of narrative discourse told from the perspective of a character diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome.

Adaptation, Parody, and Disabled Masculinity in Motherless Brooklyn

In the 2019 adaptation Motherless Brooklyn, the story is transposed from the 90s to the America of the 50s. These changes were made because of star and director Edward Norton’s desire to have a less ‘ironic’ rendering of the characters present in the text written by Jonathan Lethem. What it results in is a shift in the context that changes the story altogether; not only that but the lack of parody alters the relationship to genre, and the portrayal of disability functions as a performance. This article argues that there are multiple levels of adaptation here: the adaptation of the text, of the present to the past, and an adaptation of disability to fit the understanding of genre and medium. These layers illuminate both societal understandings of masculinity and disability, and Norton’s own, through Hutcheon’s notion of adaptation as palimpsest.

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

In Stanisław Lem's Orbit

High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis

Reviewed by: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis Matt Southey erik davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019, Pp. 544. Erik Davis's most recent book, High Weirdness is a journey through the works of three authors: Terrence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Davis effectively situates all three of these prolific authors within the weird religious milieu of 1970s America by analyzing three of their mystical experiences: McKenna's psychedelically motivated trip to the Amazon, Wilson's Cosmic Trigger experiences, and Dick's revelations in February and March 1974. Davis draws on philosophers such as Bruno Latour and William James to demonstrate that "the reality" his subjects explored was not a single thing, but an ontological plurality. Importantly, Davis argues that his authors were writing at the beginning of what he calls "network society," presaged by the techno-mystical swirl of 1970s America and then technically realized by the internet. In High Weirdness Davis's methodology is "weird naturalism," the tracking of anomalous events and experiences "not as signs of a 'separate reality' but as manifestations or mutations of this one" (11). Davis sees these authors as concerned with the immanent world rather than a transcendent one. In brief, all three authors experienced and wrote about religious encounters with strange entities which the authors tended to perceive as extraterrestrial intelligences. These authors also participated in religious practices which were often technologically revised versions of older esoteric traditions. Ultimately what ties these authors together is a sort of science-fiction aesthetic that makes religion and technology deeply relevant to each other. McKenna, for instance, saw psychedelics as a "psycho-technology" that allows humans to have a guaranteed mystical experience; no more meditating for years in a cave, just up the dosage until something happens. The authors were all deeply [End Page 475] American in their combination of a global religious awareness combined with knowledge of modern science. After experiencing several anomalous/mystical events around February and March 1974 ("2-3-74"), Dick began writing an enormous journal that has been called his "exegesis", due to his spiritual reflections. Davis's work with Dick's exegesis is particularly interesting since he clarifies many misunderstandings surrounding it. Davis was one of the editors who worked on The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick with Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, and so he is able to shed light on some of the particular twists and turns of the massive corpus. A compelling case is made that Dick took part in the burgeoning hacker culture when he urged a Vancouver audience to "build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities" (286). Davis emphasizes the networked, or "netweird," world of the 1970s that drew from a huge smorgasbord of religious traditions and remixed them under the DIY ethos of "whatever works." Modernity made the spatial and temporal barriers to knowledge moot: Americans could now listen to a Tibetan teacher in the afternoon, and pick up an English translation of the I Ching at a bookshop right after. Miles of ocean and thousands of years of history were no obstacle to the accelerating availability of knowledge. Davis is right to note that the effects of this information overload were not always beneficial, as each of the authors toed the edge of psychosis, or in the case of Dick, went right over. Davis does not shy away from this point: the superabundance of information and reality-altering technologies have epistemically damaged the body politic. High Weirdness therefore often reads as an autopsy report on our contemporary condition. For example, Davis notes that "these days, it is Wilson's earlier portraits of warring conspiracies, memetic mind control, and chaotic reality breakdown that are proving … prophetic" (403). Nevertheless, the book still carries a conviction that it is important to wrestle with these strange currents and that it might even be good for one's mental health to do so. Davis calls his three writers futurists who "did not reflect the timeless 'Be Here Now' grok sought by many psychedelic mystics and spiritual seekers of...

Millennial Fiction Meets the Campus Novel

Millennial Fiction Meets the Campus Novel Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) The campus novel has changed as campuses and their denizens have changed. Critics often treat the genre as a continuous one, harking back to Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe (1952) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), and they sometimes still invoke David Lodge's Small World (1985) as a send-up of contemporary academic life. But anyone coming through university gates since the late 1980s has encountered a very different world from Small World, and fiction has likewise changed. As I've described in "The Rise of the Academic Novel" (2012) and elsewhere, we have seen a new age of campus fiction since then, one that responds to the ubiquity of higher education in American life. Rather than an ivory tower, universities are a hub for real estate, industry, banking, healthcare, sports, technology, and cultural enterprises. And with 80 percent of Americans attending college at some point and millions working in teaching and staff positions, higher education permeates our culture and society. A good deal of fiction has responded to its contemporary state, and several recent novels by millennials give an updated sense of the troubled experience of those working in the institution. Since the late 1980s the academic novel—and I distinguish the academic novel, those dealing with the lives of college teachers, from the campus novel, which I reserve for those dealing with undergraduate life, largely on campus—left the confines of a quaint subgenre, like the locked room mystery, to meld into the mainstream of literary fiction, with entries by writers including Paul Auster, Ann Beattie, Michael Chabon, Susan Choi, Percival Everett, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, Lorrie Moore, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O'Brien, Richard Powers, Francine Prose, Richard Russo, and Jane Smiley. They have dealt with the culture wars, sexual politics, midlife crises, love and relationships, work, and the vicissitudes of the professional-managerial class—staples of mainstream fiction. Around 2000 the genre spawned a new branch, the adjunct novel, depicting, instead of the bumbling but lucky Jim, decidedly unlucky Jims (see my "Unlucky Jim," Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 2012). James Hynes has been a prominent portraitist of the unlucky in Publish and Perish (1997), A [End Page 14] Lecturer's Tale (2001), Kings of Infinite Space (2004), and Next (2010), which depict underemployed PhDs scrambling for decent jobs. The adjunct novel has spawned its own subgenre, with micro-press or self-published entries like J. Hayes Hurley's The Adjunct (2006), Alex Kudera's Fight for Your Long Day (2010), and Geoff Cebula's Adjunct (2017). Rather than the crux of the plot turning on tenure, as in McCarthy's Groves of Academe or to a degree Lodge's Changing Places (1975), the new crux is landing a decent academic job in the first place. The past five years have seen a further development: snapshots from the millennial generation. In particular, three well-received novels—Weike Wang's Chemistry (2017), which won a PEN/Hemingway Award; Brandon Taylor's Real Life (2020); and Christine Smallwood's Life of the Mind (2021)—depict the demoralized world of graduate student researchers—less students than underlings in a lab—and elite adjuncts. The protagonists, like their authors, come from the millennial generation (Wang was born in 1988, Taylor in 1989, Smallwood in 1981) and show the enforced holding pattern of those in their late twenties and early thirties. The problem is not that they have difficulties—that is a conventional spring of narrative action—but that they have little chance for a better future. Their positions stand in sharp contrast to that of their advisers, who in each novel is a successful academic, receiving grants and plaudits and jetting off to give talks, but who has little understanding of their advisee's plight. Chemistry depicts an unnamed chemistry graduate student who works in a lab but undergoes a breakdown, a breakup, and ejection from academe, finding recovery while tutoring math. In short, poetic paragraphs, it combines an academic story with one of second-generation Asian American experience in the shadow of her parents, first-generation Chinese immigrants. Real Life likewise portrays a graduate...

Interventions: An Interview with Christopher Sorrentino

InterventionsAn Interview with Christopher Sorrentino Frederick Luis Aldama Reading Christopher Sorrentino, I can't help but think of John Barth's still poignant yet decades-old observation about the "used-upness" of literature—all while championing the vital spark of those like Borges and García Márquez. I put Sorrentino squarely in the latter's camp. His work innovates, without wearing innovation on its sleeve. He inventively shapes new storytelling designs, all while keeping us grounded in tellurian matters of mind, body, and heart. He replenishes our planetary republic of letters. From his first novel, Sound on Sound (1995), which is narratively shaped as a multitrack recording session, to his claustrophobically close-up view of a fictionalized Patty Hearst in Trance (2005), to his kaleidoscopic kinesis of consciousness in Now Beacon, Now Sea (2021), Sorrentino refuses to slip into repetition or formula. He is serious about the craft. He's also an author who, like Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Flann O'Brien, and Katherine Dunn (a few that come readily to mind), has fun—and gives us permission to have fun. We see this most visibly in the coauthored (with Jonathan Lethem) Believeniks! 2005: The Year We Wrote a Book about the Mets (2006), where the Quixote/Sancho protagonist pair, Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin, also appear on the book's jacket cover as the novel's authors; and in The Fugitives (2015) he does with the crime thriller what Cervantes did with the chivalric romance, transforming formula (genre) into transformative art. Sorrentino's creative range is broad; he coauthored (with Brit Pop artist Derek Boshier) American Tempura (2007), a magisterial study that weaves the personal with the sociopolitical; his lively Death Wish: A Novel Approach (2010); as well as exquisitely rendered, deeply probing shorter work appearing in the New York Times, Esquire, Harper's, the Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney's, among others. His journey also includes teaching at prestigious universities, such as the New School and Columbia, and holding a visiting writer position at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His accolades are numerous, including Guggenheim and Lannan fellowships, and was a finalist [End Page 68] for the National Book Award for Fiction and long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. He is a member of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. I had the great pleasure of talking with Christopher Sorrentino about his life and work. frederick luis aldama: In 2006, your father, Gil Sorrentino, died—a beloved professor of mine at Stanford. In 2017, your mother, Victoria Ortiz, died. You chose to write with great sensitivity and nuance about Victoria's death in Now Beacon, Now Sea, capturing beautifully and candidly the idiosyncratic ways we experience the death of loved ones. christopher sorrentino: Parents are the big ones for most of us. When my father died, I felt mainly relief. He'd been dying for eight months, and I did most of my grieving while he was fading. When he was gone, I felt an enormous weight lifted. My mother's death was different. It was sudden, and shocking. Given her genes, I figured she'd keep going for another ten years. But I think her will to live abandoned her. As I relate in Now Beacon, I think she found her situation intolerable, and I couldn't really help her. With her death, I quickly and intensely felt anger, regret, and guilt. fla: You not only explore your conflicted relationship with your mother but also her identity as a Latina of Puerto Rican descent. cs: My mother's sense of her identity was complex, and she mostly kept it to herself. I think she was ambivalent about it, proud but also convinced that it was something it was best not to advertise. She certainly didn't try to keep me from my grandparents, or the rest of our family living in the Bronx. They were a big part of my life, and I visited with them regularly. On the other hand, she conditioned me to accept myself as a white, or white passing, person. It was an extension of her own aspirations, and in fact those of her parents, who fully embraced an...

Apes in the Plan: An Unpublished Typescript by Jonathan Lethem

Apes in the Plan is a typescript by the US novelist Jonathan Lethem, stored at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. This typescript comprises a complete unpublished novel, written c.1983-1986. Part I of the present article describes this text, identifies key precursors, explains its likely aesthetic sources and clarifies its place in literary and cultural history. Part II then integrates this text into the longer narrative of Lethem’s oeuvre by highlighting and analysing specific continuities between this text and Lethem’s later, published work. The analysis thus contributes to the understanding of Lethem’s work as a whole, by emphasising the continuity of certain themes and motifs from an earlier stage than has previously been recognised. The analysis demonstrates that even as Lethem left behind Apes in the Plan as a piece of juvenilia, he also continued to work with prominent aspects of this text, including character names, science fictional features, social critique, an interest in animal life, and a heightened awareness of language. An advocate of cultural 'second use', Lethem would find a second use for some of the elements that he had first deployed in Apes in the Plan.

The Gender of the Neuronovel: Joyce Carol Oates and the Double Brain

For good reasons, most criticism of the term neuronovel has focused on the impact that the eye-catching and fashionable prefix “neuro” has upon the stem, “novel.” For less clear reasons, the canon of neuronovels (primarily bequeathed by Marco Roth) has tended to pivot on a homogeneously white-male axis, dominated by Mark Haddon, Jonathan Lethem, Ian McEwan, and Richard Powers. This essay explores what we might learn by enlarging the scale of our analysis and looking beyond the novel, to see how a writer’s engagement with neuroculture evolves across novels, poems, and short fictions; and looking beyond the familiar cast of “neuronovelists” to resist its gender asymmetry. Because Joyce Carol Oates’s writing about the brain both spans almost half a century, and crosses multiple genres, this essay takes her evolving engagement with split-brain research as a test case to explore how her work highlights the limitations of the label neuronovel. This exploration traces Oates’s changing sense of how we might write about consciousness in the age of neuroscience, as her work develops from reflections on the raw material of consciousness in Wonderland (1971) to her sophisticated and innovative use of split-brain narration in The Man Without a Shadow (2016).

Autobodies: Detectives, Disorders, and Getting out of the Neighborhood

This article explores two detective stories featuring protagonists with neurological conditions. Lionel Essrog, the narrator of Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999), suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome, and Mark Genevich, hero of Paul Tremblay’s The Little Sleep (2009), has narcolepsy. Each character is unusually attached to his home neighborhood: Essrog to Court Street in Brooklyn and Genevich to South Boston. Indeed, Genevich still lives in his grandparents’ brownstone. What is striking in both novels is how closely their conditions are also connected to these neighborhoods. Essrog’s tics and outbursts mirror the chaos of his Brooklyn, but his obsessive, smoothing-over tendencies reflect his guilt over his orphan status, his desire to reach back into and repair the past. Genevich’s narcolepsy keeps him in “Southie” partly because of his reliance on his mother and partly, in practical terms, because it is dangerous for him to drive. Most importantly, his unpredictable sleep puts “more unconscious space between [him]self and the events [he] experienced”—traumatically induced, his “little sleeps” are “fraudulent extra days, weeks, years,” disruptions in time, when the past invades his dreams. It is significant that Genevich’s condition arises after a car accident in which his friend was killed. In fact, cars are important in both novels. I argue that, as symbols of modernity and American mobility, cars signify in complex relation with the protagonists’ homes and neurological conditions. The “auto body,” to quote one of Motherless Brooklyn’s chapter titles, puns on the involuntary, automatic behaviours of the tourettic and narcoleptic body, but also offers the possiblity of mobility both physical and metaphorical: an escape from the neighborhood and associated obsessions, a way for the detective to connect a wider set of locations and relations, to remap himself beyond the confines of a narrowly imagined community and the restrictions of his condition.

Review: Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing by Joseph Brooker (2019)

Review: Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing by Joseph Brooker (2019)

Do Bicycles Dream of Atomic Sheep? Forms of the Fantastic in Flann O’Brien and Philip K. Dick

This article develops an insight briefly offered by the American novelist Jonathan Lethem, into an affinity between Flann O’Brien’s <i>The Third Policeman </i>and the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, especially his novel <i>Ubik</i>. The article reads across the work of O’Brien and Dick in relation to the themes of sublime or divine substances; artificial life and cyborgs; and persecution and paranoia, a comparison that suggests a common root in the work of Franz Kafka. The article finally proposes that this comparative reading demonstrates the parallels that can be discerned between works in different genres, and the need for a flexible concept of science fiction in its relations with other kinds of the fantastic.

Narrative Technique in the theme of Escapism

In 1933, the word "escapism” was first used in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences to describe someone who actively attempts to escape from their everyday life. Everyone agrees that Kurt Vonnegut is the undisputed king of postmodern literature. Vonnegut's original ways of storytelling, range of expressive tools, and dramatic creative results are what set him apart. His use of metafiction is blatant and very important, especially in his most recent books. The novel Slaughterhouse-Five is an excellent instance of how metafiction may be used effectively. Vonnegut's metafictional technique in Slaughterhouse-Five takes the forms of non-linear storytelling, collage, and parody. This paper uses postmodern narrative theory to examine in depth the ways in which these three separate narrative approaches are used. The focus of this paper is on the authors Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pynchon, Junot Daz, and Jennifer Egan, and their use of self-aware escapism in their recent books. In this thesis, I argue that the central texts offer escapism as an artistically respectable goal with significant philosophical and political ramifications, challenging long-held beliefs about escapism and escapist literature.

Precedented

Precedented Matthew Luter (bio) The Feral Detective Jonathan Lethem Ecco https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-feral-detective-jonathan-lethem?variant=32205914079266 336 Pages; Print, $13.59 Though it may not look it at first glance, Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective is a noir novel through and through. We see no mean streets of the big city, spending plenty of time on the mountain roads of rural California instead, and as many major scenes take place in the daytime as at night. But plenty of the old noir tropes are visible from the start: we open on a quick-witted young woman with nowhere else to turn, seeking out a mysterious private eye with a dark backstory and acting instantly on their palpable romantic chemistry. Before we know it, we’re in the heavily stylized territory of neo-noir detective fiction. In his style-defining 1972 essay “Notes on Film Noir,” screenwriter-director Paul Schrader defined noir not as a literary or cinematic genre, but as a collection of narrative and visual motifs that combine to define a distinctive tone. And chief among the cultural influences that gave rise to noir, Schrader argues, is “post-war disillusionment,” a reaction to the Depression and, immediately after World War II, the difficulty of acclimation to peacetime. Schrader characterizes noir as a response to national trauma, though he doesn’t use that term to directly. Disillusionment takes shape as “[t]he war continues, but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward the American society itself.” But what does a noir novel have to say when the upheaval that creates the darkness as its core is not as evenly felt as the Depression or World War II? What happens when that distress isn’t even considered distressing at all by some of the novel’s characters, let alone over sixty-two million American voters? The trauma that animates The Feral Detective, as it opens a week before Inauguration Day 2017, is the bombshell of the 2016 presidential election, which has left narrator Phoebe Siegler reeling. A former employee of The New York Times who quit suddenly (and won the Internet for a day for it) after the newsroom’s then widely publicized meeting with the election’s eventual winner, Phoebe travels from New York to Southern California in search of Arabella Swados, a missing friend and recent college dropout who is also the daughter of her mentor. There she enlists the services of Charles Heist, the title investigator, whom the urbanite Phoebe accompanies through California deserts and mountains, far from the city landscapes she can navigate on her own. (In addition to The Feral Detective’s noir trappings, this dynamic also makes this the second Lethem novel, after Girl in Landscape [1998], to function as an extended riff on John Ford’s The Searchers [1956], a film that has long been a touchstone for Lethem —and, I might add, for Schrader.) Phoebe and Heist find Arabella, now living with “off-the-gridders” known as the Rabbits, a female-led group and rivals of a male-led similar group called the Bears. Before a schism, they were both part of a hippie commune; Lethem makes the two factions a microcosm of how entrenched polarization has replace the utopian promise of America. Heist, raised in the Bears until he left them as a teenager, returns to both sects on occasion to escort out any minors who wish to leave either group. Greeted as the apostate that he is, the Bears force Heist into a fight to the death against their current leader, a macho type with the arch-individualist name Solitary Love. Unable to countenance any longer an assault on her investigative and romantic partner, Phoebe intervenes, throwing off Solitary Love with the self-defense air-horn from her purse, giving Heist all the opportunity he needs to finish the job. Of course, in so doing, she essentially aids and abets a murder. In earlier noir novels, Lethem treated actual detective plots largely as entry points into playing with genre tropes — not that there’s anything wrong with that. Gun with Occasional Music (1994) attempted to see if detective fiction...

Archive Anxiety in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

How does the archive feel? In “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges creates one of literature’s most famous archives, describing what seems at first to be an orderly storehouse of all the world...

Stephen Dixon (1936–2019): An Appreciation

Stephen Dixon (1936–2019): An Appreciation Matthew Petti (bio) American literature lost a much-underappreciated master when Stephen Dixon died on November 6th, 2019, at the age of 83, after a brief illness related to Parkinson’s disease. One of the most prolific and innovative writers of his generation, he wrote until the very end, hammering away on a manual typewriter with, as he liked to say, “the two good fingers Parkinson’s has left me.” The last two of his thirty-five books (eighteen novels and seventeen short story collections) were reviewed in November/December 2019 issue of ABR. Dixon — who was twice nominated for the National Book Award, and once for the PEN/Faulkner — published over 650 short stories in a remarkable career that spanned six decades and included multiple O’Henry Awards, Pushcart Prizes, and appearances in the Best American Short Stories anthologies. Jonathan Lethem, J. Robert Lennon, Julia Alvarez, Daniel Handler, Dave Eggers, and Paul Maliszewski are among a generation of contemporary writers who acknowledge his influence on the craft. And for twenty-seven years, he was a professor in the storied Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, teaching, among his many students, Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Esi Edugyan, ZZ Packer, Porochista Khakpour, David Lipsky, Fred Leebron, Jean McGarry, and Pagan Kennedy. Dixon’s immensely personal narratives drew heavily from his own life, and usually dealt with the least palatable aspects of what it means to be alive, relentlessly confronting heartbreak, loss, disappointment, and failure. As the critic Michael Silverblatt once said of Dixon: “He attempts to render reports of unbearable experience. The outside world is calling with its terrors, and he as a writer is responding to the onslaught.” Dixon spent the last decade of his life writing about the illness and eventual death of his beloved wife, the translator, Russian scholar, and poet Anne Frydman. This work, culminating in an exploration of living as a widower with Parkinson’s Disease in Late Stories (2016), Dear Abigail and Other Stories (2019), and Writing, Written (2019), is an incomparably faithful rendering of human suffering. Dixon created texts that were viscerally experiential for the reader by dispensing with traditional narrative structure: his protagonists don’t simply move through a story from discreet beginning to resolved end. Instead, they tend to pace back and forth, in and around and over their troubles, picking off scabs, and licking wounds to see how they taste. The result is an obsessively self-revising text that reflects experience as if through a funhouse mirror — paradoxically both truly felt and narratively twisted. The critic Alan Friedman said of the 1991 novel Frog, arguably Dixon’s masterwork, “One doesn’t exactly read a story by Stephen Dixon, one submits to it. An unstoppable prose expands the arteries while an edgy, casual nervousness overpowers the will.” As in his writing, a significant thread of tragedy ran through Dixon’s life. In 1939, his father, Abraham Ditchik, a member of a criminal ring extorting doctors who performed illegal abortions, was at the center of a corruption scandal that made the front pages of newspapers nationwide. One of his younger sisters suffered her whole life from von Recklinghausen’s disease. His oldest brother, Don Dixon, an International News Service war correspondent, was captured by the Chinese in 1952 and accused of being a spy. He was held for a year and a half without a word to the outside world before finally being released. Fifty years later, Don was killed by a falling tree while jogging. Another of Dixon’s brothers — the one he was closest to growing up — died in 1960 when the freighter he was traveling on sank in the mid-Atlantic. Anne Frydman, his beloved wife, contracted MS two years into their marriage, and suffered with it for over twenty-five years before passing away in 2009. Click for larger view View full resolution Young Stephen was three and a half when his father was sentenced, and he was told that his father was away from home because he was a colonel in the Army’s Dental Corps, stationed in Albuquerque. At the age of ten, Stephen came across court documents and transcripts hidden away in...

Review

Review

Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, by Theodore Martin; Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace, by Jeremy Rosen

Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, by Theodore Martin; Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace, by Jeremy Rosen

“I am a freak of nature”: Tourette’s and the Grotesque in Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn

Cet article propose une lecture de Motherless Brooklyn, publie par Jonathan Lethem en 1999, a la lumiere de la theorie bakhtinienne du grotesque et du rire. L’originalite du roman tient a sa mise en fiction du syndrome de Gilles de la Tourette dont souffre le personnage principal, egalement narrateur a la premiere personne, qui s’approprie deliberement le surnom « phenomene de cirque » dont il a ete affuble dans son enfance. Ainsi ce heros-narrateur joue un double role tout le long du recit : il est a la fois le phenomene grotesque qu’on exhibe sur le stand de foire, et celui qui exhibe et construit le phenomene en baratinant le public / lecteur. Lethem, de cette facon, remet en cause tant la representation traditionnelle du handicap (et le stereotype du handicape) que les principaux genres dont s’inspire le roman : fiction policiere et recit de formation. Le texte se fait parodie, au sens bakhtinien du terme, a la fois hommage a ces genres traditionnels et reecriture de ceux-ci. Lethem, enfin, utilise a la fois les tics et autres vocalisations symptomatiques du heros et son penchant pour les images grotesques et le rire, afin d’operer un changement paradigmatique et transformer le stigmate en atout. Le romancier contribue ainsi a renouveler significativement la fiction consacree a la maladie.

Getting People Wrong: Some Preliminary Thoughts on Philip Roth's Passing

Getting People WrongSome Preliminary Thoughts on Philip Roth's Passing Matthew Shipe (bio) A few weeks after Philip Roth's death this past May at the age of 85, I was invited to participate in a podcast hosted by fellow Roth Society member Danny Anderson. He had invited me on his show, The Sectarian Review, to discuss Roth's long and distinguished career and speculate on his ultimate impact on American literary culture. I had never done a podcast before and have always been apprehensive about the platform—when using it, I always recall that bit in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996) when a Skype-like invention creates a sort of national existential crisis as people become painfully self-conscious and purchase attractive mannequins to be their stand-ins for video chats. Nevertheless, I was more than happy to talk about Roth with Danny and his other guest Michial Farmer, a friend I had met through Updike circles.1 For around two hours we bandied about our favorite bits of Roth's work and somehow tried to solidify our thoughts on what his fiction had meant to us. Midway through the podcast, Danny and I recalled the Roth@80 event, laughing at the memory of finding ourselves in a room with Don DeLillo, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, Louise Erdrich, and, of course, Roth himself, without a drink anywhere in sight. The night was somewhat surreal—it felt a little bit like being thrust, sober and slightly underdressed, into a Fellini film.2 I do remember managing to nudge myself in line behind Don DeLillo as he ordered a Sprite.3 I think I ordered one too hoping that I might impress him (shockingly, the gesture wasn't noticed). At the end of that night, I made my way to the front of the room to talk with Roth—again, I'd like to reiterate that this would have been the type of event where a drink (or two) would have been very handy. It was my one time to meet Roth: I can't remember what I had told him—something fairly generic about how much his work had meant to me—but I'm grateful that I was able to tell him this and he was gracious in our brief conversation. As I was finishing up, some family [End Page 130] friends approached and a flurry of pictures were taken. I like to believe that I'm in the back of one of those photos, an unidentified curly-haired mystery man never to be identified in some Roth family photo book. After sharing stories of that night, Danny asked us to read aloud our favorite passage from Roth's fiction as a way to wrap up the conversation. While there are countless passages I could have selected, the choice for me was fairly easy. I turned to my well-worn copy of American Pastoral (1997), the novel that was my first real introduction to Roth when I was an undergraduate back in the late '90s. I qualify it as my "real introduction" because I know I had read a few of the stories in Goodbye, Columbus (1959) while in high school—we did "Defender of the Faith" and maybe "Eli the Fanatic" sometime during my senior year—but I had not really experienced Roth until American Pastoral was assigned in Professor Marshall Boswell's junior seminar titled "The Literature of Replenishment."4 That course, more than anything, propelled me down the Roth rabbit hole. After the semester, I snatched up a remaindered copy of Sabbath's Theater (1995), and soon after found myself quickly making my way through much of Roth—zipping through the first Zuckerman trilogy after graduation, reading Letting Go (1962) after my first year in grad school,5 and then tackling The Human Stain (2000) the summer after it had been released as I was recovering from that first year in grad school. I confess I didn't pick up Portnoy's Complaint (1969) until much later in my Roth reading, and I still haven't read When She Was Good (1967), a lapse that I was loudly called out on by students...

Brownstones with Stories to Tell: Houses in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude

Brownstones with Stories to Tell: Houses in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude