Jonathan Lethem Research Articles

Homo Trumpiens: Ben Lerner's The Topeka School

Homo Trumpiens:Ben Lerner's The Topeka School Christian Lorentzen (bio) It's tempting when considering the last thirty years of American fiction to adopt the speculative framework proposed by David Foster Wallace in his 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" and extend it to the present. The dominant mode among the young writers of his generation—Bret Easton Ellis, Mark Leyner, and A. M. Homes, among others: what some were then calling "post-postmodernism"—was in his view flat, numb, cynical, saturated in pop imagery, an analog to the "tele-visual attitude," a form of rebellion against structures of authority whose meanings it had tired of even bothering to examine. The style was a sign of exhaustion, fiction devolved to mere stand-up comedy in prose. Wallace predicted the next rebels would be "anti-rebels" who endorsed "single-entendre values" instead of irony, self-consciousness, and fatigue. They would treat "old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction." They would be sincere. [End Page 779] The sincere turn did arrive, though not exactly as Wallace predicted. It didn't do away with cynicism so much as set it up as an ogre to be defeated, as in the dystopian rescue narratives of George Saunders's stories. It didn't do away with pop imagery so much as valorize it, as in the superhero bildungsromans of Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon. And it didn't conjure new sources of reverence so much as locate them in the tragedies of the past and then sentimentalize them, as in the third-generation Holocaust narratives of Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss (and again Chabon). If authority was still suspect under George W. Bush, at least the end of history was over, and a sense of American innocence had been regained after 9/11, the attacks that launched a thousand novels. But if sincerity had to be buttressed by surrealism, superheroes, ahistorical improvisations, and artificial innocence, how sincere was it really? Soon enough there was Obama, who represented a restoration of the sort of authority American writers could revere, perhaps even identify with. There followed a turn to the authentic. Various strategies emerged among novelists, but none has drawn the critical heat directed at autofiction—a term that originated in French in the 1970s and in English has been applied largely to what the Germans call Künstlerromans, "artist's novels" that dramatize the author's formation and inscribe the creation of the novel on the book itself. Writers like Sheila Heti (a Canadian), Tao Lin, Jenny Offill, Teju Cole, and Elif Batuman have drawn on energies that had veered into the memoir, taken recourse to the diaristic and the essayistic, and deployed alter egos easily blurred with their authors. None of these strategies are exactly new, but they represent a departure from the dominant strain of realism, if not a drastic one. The novels of Ben Lerner are worth scrutinizing with Wallace's predictions in mind. He is less an anti-rebel or anti-anti-rebel than a writer who has arrived at a truce between irony and sincerity by decoupling self-consciousness from cynicism. It's no accident that [End Page 780] postwar American fiction and television don't loom as the determining influences on his novels, as they did for Wallace and his cohort in a way that seemed inescapable at the time. Lerner's lodestars are the poetry of Walt Whitman and John Ashbery, visual art, and the classic European novel. His trilogy of autofictions—Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), 10:04 (2014), and his new book The Topeka School—examine the writer's progress: from anxieties of fraudulence, to the compromises of mastery, and now the retrospective project of locating the genesis of the writer's calling. The governing concept of The Topeka School is the "man-child," and you could call the three books Lerner's Man-Child Trilogy. In an essay on Karl Ove Knausgaard, Lerner applied Baudelaire's definition of the man-child to the Norwegian: "a man possessing at every moment the genius of childhood, in other words a genius for whom no edge...

Between reality and simulation – dissolving generic boundaries in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (2009)

Between reality and simulation – dissolving generic boundaries in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (2009)

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability eds. by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability eds. by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray Clare Mullaney BARKER, CLARE, and STUART MURRAY, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 254 pp. $84.99 hardcover; $21.75 paperback; $14.60 Kindle. The Cambridge Companion to Disability and Literature, edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, offers a much-needed introduction to the thriving field of literary disability studies, which emerged as an academic discipline in the late 1990s following its origins in the social sciences. Each of the volume's carefully crafted essays will appeal to a broad audience, benefiting both undergraduate students and advanced literary scholars looking for a comprehensive primer to disability studies and, more specifically, representations of disability in literature. In their introduction to the Companion, Clare Barker and Stuart Murray suggest that the problem with disability is not that it is absent from literature but "that it is frequently not seen" (2). They continue, "That this is the case is.…less to do with the texts themselves than the reading practices that have been brought to them. Precisely because disability appears to signal the possibility of so many connections to other topics, it can easily be lost or subsumed in what are presumed to be more 'important' (and nearly always nondisabled) questions" (2). Literary scholars are trained to understand disability as symbolic; "actual disabilities seem clearly less important than the function they serve to underscore," whether it be sentiment, abjection, villainy, or heroism. Each of the Companion's essays models how to read for disability as what Ellen Samuels calls "actual realities" and considers how representations of the lived, material experience of impairment challenge conventional literary forms and their accompanying modes of analysis (qtd. in Companion 10). The Companion is divided into two parts. The book's first half features eight essays, which track a historical genealogy of disability representations, moving chronologically from medieval to contemporary literature. Edward Wheatly suggests that medieval writing illustrates what he calls the "religious model of disability" whereby impairment is a result of "divine punishment for sinful behavior" and cure was understood as religious rather than medical (18, 19). Alison Hobgood and David Wood turn to early modern humoral theory to show how an anonymous Renaissance play, Looke about You, casts emotional deviance as a productive and even desirable aesthetic. Like Hobgood and Wood, Essaka Joshua suggests that "deformity" in the eighteenth century was, as in Frances Burney's Camilla (1796), an affirmative, aesthetic category that predates "disability" (47). Despite the rise of medicalization in the nineteenth century, Martha Stoddard Holmes argues that stereotypical representations of "afflicted" and "defective" characters like Charles Dickens's tragic Tiny Tim are ripe [End Page 299] for understanding disability as a social category because they are positioned in relation to kinship and labor. Michael Davidson asserts that modernist literature predominantly "feature[s] disease or disability as a figure for social upheavals and cultural malaise" to buffer ideals of "the statistically normal body" (74, 85). While we might assume that contemporary literature offers more nuanced representations of disability, Stuart Murray posits that post-1945 novels waffle between problematic depictions of impairment as sentimental and melodramatic, and subversions of these stereotypical representations in narratives like Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). In her essay on postcolonial fiction, Barker discusses how representations of "affliction" and their association with muteness are "direct consequences of colonization," and, although they rely on metaphor, she suggests that they also trouble "widely accepted ideas about the body, health, ability, and healing" (105, 111). The second section of the Companion considers disability studies' critical methodological investments and their overlap with intersecting minority fields of study. Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim's essay on disability and intersectionality turns to Audre Lorde's work in the 1980s to advocate for neither the inclusion nor the replacement of "disability" among a range of other identities but for consideration of intersecting "systems and structures of oppression" (129). Looking specifically at the overlap between crip and queer identities, Robert McRuer examines a range of literary, visual, and cultural...

‘Reading the New Ruins: Loss, Mourning, and Melancholy in <i>Dissident Gardens'</i>

This article argues Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens (2013) possesses the workings of a critical apprehension set against the more violent ends and commemorative strictures of mourning, loss, and despair. Typically, twentieth-century literary works which actively intervene in the past risk either commemorating political failure and defeat or mourning the trauma of a collective agony that is repeatedly experienced. Instead, I propose twenty-first century fiction produced at a certain historical, cultural, and geographical remove from the centres of state-socialism and communist atrocity articulates an ability to properly trace the political, psychological, and aesthetic contours of left loss in more reparative ways. Specifically, this article is concerned with the ways in which Lethem’s text stages a series of cultural practices through which it can express and work through left loss, disappointment, injury and despair. It sets out to juxtapose, and place into dialogue, key thematic strands from Lethem’s novel with critical accounts of mourning, memory, and loss by Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists.

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

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...

The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewisb Fiction ed. by Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt, Mark Schechner (review)

Reviewed by: The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewisb Fiction ed. by Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt, Mark Schechner Julian Levinson (bio) The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewisb Fiction. Edited by Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt, and Mark Schechner. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014. xii + 576 pp. Anyone paying attention to recent American Jewish fiction knows the field is expanding. New voices have spoken, complex literary devices have been used, narratives have been drawn from the most unlikely corners of the Jewish world. But who can say what these developments mean in the larger sweep of Jewish cultural history? Who can sift through the roster of new names to get at the main questions–whether American Jewish literature remains a coherent category, how it measures up in relation to celebrated earlier periods, whom it speaks to and for, how it should be defined, and what sort of future it may have? Many thousands of pages must be read and a generous, expansive sense of “Jewish fiction” must be embraced before such questions can be responsibly addressed. Fortunately for us, three distinguished scholars with impeccable literary taste have produced an anthology that winnows the field while remaining faithful to its variety. The volume is big in every sense of the word. Using a format almost the size of a tractate of the Vilna Shas, it contains thirty-six (double Chai!) works by some of our worthiest writers, with appendices, biographical information, and a wide-ranging introduction. But if these trappings bespeak a scholarly agenda, the works themselves are compulsively readable, emotionally gripping, often quite hilarious. The selections in the first half of the anthology come from winners of the annual Edward Lewis Wallant Award, given each year to a work of “significance for the American Jew.” Our editors served for eight years on the award committee, along with others. Having survived multiple readers and stages of vetting, these selections thus represent something like a consensus view of the emerging standard in America Jewish fiction. The second half of the anthology moves farther afield, introducing some newer and relatively neglected names. Marquee figures such as Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Michael Chabon, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Lethem are justifiably excluded to make way for newcomers, including three who were born in Russia (Maxim Shrayer, Nadia Kalman, and Lara Vapnyar), one in Latvia (David Bezmozgis), one in South Africa (Tony Eprile), and two in Israel (Ehud Havazelet and Avner Mandelbaum). [End Page 149] Such writers have been shaped by histories largely unfamiliar to native-born Americans, especially on the deepest levels of felt experience. Even as they filter these experiences through the idioms and rhythms of contemporary American fiction, they remind us of just how variable the Jewish experience is and has been across the globe. The purpose behind the anthology is laid bare in the title and introduction: these works are collectively understood as a new moment–“new” in this case meaning primarily in relation to the postwar generation of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Roth. The impulse to announce a movement beyond this group is, in itself, not especially new. Celebrated as these writers are, some critics began to express impatience with them once their status was enshrined. Some found their Jewishness too attenuated; others dissented from their attitudes toward race, gender, and cultural politics; others simply resisted the notion that this generation had spoken once and for all for the American Jewish experience. As early as 1976, Ruth Wisse wrote in her article “American Jewish Writing, Act II” that the themes of alienation and victimization, so prevalent in previous years, had disappeared in a new kind of writing steeped in “internal Jewish life and lore”1 In 1997, Tikkun Magazine identified similar kinds of re-commitments in a symposium on “the Jewish literary revival.”2 And numerous anthologies have appeared tracking new approaches to specific themes, ranging from Holocaust memory to coming of age in America to sex. Such revisionary efforts have been important, but they are often themselves limited by some ideological purpose, some sense of what “Jewish literature” should do. A great virtue of The New Diaspora, by contrast, is its agnosticism toward...

Understanding Jonathan Lethem

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 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. Motherless Brooklyn pays tribute to and subverts traditional hardboiled detective novels as Lethem plays with the conventions of a favorite (and influential) genre. Fortress dwells obsessively on appreciation and criticism of influential art, as Lethem's main character spends a lifetime contemplating the complexities of the art he loves, interrogating his own reactions to it, and thinking through the political implications of the ways he has been influenced by that which he consumes. Chronic City depicts the cost of fandom and the dangers of giving over too much of oneself to the art that one loves, dramatized via a character brought nearly to ruin not by the demands of artistic creation, but by obsessive cultural consumption. 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!

Not Yet Another World: Ecopolitics and Urban Natures in Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City

Jonathan Lethem's 2009 novel, Chronic City, features an eclectic group of New Yorkers whose unexpected friendships and unusual circumstances thrust them into situations where they encounter an incr...

Seeing Broadly: A Cultural Omnivore’s Menu

Seeing Broadly:A Cultural Omnivore’s Menu Jill Dolan (bio) ON THE TOWN. Music by Leonard Bernstein, book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Directed by John Rando. Lyric Theatre, New York City. SIDE SHOW. Music by Henry Krieger, lyrics by Bill Russell. Directed by Bill Condon. St. James Theatre, New York City. FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE. Book by Itamar Moses, music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. Directed by Daniel Aukin. Public Theater, New York City. HERE LIES LOVE. Concept and lyrics by David Byrne, music by Byrne and Fatboy Slim. Directed by Alex Timber. Public Theater, New York City. THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHTTIME. Written by Simon Stephens. Directed by Marianne Elliott. Ethel Barrymore Theatre, New York City. THE COUNTRY HOUSE. By Donald Margulies. Directed by Daniel Sullivan. Samuel J. Friedman Theater, New York City. DISGRACED. By Ayad Akhtar. Directed by Kimberly Senior. Lyceum Theatre, New York City. THE INVISIBLE HAND. By Ayad Akhtar. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. New York Theatre Workshop, New York City. THE OLDEST BOY. By Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Rebecca Taichman. Lincoln Center Theatre, New York City. [End Page 295] Broadway and Off-Broadway, which we disparagingly called “the mainstream” when I was a young lesbian feminist theatre critic in the early 1980s, has become a much more eclectic assortment of forms, contents, and ideologies than it was thirty years ago. When the Public Theater announced the spring 2015 transfer to Broadway of the musical theatre adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home, I was struck again by what seems a tectonic shift. Fun Home’s provenance reflects the era when I frequented the WOW Café and other downtown storefront theatres because they programmed formally innovative performance that spoke to my political interests and my identity concerns more than anything on or Off-Broadway. Fun Home boasts a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron, of Five Lesbian Brothers fame, who became one of the first WOW artists to enjoy a more commercial career. Likewise, syndicated cartoonist Bechdel published a popular strip called Dykes to Watch Out For in lesbian magazines and newspapers from 1983 to 2008. Fun Home, her 2006 memoir, described coming out as lesbian just as she found out that her father was a closeted gay man, shortly before he killed himself. The book established Bechdel’s shift into wider circulation. We must continue to agitate for a broader representation of work by people of color, women, and lesbian playwrights, directors, and designers on and Off-Broadway. But the musical Fun Home’s move from downtown to midtown illustrates the more eclectic, aesthetically diverse, politically various theatre now offered in venues that were once much more formally and thematically conservative and uniform, and that once served what seemed a gate-keeping function. I saw nine exemplary productions in fall 2014 that helped me parse this redefinition of the mainstream: on Broadway, director John Rando’s revival of On the Town, the Bernstein, Comden, and Green musical; The Country House, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Donald Margulies’s newest work; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, a theatrical adaptation of a novel about an autistic boy; Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama; and Side Show, the Bill Condon–directed, remounted, and revised musical about the conjoined twins, Violet and Daisy Hilton. Off-Broadway, I took in Fortress of Solitude, an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s coming-of-age novel about Brooklyn in the 1970s, at the Public Theater; Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s immersive musical extravaganza about Imelda Marcos, also at the Public; Sarah Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy, at Lincoln Center Theatre; and Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand, at New York Theatre Workshop. First performed in 1944, On the Town was probably the most “classic” of these nine productions and might represent Broadway in all its white, straight, middle-class conventional glory if it were not for Rando’s exhilarating, funny eye. Bernstein’s music remains wonderful, the dancing (originally choreographed by Jerome Robbins) was transporting, and Rando’s direction staged a deliriously pleasurable conversation with old forms and new ideas. He demonstrated a canny willingness to...

Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction: An Introduction

To provide a point of entry into the special issue, my introduction begins with a discussion of Jonathan Lethem’s 2014 story “Pending Vegan,” which concerns a visit to SeaWorld and explores institutions, practices, and attitudes that are centrally important for the study of animal worlds in modern fiction. I then move to an overview of cross-disciplinary conversations about animals and human-animal relationships being conducted under rubrics such as critical animal studies, posthumanism, cognitive ethology, and zoosemiotics, and suggest how the essays included in the present issue intervene in the larger context for research afforded by these conversations.

The Color of Prison: Shared Legacies in Walter Mosley’s The Man in My Basement and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude

The Color of PrisonShared Legacies in Walter Mosley’s The Man in My Basement and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude Devika Sharma (bio) No general consensus seems to exist on the precise meaning of neo-slave narrative. On the one hand, the term is applied—often mockingly so—to an African American writer’s description of his or her successful fight against discrimination, ghettoization, and poverty en route to becoming a full member of the respectable middle class. It is in this sense that John Edgar Wideman used the term when characterizing the autobiographies of Oprah Winfrey and O. J. Simpson. These seemed to Wideman cliché-ridden up-from-the-depths biographies, “merely repeating one of the master plots Americans have found acceptable for black lives” (xxix). On the other hand, the term is also frequently invoked when characterizing literary works of fiction dealing thematically with the historical institution of slavery in America, or comparing in one way or another contemporary African American lives to life in slavery. It is in this more inclusive and subtle sense that a novel such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved is often described as a neo-slave narrative.1 However, Brian Jarvis uses the term altogether differently in his book Cruel and Unusual: Punishment and US Culture, when describing narratives written by African American inmates as a neo-slave literature of sorts. Here Jarvis points to prison narratives written by authors and activists such as Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson, in which the prison itself figures as a kind of slavery. For instance Cleaver, in his 1968 classic Soul on Ice, described prison as “a continuation of slavery on a higher plane” (qtd. in Jarvis 107). From these various suggestions, however different they are, we may conclude that the term neo-slave narrative designates a literature concerned with isolation and confinement as racialized experiences in contemporary American society. More precisely, neo-slave literature seems to be a literature exploring at least one of two cultural templates for imagining and understanding imprisonment central also to the historical slave narratives. According to the first of these templates, racial markers such as skin color themselves amount to a form of prison. Thus, racial “passing” may figure as a strategy to escape the prison of color so pointedly described by James Weldon Johnson when relating a black man’s experience of being let down by the white woman he loves after confiding his passing: “My situation made me feel weak and powerless, like a man trying with his bare hands to break the iron bars of his prison cell” (140). According to the second of these two cultural templates, incarceration correlates, at least to some extent, with skin color. While this aspect of incarceration is of course central to the historical institution of slavery and its narratives, it is also central to today’s criminal justice system. As a recent report found, thirty-eight percent of prison and jail inmates are African American, compared to their [End Page 662] thirteen percent share of the overall population (“Reducing Racial Disparity” 2). These rates imply that a black male born in 2001 has a thirty-two percent chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life, a Hispanic male has a seventeen percent chance, and a white male has a six percent chance. One pertinent way of understanding this racial disparity within the criminal justice system is to look at it as an example of structural racism—that is, the longstanding differential treatment of people of color. In this vein, sociologist Loïc Wacquant suggests we understand the contemporary American prison system to be the latest in a sequence of institutions whose purpose it has been to define, confine, and control black Americans. Wacquant lists four such institutions, namely slavery, Jim Crow, the urban ghetto, and finally the contemporary United States prison system. The institutional nexus in this fourth arrangement of racial dominance is a combination of material and symbolic containment of people of color, Wacquant notes. Materially, black offenders are contained by draconian penalty laws.2 Symbolically, Wacquant argues, the current paradigm of law and order has succeeded in strengthening the old American...

The Lost Language of Belief: A Conversation with Jonathan Lethem

In June 2014 Silvia Albertazzi interviewed the American writer Jonathan Lethem in Florence, during the von Rezzori Festival, while he was writer in residence at the Florentine site of New York University. This is the full text of their conversation. A much shorter version in Italian appeared on the newspaper “il Manifesto” on 21/6/2014.

Do You Just Love Philip Roth?

Do You Just <i>Love</i> Philip Roth?

Double Quote Unquote: Scholarly Attribution as (a) Speculative Play in the Remix Academy

Double Quote Unquote: Scholarly Attribution as (a) Speculative Play in the Remix Academy

Rewriting the Author: A Narrative Approach to Empathy in Infinite Jest and The Pale King

For all the extratextual information that surrounds the popular image of David Foster Wallace--the interviews and book reviews, the many commemorations--the question remains how this image affects the reception of his novels. The notion of the implied author may well be drawing heavy criticism in recent narrative theory, but research indicates that readers do infer a representation of the writer while reading, merging the information they gather from the text with the knowledge they already have about its author (Herman and Vervaeck 16). Given his often-voiced and widely quoted views on serious literature, this knowledge might be quite extensive in Wallace's case, not least because he also seems to be profiled as a writer's writer. Of the several novels published after 2008 that may or may not include sly references to Wallace, two examples are most explicit: Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City (2010) and Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot (2011). Both Lethem and Eugenides have acknowledged and denied on various occasions that they have based key plot elements in their novels on Wallace, but perhaps more telling than the ambiguity of their answers to questions about Wallace's presence in these books is the simple fact that such questions were even asked. If we choose to believe that two acclaimed novelists did indeed fictionalize one of their colleagues, we have to wonder what reasons they could have had for doing so. Or, to put it differently, can we find something in Wallace's texts that other writers might want to communicate to the reader? One way to answer this question, 1 argue, is to look into the authorial persona that David Foster Wallace established for himself. The difficulties that arise when novelists repeatedly and spiritedly express their literary views in essays, interviews, and book reviews include the fact that these views are not necessarily emblematic of their own fiction and the possibility that their take on literature will further determine the critical reception of their work. This essay addresses these difficulties with regard to Wallace's novels by raising questions about the relationship between author, narrator, and text: how does the author express his poetics, does that translate into his writings--with the bestseller Infinite Jest (1996) and the unfinished novel The Pale King (2011) as most interesting test cases--and which narrative strategies does Wallace use to that end? As I will clarify early on, this discussion of Wallace's novelistic poetics centers on the premise that his ideas on the moral usefulness of literature were partly modeled on the widely accepted assumption that novel reading augments the so-called empathy-altruism hypothesis, the belief that readers learn to substitute experiences of narrative empathy for shared feelings with real others (Keen vii). The Victorian Connection To be sure, the possible links between Chronic City or The Marriage Plot and the authorial persona of David Foster Wallace are relatively easy to make. Lethem's book frequently alludes to the fictional thousand-page novel Obstinate Dust by Ralph Warden Meeker, a literary sink-weight (111) that--like Wallace's Infinite Jest upon its publication--is more often talked about than read. Frustrated by the tome's inaccessibility and its sheer volume, Lethem's protagonist Chase Insteadman at one point chucks Obstinate Dust down Urban Fjord (111-12), a fifty-yard-wide crevasse along Manhattan's 191st Street constructed by the artist Laird Noteless--whose name stands in stark contrast to the 388 Notes and Errata at the end of Infinite Jest. Unlike Chronic City, Eugenides's The Marriage Plot does not single out a novel but features an actual protagonist that seems to share many characteristics with Wallace. Leonard Bankhead is a science major with a specific interest in language philosophy (45) who, like Wallace, chews tobacco and frequently wears a bandanna. While Wallace did not suffer from bipolar disorder, Leonard's affliction leads to ruminations on depression and mindfulness in The Marriage Plot similar to those throughout Wallace's work. …

Leah Price (ed): Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books

Think of this as Playboy for bibliophiles. Dozens of full-page, high resolution photographs will have you tilting Unpacking My Library on its side to better admire the stacks and shelves of thirteen authors from a variety of genres. Supporting interviews tell you when the authors bought their first books, how they arrange their books, and what books they keep on their bedside tables. Leah Price, professor of English at Harvard, has put together a captivating little collection that will leave you wanting more. Six of the thirteen authors included in Unpacking My Library—Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, Lev Grossman and Sophie Gee, and Claire Messud and James Wood—are couples and were chaptered together but interviewed separately. Each couple interviewed maintains shared libraries, so for each, there is a single photo set. The remaining seven authors included are Alison Bechdel, Stephen Carter, Junot Diaz, Jonathan Lethem, Philip Pullman, Gary Shteyngart, and Edmund White. Most exciting to me was the chapter with Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, one of my favorite series growing up. Pullman is the only author featured in Unpacking My Library who wrote an essay response instead of answering each of Price’s questions in turn and it’s nice to read his words uninterrupted. That said, Price asks great questions. Have you ever in your life given up reading? Uniformly not. How do you dispose of unwanted books? Bechdel keeps them, Diaz gives his away, Grossman and Gee put theirs out on the curb, Shteyngart uses the trash. How do you arrange your books? Jonathan Lethem ‘‘oscillate[s] between alphabetical absolutism and imperatives of genre, size, color, [and] publisher’’ (114). Authors were also asked about their shelving arrangements. Pinker stores his books in stackable cubes in order to avoid ‘‘those awful things called bookends’’

In the Mix: The Potential Convergence of Literature and New Media in Jonathan Lethem’s ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’

This article considers the reinscription of certain ideas of authorship in a digital age, when literary texts are produced through a medium that substantiates and elevates composite forms and procedures over distinct original versions. Digital media technologies reconfigure the way in which we apply such techniques as collage, quotation, and plagiarism, comprising as they do procedural code that is itself a mix, a mash-up, a version of a version of a version. In the contemporary moment, the predominance of a medium that effaces its own means of production (behind interfaces, ‘pages,’ or ‘sticky notes’) suggests that we may no longer fetishize the master-copy, or the originary script, and that we once again need to retheorize the term ‘author,’ asking for example how we can instantiate such a notion through a medium that abstracts the indelible and rewrites it as infinitely reproducible and malleable.1 If the majority of texts written today—be they literary, academic, or journalistic—are first produced on a computer, it is increasingly necessary to think about how the ‘author’ in that instance may be not a rigid point of origin, but instead a relay for alternative modes of production, particularly composite modes of production, assuming such positions as ‘scripter,’ ‘producer,’ or even ‘DJ.’ By embarking on this path of enquiry, this article attempts to produce a

Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude and Omega : The Unknown , a Comic Book Series

Jonathan Lethem’s long-evident interest in comics, for example in his 2003 novel The Fortress of Solitude , culminated in his 2008 reworking of Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes’s 1976 comic book series from Marvel Comics, Omega: The Unknown . Demonstrating that Lethem’s self-conscious paraphrasing of the prior series is part of a sustained examination of repetitions and relations, this essay shows how the serial nature of comics enables Lethem to address themes of families, legacies, and communities, both in this comics work and in his earlier novel also. It will be argued that The Fortress of Solitude and Omega: The Unknown together read the repeating-but-differing images of the comic book in contrast with the repetitions of the franchised brand to present a sustained critique of capitalist cultures. In all of this, it will be seen, Lethem draws on the idioms and traits of comic books: colors, panels, word balloons, margins, gutters, lines.

Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Joy Garnett

Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Joy Garnett

The Dandelion Podcast: Interview with Jonathan Lethem

Birkbeck postgraduate student Zara Dinnen talks to&nbsp;writer Jonathan Lethem about his most recent novel, Chronic City, his views on plagiarism and the cultural commons&nbsp;in the digital era, representations of space and realities in his fiction, and his relationship to the academic and public reception of his work.