Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing

Joseph Brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. His previous books include Joyce's Critics (2004), Flann O'Brien (2005) and Literature of the 1980s (2010).

• AcknowledgementsNoteIntroductionChapter One: SourcesChapter Two: GenresChapter Three: WorldsChapter Four: HeroesChapter Five: StreetsConclusionWorks Cited

Joseph Brooker’s Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing is an important new addition to the growing bookshelf of excellent scholarship devoted to Lethem’s voluminous output. Wrestling Lethem’s work free of the problematic label, postmodernism, Brooker eschews the misleadingly tidy safety of chronological order, and instead deftly shuffles Lethem’s fiction under a sequence of key rubrics, to meticulously analyse the spectrum of his concerns, from the complexities of world making to the pathos of the superheroes’ confrontation with “the indignities of mundane reality.” Attuned to both Lethem’s place amongst his contemporaries (Egan, Franzen, Wallace), and his skilful borrowings from the past (from DeLillo and Dick to The Trashmen), this is a compelling and comprehensive analysis of a major writer.