Jonathan Lethem's essays reveal surprising influences on his fiction
This is a book that turns the reader into Mortimer Snerd, the ventriloquist's puppet who supposedly first uttered the immortal phrase "Who'd have thunk it?" Who'd have thunk that Jonathan Lethem – one of the most emotionally engaging and intellectually nimble of contemporary novelists – might prefer Barbara Pym to Thomas Pynchon? Who'd have thunk the first book he had autographed was by Anthony Burgess, or that he adored Gk Chesterton, the essay on whom has the most appropriately ecstatic opening sentence: "How do you autopsy a somersault?" There are also more familiar aspects. You would have to be a rather obtuse reader not to realise Lethem's love of Dick, Dylan and Ditko.
This is not, thankfully, one of those ragbag anthologies of non-fiction that fiction writers throw together when their cuttings drawer becomes full. Rather, like Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind...
This is a book that turns the reader into Mortimer Snerd, the ventriloquist's puppet who supposedly first uttered the immortal phrase "Who'd have thunk it?" Who'd have thunk that Jonathan Lethem – one of the most emotionally engaging and intellectually nimble of contemporary novelists – might prefer Barbara Pym to Thomas Pynchon? Who'd have thunk the first book he had autographed was by Anthony Burgess, or that he adored Gk Chesterton, the essay on whom has the most appropriately ecstatic opening sentence: "How do you autopsy a somersault?" There are also more familiar aspects. You would have to be a rather obtuse reader not to realise Lethem's love of Dick, Dylan and Ditko.
This is not, thankfully, one of those ragbag anthologies of non-fiction that fiction writers throw together when their cuttings drawer becomes full. Rather, like Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind...
- 2/25/2012
- by Stuart Kelly, James Wood
- The Guardian - Film News
"Death disports with writers more cruelly than with the rest of humankind," Cynthia Ozick wrote in a recent issue of The New Republic.
"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.
"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling?
"Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag,...
"The grave can hardly make more mute those who were voiceless when alive--dust to dust, muteness to muteness. But the silence that dogs the established writer's noisy obituary, with its boisterous shock and busy regret, is more profound than any other.
"Oblivion comes more cuttingly to the writer whose presence has been felt, argued over, championed, disparaged--the writer who is seen to be what Lionel Trilling calls a Figure. Lionel Trilling?
"Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his "field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag,...
- 4/24/2011
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
Ceridwen Morris
With “The Ask,” Sam Lipsyte graduated from the ranks of the overlooked and became a bestselling novelist. “I spent a lot of years on underrated lists,” Lipsyte said. “I just saw myself for the first time on an overrated list. I felt I had truly I arrived.” Lipsyte, who also published a story collection and two previous novels, talked to Speakeasy about how “The Ask,” out now in paperback, has and hasn’t changed his life.
The Wall...
With “The Ask,” Sam Lipsyte graduated from the ranks of the overlooked and became a bestselling novelist. “I spent a lot of years on underrated lists,” Lipsyte said. “I just saw myself for the first time on an overrated list. I felt I had truly I arrived.” Lipsyte, who also published a story collection and two previous novels, talked to Speakeasy about how “The Ask,” out now in paperback, has and hasn’t changed his life.
The Wall...
- 3/9/2011
- by Steven Kurutz
- Speakeasy/Wall Street Journal
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