Has Jonathan Lethem read every book ever published?
According to Martin Amis in The Information, the last person to have read every book ever published was Coleridge. Faced with More Alive and Less Lonely, though, you might wonder whether there’s a new candidate in town. Certainly, Jonathan Lethem’s mind seems not so much well-stocked as bursting at the seams. A few of the 70-odd pieces gathered here do concern such mainstream figures as Dickens, Kafka and Melville (where Lethem appears to know all the books not just by, but also about, them). But many of the others may have even the most erudite of readers heading sheepishly for Google, as he considers the work of say, Russell Greenan, Bernard Wolfe or Tanguy Viel. At one characteristic point, he notes that the only real rival to John Franklin Bardin in the creation of waking nightmares is Cornell Woolrich; at another, that Walter Trevis’s novel Mockingbird is ‘the perfect bridge between Clifford Simak and Steve Erikson’. Meanwhile, one of the more earnest, if fairly baffling, essays ponders the metaphysical significance of Batman: ‘Batman is death. He’s death denied, or mediated through the crude morality of Fate.’
Admittedly, anybody familiar with Lethem’s fiction won’t be too surprised at how wide-ranging his interests prove to be. In his first novel Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), he set out ‘to locate the exact midpoint between (Philip K.) Dick and Chandler’ — which is why it features a Californian private eye tracking down a talking gangster kangaroo. Next came three science fiction works, before Lethem’s breakthrough book Motherless Brooklyn signalled a move into more orthodox literary territory. Nonetheless, ever since he got there, his realism has generally been accompanied — or, as he prefers to put it, “wrenched” — by scenes.