“If everyone is continually executing interpretive strategies and in that act constituting texts, intentions, speakers, and authors, how can any one of us know whether or not he is a member of the same interpretive community as any other of us? The answer is that he can’t […]. The only “proof” of membership is fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community, someone who says to you what neither of us could ever prove to a third party: “we know.” — Stanley Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum””
“Lethem, like the best of his characters, has also returned in different guises — the first of which was a purveyor of pulpy, postmodern genre fiction. Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) transplants the traditional hard-boiled detective figure into a Terry Gilliam–style future complete with “babyheads” (genetically supercharged toddlers who smoke and guzzle whisky at their exclusive underage bars) and “evolved” animals such as Joey Castle — a “kangaroo gunman with an itchy trigger finger.” Amnesia Moon (1995) follows Chaos (a.k.a. Everett Moon) through a postapocalyptic America in which certain “dreamers” can reimagine material reality. In As She Climbed Across the Table (1997), an anthropology professor’s girlfriend falls in love with Lack: a void generated by a particle accelerator. And Girl in Landscape (1998), in which a 13-year-old Brooklynite is forced to negotiate the trials of adolescence on the Planet of the Archbuilders, partially recapitulates the plot of John Ford’s The Searchers. Lethem has always been explicit about his formative influences, and this initial quartet of novels draws openly from the work of Raymond Chandler, Philip K. Dick, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon.”
““All writing,” as Lethem asserts in his preface to The Ecstasy of Influence (2011), his most recent essay collection, “no matter how avowedly naturalistic or pellucid, consists of artifice, of conjuration, of the manipulation of symbols rather than the ‘opening of a window onto life.’” Lethem’s emphasis on the linguistic construction of reality, combined with his insistence on the inescapability of “influence,” his use of pastiche, his promiscuous intermixture of so-called high and low cultural forms — all of these features suggest the image of Lethem as a self-consciously postmodern writer, an author who (per Roland Barthes) is dead and loving it.”
“Lethem has expressed his frank bafflement at authors who flatly decline the entire repertoire of postmodern innovation. Alice Munro, William Trevor, Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Franzen — these authors, Lethem believes, have basically “declined the entire twentieth century (and interesting parts of several others). You’ve read our entire menu, sir? And nothing was of interest? Really, nothing?””