My first Lethem book. While I'm new to his novels, I’ve read a number of articles that he's written as a cultural critic, much of which I liked. Lethem has the kind of boho background that I envied growing up––painter father, activist mother, raised in Brooklyn with front-row seats to the rise of punk rock and hip-hop, wide exposure to both high- and low-brow arts and culture––which informs his work, certainly in nonfiction, but also fiction, if this book is any indication.
What’s interesting to me about Lethem’s background is the “heel turn” he made early in life, abandoning the fast track towards a prestigious career in the visual arts to become a burnout working at Berkeley bookstores, initially writing pulpy science fiction and advocating for Philip K. Dick before it was cool (or maybe when it was actually cool). However, it seems like it’s the cultural fluency established in his youth that has allowed him to be the perfect guide to the Harper’s/Granta crowd as genre fiction has risen from the bargain bins to the cultural juggernaut (and dominant sales-driver) it is today. He’s your cool older cousin or uncle, not “the comic book guy.” To be a good translator, you need to best know the language of your target audience, I suppose.
Appropriately, (2016) is an odd duck, stylistically speaking. It certainly has enough literary fiction indicators––clean prose and clever observations, a mélange of fact and fiction, ringing dialogue and hip avoidance of cliché––but it is basically a body horror story, in the style of or, most closely, . Somewhere out in Hollywoodland, there’s a bad B-movie variant of this novel circulating, but there are elements of the narrative that make it almost uniquely well-suited for a book, which was fun to see in action.
I didn't know there was such a thing as professional backgammon players.