Synopses & Reviews
What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture supposed to do with novelists? In
The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the “white elephant” role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing range of answers.
A constellation of previously published pieces and new essays as provocative and idiosyncratic as any he’s written, this volume sheds light on an array of topics from sex in cinema to drugs, graffiti, Bob Dylan, cyberculture, 9/11, book touring, and Marlon Brando, as well as on a shelf’s worth of his literary models and contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Paula Fox, Bret Easton Ellis, James Wood, and others. And, writing about Brooklyn, his father, and his sojourn through two decades of writing, Lethem sheds an equally strong light on himself.
Review
"Did I say I love this book? Well, OK then, I love this book....bring[s] a novelist's sensibility to these essays, to find a through line, to approximate a narrative. It offers a way, in other words, to rethink the collection as a book in its own right and not just that, but a book about a big idea."
The Los Angeles Times
Review
"Lethem writes with a commitment to sharing his enthusiasm for whatever obsesses him....While the results illuminate his formative influences and artistic development, they also cast considerable light on the culture at large, which is both reflected in Lethem's work and has profoundly shaped it.....[H]igh ambitions and a strong sense of purpose." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"A fresh, erudite, zestful, funny frolic in the great fields of creativity." Booklist
About the Author
JONATHAN LETHEM is the New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn.
Table of Contents
i: My Plan to Begin WithMy Plan to Begin With, Part One
The Used Bookshop Stories
The Books They Read
Going Under in Wendover
Zelig of Notoriety
Clerk
ii: Dick, Calvino, Ballard: SF and Postmodernism
My Plan to Begin With, Part Two
Holidays
Crazy Friend (Philip K. Dick)
What I Learned at the Science-Fiction Convention
The Best of Calvino: Against Completism
Postmodernism as Liberty Valance
The Claim of Time (J. G. Ballard)
Give Up
iii: Plagiarisms
The Ecstasy of Influence
The Afterlife of “Ecstasy”/Somatics of Influence
Always Crashing in the Same Car
Against “Pop” Culture
Furniture
iv: Film and Comics
Supermen!: An Introduction
Top-Five Depressed Superheroes
The Epiphany
Izations
Everything Is Broken (Art of Darkness)
Godfather IV
Great Death Scene (McCabe & Mrs. Miller)
Kovacs’s Gift
Marlon Brando Breaks
Missed Opportunities
Donald Sutherland’s Buttocks
The Drew Barrymore Stories
v: Wall Art
The Collector (Fred Tomaselli)
An Almost Perfect Day (Letter to Bonn)
The Billboard Men (Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel)
Todd James
Writing and the Neighbor Arts
Live Nude Models
On a Photograph of My Father
Hazel
vi: 9/11 and Book Tour
Nine Failures of the Imagination
Further Reports in a Dead Language
To My Italian Friends
My Egyptian Cousin
Cell Phones
Proximity People
Repeating Myself
Bowels of Compassion
Stops
Advertisements for Norman Mailer
White Elephant and Termite Postures in the Life of the Twenty-first-Century Novelist
vii: Dylan, Brown, and Others
The Genius of James Brown
People Who Died
The Fly in the Ointment
Dancing About Architecture
Dylan Interview
Open Letter to Stacy (The Go-Betweens)
Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Rick James
an orchestra of light that was electric
viii: Working the Room
Bolaño’s 2666
Homely Doom Vibe (Paula Fox)
Ambivalent Usurpations (Thomas Berger)
Rushmore Versus Abundance
Outcastle (Shirley Jackson)
Thursday (G. K. Chesterton)
My Disappointment Critic/On Bad Faith
The American Vicarious (Nathanael West)
ix: The Mad Brooklynite
Ruckus Flatbush
Crunch Rolls
Children with Hangovers
L. J. Davis
Agee’s Brooklyn
Breakfast at Brelreck’s
The Mad Brooklynite
x: What Remains of My Plan
Micropsia
Zeppelin Parable
What Remains of My Plan
Memorial
Things to Remember 435