Sound and Inqusition

Jonathan Lethem. Gun, With Occasional Music, 1994.(2005 edition, purchased in used-book store, Mason, OH, early Spring 2008.)

From his review of Motherless Brooklyn,) Luc Sante on Lethem:

Lethem possesses all the equipment necessary to write giant postmodern slabs that will invite decades of exegesis. Instead he has chosen to pursue something that calls to mind Manny Farber's famous category: art "that termite-like...feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement." He writes what are apparently small genre novels, but ones that sustain, perfect, and destroy the givens of genre all at once.