The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can't escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem's case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. Lethem fans already know of his love of the band – composed of David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar) --  from his essay “The Beards.” There, he connected his love of  "Fear of Music" to the aftermath of his mother's death from a brain tumor. “I have an obvious predisposition to handling the material of 1978 and '79 with an exaggerated, personal intensity,” he told me. We spoke via Skype, Lethem from his office at Pomona College where he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing.

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The sign for the Sunset Foot Clinic on West Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles is known to some locals as a kind of fortuneteller. On one side is depicted a foot with a woeful face, a bandaged big toe and crutches, while the other side shows an ecstatic foot in gloves and sneakers giving the thumbs-up sign. (Yes, these feet have both arms and legs.) When the sign is working, it rotates, and several residents of the nearby Silver Lake and Echo Park neighborhoods believe that whichever side they see first indicates what sort of day awaits them. Others use the sign as a guide: If they see the Happy Foot, they get to do something fun, while the Sad Foot condemns them to an afternoon of chores.

The Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign became better known to readers outside the Los Angeles area when it appeared in Jonathan Lethem's 2007 novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet." In that book, the main character, a musician named Lucinda, can see the sign from the window of her apartment: "The two images presented not so much a one-or-the-other choice as an eternal marriage of opposites, the emblem of some ancient foot-based philosophical system. This was Lucinda's oracle: one glance to pick out the sad or happy foot, and a coin was flipped, to legislate any decision she'd delegated to the foot god."

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It is no accident, then, that childhood and adolescence should play such a major role in Brooklyn literature. The place to start reading is Betty Smith's 1943 novel, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." This story of young Francie Nolan, growing up with her family in Williamsburg, is saturated with the routines of daily life in an immigrant ghetto; it bridges the gap between bestseller and literary classic, largely because it is so affecting that it cannot help but win over readers of every age. Particularly moving is the relationship between Francie and her father, a charming Irish singing waiter too enamored of alcohol to support his family on a consistent basis.

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And another quick note before we get this bookworm party started. While this column is oriented toward the latest in indie publishing, my personal definition of what exactly that encompasses is probably a bit broader than the one offered by the excellent Punk Planet. For me, "indie" sometimes connotes a particular state of mind, usually one involving bizarre experiments and risky brilliance; sometimes I can find that confluence in a major release (Jonathan Lethem's latest comes immediately to mind, and not just because he's the finest writer working today). But the majority of the time that will simply not be the case.

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Peck charges on for almost 6,000 words from there, flogging every misused dash and antecedent-less pronoun in two paragraphs from Moody's memoir "The Black Veil"; calling the book "lies" and "criminal," and then extending his fuck-you to the horse Moody rode in on. Peck lashes Moody together with Davids Foster Wallace and Eggers, Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, and assorted other Lit Boys as "heirs to the bankrupt tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses'; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov ... the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis ... wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's ... and the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of DeLillo."

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"Here I can keep the trophies and dangerous souvenirs I've collected from other worlds," Superman explained. "Here I can conduct secret experiments with my super-powers and keep souvenirs of my best friends!" The fortress became a gimmick, convenient, for the retelling of tales, a window on Superman's past adventures and a mirror of things to come. "I built it here in the polar wastes because the intense cold keeps away snoopers," Superman said. Its precise location was never disclosed, only that it lay "in a region of ice and snow" and that no one would ever read the diary Superman kept there, a "gigantic book, made of metal," which he wrote in Kryptonese with one of his fingernails, "while hovering in midair high off the Fortress floor."

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Nope. The long-tongued Kiss vocalist likes his women a little meatier, a preference he made patently clear Tuesday night at "14 on Sixth," which bills itself as New York's first ever plus-size fashion show. The show was being filmed for an upcoming documentary.

But Simmons, who arrived out of makeup and boasting a tan that would make George Hamilton turn deeper orange with envy, had his eye not so much on the fashions as on the big girls making their way down the catwalk.

"I love breasts. They make the world go 'round," Simmons exclaimed, apparently mammariously overcome midshow.

And -- call him a boob -- but Simmons suspects he's not alone on this. "Men appreciate a curvier woman, especially one with breasts," he opined. "Women need to understand this, and show us their breasts more often."

A plea as heartfelt as the song "Beth."

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Simmons may like 'em meaty but ...

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Conley is a trained sociologist and a career academic teaching at New York University. His book raises his own anecdotal experiences into a sociological light, making it a kind of memoir-plus. Yet it seemed to me the book ultimately comes down on the side of the personal, and on those terms it's a triumph. Like any novelist arraying himself with inspiration for a long voyage into unknown territory, I took it as a hopeful sign.

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Nonfiction

"Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War" by Mark Bowden

"Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley" by Peter Guralnick

"Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World" by Mark Fritz

"Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette" by Judith Thurman

"Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption" by Lisa Belkin

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Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned in Hawaii was that a Manual Override is unfortunately not the same as the real thing. The effect wears off too soon.

While he's waiting for it to wear off, he gets a lot of solid math done. Alan provided him with some notes on redundancy and entropy, relating to the voice encryption work he is currently doing in New York City. Waterhouse works through that stuff and comes up with some nice lemmas which he lamentably cannot send to Alan without violating both common sense and any number of security procedures. This done, he turns his attention to cryptology, pure and raw. He spent enough time at Bletchley Park to realize just how little of this art he really understood.

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Mother and daughter worked together, dressing the two young boys, tucking them into their outfits. The boys slithered under their hands, delighted, impatient, eyes darting sideways. They nearly groaned with momentary pleasure. The four were going to the beach, so their bodies had to be sealed against the sun. The boys had never been there. The girl had, just once. She could barely remember.

Since I first read those sentences, I have loaned or given copies of "Girl" to my little sister, my boss, a famous writer I admire, several colleagues, two foreign visitors and many friends. Most of them had never heard of Lethem for the same reason that you probably haven't -- not because he hasn't written much (Lethem has written five novels and one book of stories) but because until now he has written only science fiction and, by and large, science fiction doesn't get reviewed in the mainstream press. That will probably change with Lethem's new novel, "Motherless Brooklyn," a book that looks likely to complete his long, gradual crossover to full literary respectability.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/23/brooklyn/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/09/23/lethem/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/23/lethem/#comments Thu, 23 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/09/23/lethem A detective with Tourette's syndrome narrates a hard-boiled crime novel. Sounds like a gimmick, right? Another in the endless line of diversity dicks -- sleuths in wheelchairs, lesbian lieutenants, investigators who also happen to be heroin addicts or restaurant critics or codgers as old as Angela Lansbury. But Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, "Motherless Brooklyn," is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette's is a gimmick, but it's a gimmick with depth, with soul. Lethem, after all, walks the serious-fiction beat, and in his hands the compulsions of Tourette's become a kind of kaleidoscopic metaphor, ultimately (and somewhat paradoxically) reflecting the fundamental ethos of the mystery genre itself: the compulsion to restore order and rightness to a world thrown temporarily out of joint.

The world of "Motherless Brooklyn" is, of course, the borough of the title, and what disrupts its sense of order is the stabbing death of a small-time neighborhood operator named Frank Minna. Lionel is Frank's factotum, one of four misfits from a local orphanage Frank has commandeered to work in his seedy and makeshift detective agency. Calling themselves Minna Men, the four have become vassals in Frank's scruffy little fiefdom, and like the members of any feudal hierarchy, each has found his particular niche: Tony is the implicit second-in-command, the lesser noble to Frank's lord of the manor; Danny is the enigmatic knight-errant, distant and of uncertain loyalty; Gilbert is the earthy, none too intelligent serf; and Lionel, nicknamed Freakshow because of his constant verbal tics and physical twitches, is the fool, the court jester, whose antics the others tolerate with the indulgence that forced proximity dictates.

With Frank's murder, this miniature fiefdom loses its suzerain, and in the scramble to find the killer, long-submerged tensions begin to pull the Minna Men apart. (Think Yugoslavia after Tito, or the Bowery Boys without Leo Gorcey to keep them all in line.) As Frank's deputy, Tony tries to control the investigation, but Lionel has his own reasons -- some of them Tourette's-related -- for getting to the bottom of Frank's murder: "My words begin plucking at the threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point ..." In a sense, this is detective work as medical condition, stemming from a pathological need to poke at experience, to process its patterns, "putting hairs in place, putting ducks in rows, replacing divots."

What follows is a fairly standard noir quest: a long, convoluted road to discovery, littered with the usual detritus of fractured conspiracies, and complete with corpses, cutthroats and big, ugly men with big, ugly guns. But as in his earlier novels ("As She Climbed Across the Table," "Girl in Landscape"), Lethem harnesses the engine of a familiar genre to transport us to a territory uniquely his own. It comes as no surprise that he uses Tourette's as an excuse for some heady verbal pyrotechnics. (My favorite Essrog riff: "He's just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse.") More unexpected is the sympathetic warmth he brings to the characterization of Lionel. "Motherless Brooklyn" has a few problems -- including some cartoonlike stock characters and one scene near the end that flirts with maudlin sentimentality -- but it works far better than the average hip postmodern novel in terms of sheer emotional impact. Because Lethem never lets the metaphorical and linguistic possibilities of his narrator's illness overshadow his immensely appealing humanity, we really care about Lionel and his search for his mentor's killer.

In the end, the mystery at the heart of "Motherless Brooklyn" turns out to be surprisingly modest. Readers looking for one of Don DeLillo's or Thomas Pynchon's grand metaphysical conspiracies may be disappointed. But really, Lethem is too inventive a writer to produce just another literature-of-paranoia knockoff, with Tourette's as its central trope ("The Barking of Lot 49"?). Instead, he's given us something that is at once less derivative and more traditional: a detective story that transcends its pulp roots not by adopting high-art pretensions but by bringing to the genre an originality and an idiosyncratic sympathy that few other writers could muster.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/23/lethem/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/09/20/marcus4/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/20/marcus4/#comments Mon, 20 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/marc/1999/09/20/marcus4 1. The Pale Orchestra conducted by David Thomas
"Mirror Man Act 1: Jack & the General" (Thirsty Ear)

The centerpiece of the 1998 Diastodrome! Festival in London, with impresario/composer/performer Thomas moonlighting from his band Pere Ubu: a live recording of what could have been called "Route 66," because the journey the singers and musicians take across an America they're afraid of forgetting is that expansive. What's missing is that old Bobby Troup-Rolling Stones glee as the miles burn up and L.A. gleams in the distance. This is all backroads and, with Bob Holman's increasingly frantic monologues about how, no, no, no, don't you understand, that's not it -- he's talking about gas prices and small towns and theme parks -- panic. Then the tone shifts. A character something like Steve Martin's corrupt, dreaming traveling song-salesman in "Pennies from Heaven" emerges: Thomas, ready to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, or whatever bridge takes you from here to there. He convinces you that he has the right to do it, because he doesn't take the bridge for granted and you do. Suddenly you want to leave the house and get in the car and see if you can find the same country this company is finding -- leaving the disc on while you're gone.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/20/marcus4/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/12/23/eric_8/ http://www.salon.com/1998/12/23/eric_8/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/col/eric/1998/12/23/eric Hurtling faster and faster toward the event horizon of a year from now, here
is the Unspun Top 10 of 1998 -- artifacts to take with you down the wormhole:

1) "Memory Gospel" by Moby: When time so outraces memory that all we can do is try to remember the future, when psychic rootlessness and cultural entropy
constitute the only aesthetic anyone can believe in anymore, this soaring B-side clandestinely hidden on the latest single by the most willfully alienated
artist of the decade provided a subliminal soundtrack for everything else. A pop response to Henryk Gorecki's "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," it short-circuited spiritual foreplay and cut straight to the ecstasy, the blur of orgasm merged
with the careen of history.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/12/23/eric_8/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/06/15/feature_8/ http://www.salon.com/1998/06/15/feature_8/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1998/06/15/feature Like a lot of people who grew up in Florida (or California, or wherever there's an endless summer), I've learned to fear the beach. Sunburn, sandcrabs, tourists in tight clothing -- you know the litany. What's more, the beach is generally a sorry place to dip into a good book. Even if there isn't a 200-pound bruiser kicking sand up your nostrils, the multiple distractions -- including, sometimes, tourists in tight clothing -- make it difficult to submit to whatever spell an author may be trying to cast. The term "hammock reading" isn't very evocative of summer, but when I think of the books I plan to take away with me this July, that's where I imagine myself reading them.

No matter where you plan to lug your pile of beach books this summer, there's an unusually good supply of lively, literate, engrossing titles. Below are recommendations, culled from a handful of Salon's editors and regular critics, of some of the best hardcovers published thus far in 1998. Before we get to that, however, here's an (admittedly personal) look at some of the most interesting paperbacks that have recently landed in stores.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/06/15/feature_8/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/03/17/review_86/ http://www.salon.com/1998/03/17/review_86/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1998/03/17/review When we were little kids and our parents and teachers urged us to flex our imagination, they thought they were doing us a favor -- and they were, under cover of daylight. But where were they after dark, when we'd lie stone awake and frozen with fear in our beds after we'd read one of Ray Bradbury's alien-spores-in-the-basement stories, under the covers with the flashlight, or taken a "Twilight Zone" episode much too close to heart? When we reached adulthood, we convinced ourselves those fears were just silly: The "Twilight Zone" sets were cheesy, and Bradbury turned out to be not nearly as scary as Richard Nixon.<BR

But Jonathan Lethem is the kind of writer who reassures us that none of those nights were spent in vain: We had plenty to fear -- we just needed those stories because they gave us something to hook our terror onto. "Girl in Landscape" -- which could be called science fiction for those who like that sort of thing, although it shouldn't scare off those who don't -- uses the raw materials of those fears (mysterious viruses that change our perceptions; dry, spooky terrain that looks like nothing so much as nightmare territory; tiny, slimy creatures that grow inside of potatoes) as a way of exploring both the awe of female adolescent sexual awakening and the treachery of it.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/03/17/review_86/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1997/11/20/20media/ http://www.salon.com/1997/11/20/20media/#comments Thu, 20 Nov 1997 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/media/circus/1997/11/20/20media When Charles Frazier's earthy, decidedly old-fashioned first novel "Cold Mountain" beat out Don DeLillo's "Underworld" and three other books Tuesday night to win this year's National Book Award for fiction, many in the book world expressed some mild shock and surprise. (Who is this bearded whippersnapper?) But not America's book collectors. They'd been betting on Frazier all along.

From the moment "Cold Mountain" was released this spring, it has basked in the glow of almost-otherworldly buzz. Strong reviews and good word-of-mouth translated into sales, and Atlantic Monthly Press' first printing -- 25,000 copies -- quickly vanished from bookstores. It's impossible to know how many of those copies were snapped up by collectors who saw a good thing coming, but as early as this summer antiquarian booksellers began advertising signed copies for $50, then for $75, then for $100.

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