ABSTRACT
The American novelist Jonathan Lethem has expressed scepticism about literary canons. He argues that the American novel resembles a Mount Rushmore on which only three or four heads are carved, and those belong to white males. From 1994 to 2017 he produced ten novels, one novella, three full short story collections and two more slim volumes containing short stories; three substantial collections of essays and memoirs and two critical books on film and music. By the time Lethem’s literary career commenced, the boundary between fictions considered as ‘genre’ and as ‘art’ had already been ostentatiously crossed a number of times. Chronic City shifts Lethem’s narrative focus from Brooklyn to Manhattan; such had been his identification with his native borough that this move across the East River could be drolly presented as a migration of continental scale.
