This is a book that turns the reader into Mortimer Snerd, the ventriloquist's puppet who supposedly first uttered the immortal phrase "Who'd have thunk it?" Who'd have thunk that Jonathan Lethem – one of the most emotionally engaging and intellectually nimble of contemporary novelists – might prefer Barbara Pym to Thomas Pynchon? Who'd have thunk the first book he had autographed was by Anthony Burgess, or that he adored GK Chesterton, the essay on whom has the most appropriately ecstatic opening sentence: "How do you autopsy a somersault?" There are also more familiar aspects. You would have to be a rather obtuse reader not to realise Lethem's love of Dick, Dylan and Ditko.
This is not, thankfully, one of those ragbag anthologies of non-fiction that fiction writers throw together when their cuttings drawer becomes full. Rather, like Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind or Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, it is a curated selection of essays which thematically add up to more than the sum of its parts. The pleasure for readers is twofold: on one hand, there is the intrinsic interest in the subjects (as various as Shirley Jackson and nude life models, hitch-hiking in Utah and the top five depressed superheroes). On the other, there's the fact that this is Lethem telling us these things, and how it gives an insight into his own creative practice.
In that respect there are a number of pieces which, if they aren't manifestoes, are at the least manifestish (or even manifetish, an invoking of totemic authors). In "Postmodernism as Liberty Valance", Lethem sketches out three areas that have been labelled as "postmodern" despite the clear differences between them. One is the idea that the world of "global techo-capitalism" is not "a coherent or congenial home for human psyches". The second is the generation of writers who adapted http://www.theguardian.com/books/data/author/shirley-jackson and other critical theorists to American subjects – the loose group that includes Robert Coover, John Barth and Stanley Elkin. Finally we have the combination of modernist aesthetics and what might broadly be called "popular culture" – a term of which Lethem is rightly suspicious. This conflating of three modes leads to outright contradiction. In the popular imagination, ill-fed by weak criticism, postmodernism comes to mean both "exalting disreputable genres like the crime story" (in Lethem's words) while simultaneously meaning a nouveau roman-style move away from plot itself. Lethem ingeniously imagines this straw-man postmodernism as Lee Marvin's character (amoral, brutalising), who everyone thinks is shot by Jimmy Stewart (in the guise of anyone from Carver to Franzen), with the critic as John Wayne's secret assassin. "The reason postmodernism doesn't die", writes Lethem, "is that postmodernism isn't the figure in the black hat standing out in the street squaring off against the earnest and law-abiding 'realist' novel … postmodernism is the street."
The same ideas are expanded in the title essay, where there is a noble refusal to conform to a thinking made up of pop versus culture or originality versus imitation. Indeed, Lethem's refusal either to smarten up writers such as Philip K Dick – to swap, metaphorically, their Converses for a nice pair of brogues – or to caricature the literary novel as a dessicated vampire, needing the fresh blood of street culture, is what makes his own literary practice so progressive. The idea of replacing the "Rushmore", as he calls it, of Bellow-Roth-Updike-Mailer with Lethem-Chabon-Foster Wallace-Eggers is anathema to him.
It is why the controversial essay "The Disappointment Critic", where Lethem takes to task the critic James Wood, is something of a disappointment, falling back into a them versus us stance. Having re-read the review in question, I'm just surprised Lethem didn't keep his powder dry for Michiko Kakutani instead.
Mailer is a presence throughout, and Lethem's retroactive alignment of Mailer's work with the current generation of American writers is worth deeper critical scrutiny. We don't really have books like Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author or Edmund Gosse's Gossip in a Library, so Lethem's account of his time at Bennington, alongside Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt, is eyebrow-raising – especially the way in which his anxiety about not being somehow disguised in The Secret History is marginally more painful than the idea that he is in it. The sincerity of revelation – a quality he shares with Geoff Dyer – is matched in his paean to Dick, including his own apprentice short stories.
The book is neatly modulated, with the impassioned and detailed studies offset with bagatelles (a lovely proposal for new holidays, an account of his superhero "The Epiphany", Brooklyn cameos that might be fugitive excerpts from unwritten novels). There is a quality of self-deprecation – "But stay. Please do stay", "yes, I am the person who made that weird thought go into your head. Yes, I am as flabbergasted as you are, really. Thank you" – which is as disarming as it is wholly unnecessary.
• Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books is published by Polygon.
