MARK HASKELL SMITH
on Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence.Persistance of Memory © Lou Beach
Jonathan Lethem
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
Doubleday, November 2011. 480 pp.
Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. is a one-man omnibus, and you’re either on it or you’re not.
A shotgun blast of multitentacled musings, it splatters the author’s obsessions across the cultural landscape in a kind of frenzied bookworm exuberance. There are dozens of essays. Essays on science fiction conventions and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (as it relates to postmodernism). On actor Donald Sutherland’s buttocks (as they relate to the author’s sexuality), teenage boys, nude models, and Lethem’s mixed feelings about his success. On the urgent need to take a shit while on book tour and the “eternal intertextuality of cultural participation.” There are previously published reviews and rambles on 9/11, James Brown, Bob Dylan, death scenes in Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Norman Mailer, Spider-Man, and Roberto Bolaño, among others. Lethem even dusts off some of his early short stories, experimental fiction, and poetry.
Unlike a greatest hits collection — such as the Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady or The Greatest Hits … So Far!!! by Pink, or even Geoff Dyer’s (albeit excellent) collection of essays Otherwise Known as the Human Condition — Lethem isn’t just dumping a bunch of prepublished material between the covers and calling it a day. He may dabble in “nonfictions,” but at heart he’s a novelist and can’t resist the novelist’s impulse to craft a narrative.
Half Termite, Half Elephant
