The biographical details printed on the back flap of his sprawling, ambitious new novel, Chronic City, merely hint at the scope and genre-bending nature of Jonathan Lethem's fiction. Since publishing Gun, With Occasional Music a fusion of Philip K Dick, Raymond Chandler and Alice in Wonderland in 1994, Lethem has flirted with science fiction, noir, fantasy, literary fiction, memoir, and Shakespearean pastiche to formulate a body of work that on the face of it is so eclectic in style and approach that each novel seemingly could be the work of a different writer.
The publication of his breakout novel 1999's Motherless Brooklyn perfectly encapsulates his diverse and scattergun approach to fiction. An inventive, evocative crime drama centring on a language=obsessed Tourette's sufferer, it managed to win the Macallan Gold Dagger but also a National Book Critics' Circle award an impressive and unusual achievement, especially considering the novel that preceded it: Girl in Landscape, an odd reworking of The Searchers (with apparently inadvertent nods to A Passage to India) set in space.