Jonathan Lethem Ecco News Today

Before moving to California, Jonathan Lethem set novels in the gentrifying Brooklyn of his youth. With 'Brooklyn Crime Novel,' he wants to correct the record.

A little more than halfway into Jonathan Lethem’s The Arrest comes a chapter titled “Postapocalyptic and Dystopian Stories”, in which the screenwriter protagonist and his movie-producer friend debate the appeal of such tales while name-checking a panoply of authors and titles – Vonnegut, King, Atwood, Walter Tevis, Philip K. Dick, George R. Stewart, Walter M. Miller, Emily St. John Mandel, Russell Hoban, and especially Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s The Road “bugs the fuck out of me,...