I meet Lethem at his office on the corner of Union Street and Nevins. If his breakthrough novel, Motherless Brooklyn (1999) – a masterpiece of a mobster detective story whose hero has Tourette's syndrome – creatively mistook Brooklyn for a loud, involuntary, chaotic disorder, then his sweeping autobiographical novel, The Fortress of Solitude (2003), brought to life its intimate, mutable questions of race and class. A youth steeped in comics, sci-fi and paperback noir made him the writer he is in the same measure, perhaps, as these streets themselves. He grew up not far from here, the child of idealistic bohemian social reformers (his father was a painter his charismatic mother died when Lethem was 13). Lethem, 46 next month, is one of America's best novelists, and indisputably its most skilled transubstantiator of urban pop culture into fictional worlds. But few have documented the place itself in such Dickensian detail, or with such manic, quick-witted, genre-loving energy as Lethem has. Brooklyn is riddled with writers – so much so that Lethem's friend, the novelist Colson Whitehead, once wrote an essay joking about it ("Google 'brooklyn writer' and you'll get: 'Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?'").
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