When Jonathan Lethem was born, in 1964, his mother had dropped out of college and was piercing ears with a pin and ice-cube in Greenwich Village, where she ran with a crowd of folksingers including Tuli Kupferberg, Dave Van Ronk and Phil Ochs. His father, in an early phase of his career as an artist, was painting basketball hoops, vices and stereopticons. After a time the family settled in a neighbourhood to the south of downtown Brooklyn, where young whites were buying brownstones on the cheap.

LRB 5 July 2007 | PDF Download