Jonathan Lethem's works cross the borders of many literary genres, a fact which has both confounded and charmed critics. For example, his novel Girl in Landscape "exists somewhere in the previously uncharted insterstices between science fiction, western, and coming-of-age novels," noted Elizabeth Gaffney in a Publishers Weekly profile of Lethem. And of the short story collection The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, a Publishers Weekly reviewer commented, "Although Lethem is claimed by the science fiction community as one of its own . . . [his] work is really extra-genre, in the manner of Borges or William Burroughs." His 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn, appeared on the surface to be a wry take-off on the detective-novel genre featuring a hapless gumshoe, but here "Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation," noted New York Times Book Review critic Albert Mobilio, "one revealing how the mind drives on its...