Jonathan Lethem is probably America’s most unclassifiable novelist. Here’s a writer who began his career with a Chandleresque noir novel set in a Philip K. Dick world of futuristic drugs and genetically-enhanced kangaroo gangsters, but who’s set to release a highly anticipated and highly literary American epic about politics, radicalism, and communism from the 1930s through the Occupy movement, titled Dissident Gardens. Somehow, the gonzo pulp writer went straight. What happened? And just what kind of writer is Jonathan Lethem, anyway?

Lethem’s early novels earned him the reputation of a genre bender: after the aforementioned Chandler/Dick mashup, Gun, With Occasional Music, there were novels variously evoking Dick (again), Chandler (again), and Stanislaw Lem by way of Kurt Vonnegut. My personal favorite Lethem novel is from his genre-bending period. It’s called Girl in Landscape, and it sets a sexual coming of age tale on a distant planet that’s part Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, part John Ford’s The Searchers, all weird and weirdly evocative. It’s got interplanetary settlers, cowboys, clairvoyant kids, tiny mouse-sized deer, and hermaphroditic aliens with frond-like tentacles. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever read, and I love it beyond all reason.

Then something happened. In 2003, Lethem published The Fortress of Solitude, a semi-autobiographical tale of a boy growing up in the 1970s as Brooklyn gentrifies around him. The novel bore the Lethem trademarks of evocative writing, good characters, and rich layers of subtext, but something was different. The earlier novels had played with the tropes of popular genres like mystery and science fiction-but Fortress was straight-up realism, more or less. It was literary. Lethem got positive notices for Fortress, including a mostly appreciative review from the famously tough Michiko Kakutani.

Since then, Lethem’s taken a decidedly literary turn. Although his work is still a postmodern patchwork of influences, the books since Fortress have dabbled in more highbrow allusions, with few of the genre pyrotechnics of his previous work. It’s hard to tell where he’s going, what guiding principles or thematic concerns are shaping his work, or what direction he’s developing in. Interviews with him suggest that questions about his location within any genre landscape make him a bit cranky, and that he’s leery of being categorized in general. Some quotes:

• “I don’t try to cultivate any genre of writing in myself. I write what I urgently need to write at the time. What I try to cultivate in myself is the permission to do anything I can think of. “
• “I’ve come to feel that talking about categories, about ‘high’ and ‘low’, about genre and their boundaries and the blurring of those boundaries, all consists only of an elaborate way to avoid actually discussing what moves and interests me about books—my own, and others’.”
• “Things get really confusing when you bring in the word genre as if everyone understands what it means.”

OK then.

Even so, I love Lethem’s play with genre early in his career, and if he’s going to do something radically different each time out of the gate-as he appears to be doing-it would be great if he could return to his sci-fi or noir roots once in a while. His genre-influenced books have an entertainment and weirdness factor that seems lacking in his later work. And in the hands of a writer like Lethem, genre tropes like the hardboiled detective, the lone cowboy, the alien world, can often become something that you’ve never seen before, vibrating with a meaning that you don’t expect. In his early books, Lethem approaches his themes-the feelings and concepts that obsess him-sideways, behind the cover of the genre conventions he’s decided to adopt, opening up a rich interpretive space for the reader. In his later books, Lethem comes at his themes head on, and the results can sometimes be a bit flattening, interpretively.

I’m going to read the new book with interest-and, if the past is a guide, deep appreciation. But, Jonathan Lethem, if you’re out there, consider this my humble request to return to your scruffy genre roots sometime soon.