Famously, most of the defining novels about California have not been produced by Californians. The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon, The Big Sleep, The Loved One, The Crying of Lot 49, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Tales of the City – all written by authors for whom the West Coast was the exotic antithesis of the (East Coast, Midwestern, European) worlds that for them represented normality.

Jonathan Lethem grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and so belongs to this tradition of outsider observers. In fact he lived in California in the Eighties and Nineties, and much of the heavily sci-fi-influenced fiction he wrote before the New York-based novels for which he is best known, the dazzling