Description: Real diagnosable amnesia is mostly just a rumor in the world, a rare and usually temporary condition. But in literature it has formed a recurring theme -- even a genre of its own -- reflecting a modern mood, and a mood that clearly has special appeal to Americans. From the noir troupe of a lone man wandering the streets in an amnesiac stupor wondering if he's done anything criminal, to a more existential meditation on absence, to stories whose conclusions reveal the narrator was dead the whole time, to Pirandello's syndrome, where those elusive memories don't exist because the author didn't bother to write them, to a more collective political amnesia, Lethem has limned our literature for stories that "more than just present a character who'd suffered memory loss, entered into an amnesiac state at some level of the narrative itself -- and invited the reader to do the same".

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