Bryant Gumbel, anyone?Lethem was also the only novelist on it. "The entire burden of writing novels in the 21st century is on my shoulders," he says, then adds, "I just wish we [on the list] could engage in some sort of income averaging and then I'd be in really great shape."Although As She Climbed Across the Table didn't require the kind of research that Motherless Brooklyn did, Lethem says that the science at its heart "is just authentic enough. I rescued myself at the very beginning by telling it from the point of view of a humanities professor who's uncomprehending. He can't 'get' contemporary physics, and so I was writing more about that feeling of being in awe of the chilly, fascinating mysteries [of physics] but never being able to get it and just loving the language - which poets and writers end up doing, standing outside this temple and pilfering the language."I think it's a book where my influences are almost mechanically obvious. I mean I'm really trying to write a John Barth or a Don DeLillo academic satire with a Stanislaw Lem plot. And it's a very naked homage stylistically, to that tradition of the campus novel, to Malcolm Bradbury."It seems to me you can observe the set operations of the campus novel.. It obeys all the rules. When you open it, the reader's expectations fall into place in that wonderful, pleasurable way that genre fiction does, where you know certain things are going to have to happen There'll be the campus party, the scene of reprimand.

I'm absolutely indebted to The History Man for that long party scene."By this point, I have started to notice Lethem's book collection, which fills his living room and snakes around the walls into the bedroom. His apartment and his film deals have not filled me with unbearable envy, but I now see that this is a collection to die, or possibly kill, for. There's a complete set of Pynchon first editions, with jackets, some signed Anthony Burgess, mountains of crime novels, skyscrapers of collectable pulp and SF paperbacks. One has to be very cautious about reading a personality from bookshelves, but in Lethem's case the temptation is hard to resist.This is a man who in previous novels has merged science fiction and hard-boiled mystery, then science fiction and the western. Yet he's reluctant to pontificate too much about the significance of genre.

"My engagement with genre is so fertile and manifest," he says "I've loved it all my life.... I see genres everywhere."And wherever he sees one, you get the feeling that he will embrace it, subvert it, reinvent it and make his own. No wonder he's feeling brave.* Geoff Nicholson's latest novel is 'Bedlam Burning' (Gollancz). Gather Vermeer's two-dozen surviving works and, within minutes, one would provoke a mob held at bay by the linked arms of policemen, as if re-enacting Beatlemania.

The scrum at the exhibitions held five years ago in Washington and Holland, likely to be repeated at the National Gallery's show this June, was certainly at odds with the outwardly tranquil scenes on display. Gather Vermeer's two-dozen surviving works and, within minutes, one would provoke a mob held at bay by the linked arms of policemen, as if re-enacting Beatlemania. The scrum at the exhibitions held five years ago in Washington and Holland, likely to be repeated at the National Gallery's show this June, was certainly at odds with the outwardly tranquil scenes on display. It is perhaps those transatlantic jamborees which prompted, in swift succession, two resonantly dinky novels about the artist As in most things, Proust got there first. Vermeer pervades A la recherche du Temps Perdu, not only with Swann's abandoned essay but - gloriously - Bergotte's death in front of the "View of Delft", a detail of which he had risen from his sick-bed to study after reading a critic who had said that it was "like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that was sufficient in itself".As Proust's Narrator says, such an artist's work "expresses for others and renders visible to ourselves that life of ours which cannot effectually observe itself... Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs".In Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl With a Pearl Earring, now a HarperCollins paperback (£5.99), such an aim propels the story of the eponymous serving-girl, Griet, who inspires Vermeer's work, her own being a means to feed a blinded father.