Do these examples tread the fine line of plagiarism, Lethem asked – a question that had been thundering through the news, as the entertainment industries set about tightening copyright laws again – or is the collage of different influences a long tradition in art and literature, and is its re-imagining a reinvigoration of past forms? Consider, suggested Lethem, T S Eliot's The Wasteland and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, each works that revel in cultural plunder. Then consider Disney, which has cartoonised the fairy tale Cinderella and J M Barrie's Peter Pan but guards its own intellectual property fiercely.

The son of Brooklyn hippies, with a stint in San Francisco at the start of the tech boom, Lethem has moved through the US counterculture where sharing – be it old-fashioned book sharing or open-source software – has kudos. He does not object to the artist drawing financial reward for his work, but argues that when the work's fame has reached far, being quoted and enriching others for the common good becomes the reward. In a final pirouette, Lethem appended to the article a list of the people from whom he had stolen lines to include in his text: whole sentences, even borrowed memories, from Mary Shelley to Lawrence Lessig, that he used to push his idea forwards. It is an art-essay, bricolage in print, and so brilliant that it deserved passing on, regardless of copyright.

That article is the centrepiece of Lethem's new book, The Ecstasy of Influence: non-fictions, etc. To call it a collection of essays would give it a formality that it doesn't have. There is collected journalism and criticism, from Rolling Stone to the London Review of Books, but this is interleaved with autobiography and the odd flash of fiction, and a narrator occasionally apologising for the quality of juvenilia.

It is a vast survey of modern culture, and he rifles through the rejects as well as the canon – he prefers Barbara Pym to Thomas Pynchon – in order to re-examine the cultural fabric. The arguments are intense, the writing heavy with reference and influence, and there are some incisive takes on the modern world. "In polymorphic cyberville," he notes in one essay, people "gather in epistolatory mobs, gossip about books or about theatre they've attended, or watch brief movies, like those in Edison's cinematographic viewing boxes, while petting their obstinately prehistoric genitals".


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