Art & Creativity Quote by Jonathan Lethem

Lethem’s modesty is doing double duty here: it’s gratitude with an edge, a little smile aimed at the churn of contemporary publishing. “Odd good luck” sounds like a shrug, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to an industry that has largely stopped granting writers time to become themselves in public. The line turns on a tension between career-making mythology and the unromantic truth of craft: most breakthroughs aren’t lightning bolts, they’re incremental accretions that only look sudden in hindsight.

The real target is the word “breakthrough,” that PR talisman publishers and critics wave to manufacture urgency. Lethem exposes how elastic it is: if every book can be branded the breakthrough, the label stops describing artistic transformation and starts describing marketing need. Yet he doesn’t dismiss the term outright. “And each was, in its way” is the sly pivot, refusing cynicism as an identity. He’s insisting that growth is plural. A book can be a breakthrough in voice, in ambition, in readership, in confidence, even if it doesn’t arrive as a single, canonizing event.

There’s also an implicit autobiography of a writer’s relationship to attention. Starting slowly isn’t just economic “luck”; it’s psychological protection. It lets a writer take risks without being crushed by premature consensus, to fail in relative privacy, to change genres or obsessions without being trapped by an early brand. The subtext is almost parenthetical but pointed: the culture loves meteors, but literature is more often a staircase.