a Pynchonesque springboard into publishing (brief excerpt from NYTimes article)

[pynchonoid]

[...] What Lee was writing was a novel with the
extremely unpromising title ''Agnew Belittlehead.'' On
a couple of occasions I have tried to get him to talk
about this part of his bibliography, which he says is
too painful to go into, and I think I have learned the
following: that the book was about 500 pages long and
heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon; that it
contained both Byronic verse and fantastical or
science-fiction elements; and that, as he confessed
once, it was ''completely intellectualized'' and had
''nothing to do with people, nothing to do with
humanity.''

One reason for the oddness of ''Agnew'' may be that
Lee wrote much of it during a time when his mother was
dying of stomach cancer and he was making long visits
to Syracuse, N.Y., where his parents were then living,
to help care for her. The book may have been a kind of
escape, much like cooking and golf, both of which he
took up seriously during those long, sad months. His
mother's death was clearly a kind of turning point --
an experience that deepened and matured him. His
mother said to him then that she wished he had never
gone to Exeter, because she could have had those extra
years with him. ''My mother was 52 when she died,'' he
told me. ''But it seemed to me that she died younger,
because she lost 10 years of her life just trying to
assimilate into things. Right before she got sick, I
thought she was just hitting her stride.''

Though unpublishable, ''Agnew Belittlehead'' was
promising enough to get Lee an agent and a scholarship
to the creative writing program at the University of
Oregon in Eugene (familiar to many of us because
that's where ''Animal House'' was filmed). It was in
Eugene where, week by week, he turned out ''Native
Speaker,'' a debut novel that, as critics have
suggested, doesn't read like one. It doesn't succeed
in every respect, but it has that essential but
undefinable quality: a voice. Lee is too modest to say
so, but he must have known, from the very first pages,
that he had found both himself and his calling.
''Native Speaker'' is that assured and exuberant.
[...] 

from:
February 29, 2004
Deep in Suburbia
By CHARLES McGRATH
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/29/magazine/29LEE.html?ei=5062&en=8666bbc9f87771ac&ex=1078635600&pagewanted=print&position=>

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