I guess the other reviewer was not very sensitive, or was blinded by the usual prejudice against SF. I do not want to waste your time defending SF and its dignity as a literary territory. Read Dick, read Disch, read Delany, read the early Ballard, and then judge, if you please. But saying that SF is not Lethem's favorite playground obviously means you don't know much/anything about Lethem. He's a brilliant, gifted, and highly original SF writer who turned mainstream when he wrote Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. But he never forgot his roots. There's a hommage to Philip K. Dick even in the Fortress (which, being based on superheroes among many other things, is partly SF too). As for Girl, it's a great, moving, disquieting vision of America, projected on a faraway planet whose landscape has been cut and pasted from a disquieting masterpiece of US western mindscape, The Searchers. A book about families, children, multicultural relationships, thwarted ambition and crippled love, about loss and mothers, and motherless children. A great book.
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