Reading Jonathan Lethem ...?

Everyone seems to say that the later section is mediocre in that way. I'm not sure, when I glance forward at it it looks like fun and I look forward to rereading it.

I meant the obnoxiousness of the character when still a child. He is not very nice to the girl on p.181, for instance. And he is into graffiti, which, as we know, I don't like, so I think him obnoxious on that score.

I do think that the first section contains some good writing.

Including

Up from the canyon floor, out of the deep well of streets, gazing out into the Brooklyn Beyond is like standing in a Kansas prairie contemplating distance. Every rooftop for miles in every direction is level with that where you stand. The rooftops form a flotilla of rafts, a potential chessboard for your knight-hops, interrupted only by the promontory of the Wyckoff housing projects, the skeletal Eagle Clothing sign, the rise of the F-train platform where it elevates past the Gowanus Canal. Manhattan's topped, but Brooklyn's an open-faced sandwich in the light, bare parts picked over by pigeons and gulls.

re the crime theme, somewhat contradicting my earlier perception, I should note that the Aeroman project involves 'fighting crime'. I like this.

A lot of drugs are taken in this book.

The idea that the third section of the book is less well-judged than the first is a familiar one. I think I now have to endorse it.

The whole Camden College sequence is a parade of unpleasantness. And the sequence at the commune house in San Francisco, that whole chapter, doesn't seem to belong in this book.

The broad satirical sections on Hollywood and the SF convention are readable, though.

I liked O-Jay-Jay-Jay, he still makes me chuckle

If that is something in the book then I think I can not have reached it yet in this rereading. I am on p.400 or so.

I reached it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8ZuRuZNIQo

re Part III: the whole VT and CA sequences seem ill-founded digressions; the pace and level of detail don't seem optimum. And yet, as soon as it gets back to Brooklyn, at the start of ch III: 10 I'm utterly compelled, every line of narrative and dialogue is a new thrill.

I'm afraid this is to say that, apparently, James Wood was right.

I finally read THIS SHAPE WE'RE IN. It's very imaginative. JL on top of odd, fizzing language, one of his strengths.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/outborough-destiny-jonathan-lethems-dissident-gardens/

http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/79685/

this guy fell off so hard

just reading the character names gets me riled up now

she's named Rose, get it? GET IT?

I'm gonna read this anyway, because it's about grandparents similar to my own and takes place in the borough where I live. Will probably at least enjoy it on that level.

Starts off well but not sure if I'll make it all the way

The difficulties inherent in this project of redemption are evident in the novel’s greatest human creation, Lenny Angrush.

Aimless wrote:

--

I finished Motherless Brooklyn a couple of nights ago and it left a mixed bag of impressions. The prose was deliberately and rather heavily stylized but Lethem generally stayed on his chosen tightrope without falling off very often. In the end it was more a plus than a minus.

As for its plot and characters, those basic elements which most books rely upon for their impact, it was not a very good book. The gimmick of a narrator with Tourette's syndrome was at least carried off with internal consistency, but whether Lethem's confident portrayal was in any way accurate is hard to say and I am skeptical of it. If you took away the endless caressing of this feature of the narrator he would almost disappear. The story was goofy and pointless and the other characters showed only fitful signs of life.

It's easy to see why this book attracted reviewers' accolades; it presented a wholly new gimmick and the style is meant to dazzle you. It stands out in a crowd of sameness. But once you've been dazzled and put the book aside, it's about as impressive as a spent sparkler on July 5th.
--

I differ, and agree with Alfred and James Redd that this is his best work.

I don't make any claim that the book is accurate re Tourette's - I wouldn't know.

But it is one of those novels that have stayed with me and shaped my imagination for years -- the opposite of a spent sparkler. An ongoing memory of fireworks over Coney Island.

fwiw my brother who has tourette's loved the book

forgot to read dissident gardens, anyone read it?

not i but looks interesting + up my alley -- last book of his i think i read was the one about smoking pot in NY and virtual reality gaming

I did. Not very keen. Actually too close to the Rushdie and / or Pynchon model of narration and character, and as a novel of the US Left it comes across as a hatchet job which I don't think was the intention at all. I prefer CHRONIC CITY which has just been referred to - slack and rangy but more agreeable.

That is quite interesting / surprising that someone with Tourette's liked MB !

JL near his best! (TFOS)

--

Up from the canyon floor, out of the deep well of streets, gazing out into the Brooklyn Beyond is like standing in a Kansas prairie contemplating distance. Every rooftop for miles in every direction is level with that where you stand. The rooftops form a flotilla of rafts, a potential chessboard for your knight-hops, interrupted only by the promontory of the Wyckoff housing projects, the skeletal Eagle Clothing sign, the rise of the F-train platform where it elevates past the Gowanus Canal. Manhattan's topped, but Brooklyn's an open-faced sandwich in the light, bare parts picked over by pigeons and gulls.

― the pinefox, Sunday, April 28, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A book AND a film:

http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/949151-wb-acquires-jonathan-lethems-new-novel-the-feral-detective

I liked Dissident Gardens a lot

I still haven't read his last two.

I think them possibly his least successful novels. But the news of a novel with 'detective' in the title gives me hope.

Reading FORTRESS for the first time: mostly confirms all said here before --

1. The first half is, at its best, luminous in a way JL almost never is anywhere else

2. The Liner Note is remarkable as some kind of self-impersonation - a really odd fictional effect - I felt that the first time I read it and am not sure I've ever seen it fully described

3. [not far enough into Part III to reassess it yet]

4. but - it seems to me that the Part III problem maybe kicks in a bit earlier than expected, ie: in Part I - basically when the protagonist becomes cocky and unpleasant at CBGBs, etc. Not just unpleasantness but uneven writing. Despite my admiration for this novel there remain some strange jarring notes -- like the quotation from 'Life During Wartime' at the end of ch15, which clunks in like something a lesser writer would do. (If you know Talking Heads it clunks, if you don't it won't mean much and will feel awkward.) And in fact those lines immediately follow a summary of what's happened which doesn't feel true to the novel thus far (it says Mingus protected Dylan in school -- but it's been made explicit that he didn't), more a kind of sentimental misreading of it.

5. I also have some sympathy for what a few people have written - that the ring / Aeroman isn't properly integrated. The 'sense of wonder' at this magic item is very limited, in fact almost non-existent, in what otherwise comes over as a deeply mimetic novel.

Otherwise the bigger picture is still what a leap it was for JL to get from the 1990s work to this, though the leap meant leaving some things behind as well as gaining others.

I don't know why I wrote 'for the first time': it's the third time.

Finished again. It feels clear to me that the book does recover its urgency in the last 6th or so, from part III chapter 10 on. The prison material and Mingus's own POV are very strong in their way.

The late episode in Indiana I have always found a compelling unexpected climax, but curiously I had always thought that the mother was revealed to be dead. I don't think she is.

The last crescendo, I can see what kind of thing JL is trying to do, and see how the rhythm of it works, but I am not sure that the governing concept of 'middle spaces' is coherent enough to carry it and pull together the very different things that are mentioned.

Back to KAFKA AMERICANA with Carter Scholz, which impressed me in 2014.

'The Notebooks of Bob K.' is still one of JL's greatest brief pieces for my Bat-money.

'Receding Horizon' seems less impressive than it did perhaps, but the transitions from Kafka to Jack Dawson and George Bailey are ingenious. The self-consciously metafictional exchanges between the two authors don't improve the story.

'K for Fake' I'm less sure about now.

Looking again at THE WALL OF THE SKY, THE WALL OF THE EYE.

'Vanilla Dunk' is one of the longest stories: the exosuit idea in which past sporting heroes are revived in present-day sportsmen is brilliant. (Couldn't help thinking how many buttons of association a soccer version could push: 'The lad's bought Tony Cottee's skills', etc.) But I don't think this so great as a story - it's strangely anti-climactic, and its biggest problem is that it relies on vast amounts of ball-by-ball description of imaginary games of basketball (a sport whose rules I can only guess at).

Otherwise I think the book quite creditable in embracing the fantastic, unmoored, abstracted kinds of narrative space and characters and leaving the reader with minimum amounts of 'realism'. Perhaps an element of Barthelme behind all this, but darker than most of the Barthelme stories I've managed to read.

MEN & CARTOONS: I've always enjoyed 'The Vision', but this and 'Super Goat Man' feel all the slighter after rereading FORTRESS to which they are so adjacent. It's hard quite to get the point of the Mafia game in 'The Vision', and what strikes me about both stories is how obnoxious the narrator is. I'm not sure how deliberate this is.

Does Men & Cartoons have "Vivian Relf?" A lovely, haunting short story.

Yes it does. I like that one also. As I recall it contains a great pastiche-Nabokovian poem. In fact that might well be my favourite story in the collection.

'Lucky Alan' again -- I think this must have been discussed way upthread when first published in the New Yorker? I still don't get the point of it. I quite like the Woody Allen Manhattan setting, but any writer who lived in NYC could produce that. I think that the story must have been part of a general JL turn towards the idea of writing about rich human characters, but it doesn't seem to add up to any cogent account of human experience.

Access Fantasy has always stuck in my mind from that collection

Oh yes that's strong for sure. PKD + Ballard, or ... was it Frederik Pohl who said 'the job of SF is not to imagine the car but the traffic jam'?

OMEGA THE UNKNOWN at last. Terrific. I think you could venture that it was JL's last great fictional work.

I think it was Steve Gerber who had www.omegatheunknown.com set up.

It now links to a page advertising a 'juicer'. This feels slightly Dickian.

http://www.omegatheunknown.com/

links to a page advertising a 'juicer'

Would it be asking too much for the linked item to be the infamous Juicero?

Juicy thought.

I found a very cheap paperback of DISSIDENT GARDENS and just started rereading it. I don't think my overall view will change much. On the one hand, there is an elaborateness to the prose that is perhaps an achievement in itself. On the other, there is a kind of perpetual hyperbolic quality, too close to Rushdie (or the common denominator Pynchon, probably much more what JL had in mind), that doesn't work for me.

wait are you saying pynchon's sentences are hyperbolic contentwise or (a more interesting bcz so much less decodable claim) structurally?

(i know we will never agree on pynchon)

Quit talking and start chalking!

Sorry, wrong thread

Not really

Somewhere on M. John Harrison’s blog he talks about how he likes V but finds Gravity’s Rainbow is unreadable, whilst one of his New Wave friends, can’t remember which, has the reverse opinion.

Oh, with John Clute