Reading Jonathan Lethem ...?

When ILE did the book club, Motherless Brooklyn was one of our books, and generally most people found it lacking originality just as you said re: its gangster angle. I however enjoyed it immensely for precisely the gangsterisms and the unsolving (that should be resolving obviously) of the mystery -- though I should note that I haven't read much detective fiction before.

She Crawled Across the Table reminded me a lot of a Murakami tale - playing around with some physics and relationships and identity - interesting, but needs another round of editing, I think.

So was the ending worth the chilly bathing?

The conclusion of Across the Table was pretty much stream of consciousness stuff, near as I can recall (however, I think that I was reading it in the wee hours of the morning and that might be the explanation for my hazy recall and meandering ideas).

I stumbled across Lethem in the most typical way - bought his Motherless Brooklyn when it won the award and then was hooked.

On the other hand, I haven't read Fortress of Solitude, so maybe it's great!

I didn't know about Lethem's This Shape We're In - many thanks for bringing it to my attention (and to my latest "Order These Next" pile of sticky notes).

Phil C has a good point, about structure. The book feels unbalanced, perhaps in just the way he describes.

But I suppose to me the book is never quite right; its attitudes and preoccupations - its sense of what fascinates - are always a little askew and alien to mine.

Yet I don't mean in saying this to detract from the writer's forceful gift. Maybe - yes - maybe he uses a little too much force.

As phil said upthread, the book is very overwritten - at points embarrassingly so: "his hair was astonishingly equal in length everywhere on his head"; "that shadows stood sipping from paper bags as he struggled down to join his bicycle on the pavement was only appropriate, matched his mood" (huh?) and who has ever seen girls skipping rope and seen their knees "shining like bunches of grapes" ....Bunches of grapes?!

At one point Dylan describes Arthur Lomb as "making such a show of a card unplayed that he tipped his whole hand"; sometimes Lethem does just that.

Over the weekend I read an advance of Jonathan Lethem's new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet. It's pretty good even though it's about an indie rock band.

I was a little worried that he had fizzled out after Fortress of Solitude (i.e. his (over)ambitious novel that tied up a lot of autobiography and pet themes), that he developed an Axl Rose complex. That was in '03 and only compilations of earlier stuff (good short stories and bad essays) have come out since. So, while YDLMY may not be quite as good as his earlier genre-jacking novels I'm enough of a fan that I'm glad he's having fun again. It's a slight book and very readable, so I was able to blow through it during a three-gig weekend.

Also, the parts about rock shows and being in a band are waaaay less embarassing than when most other writers try to cover that sort of thing.

One of the only advance reviews I was able to find mentioned that it's a rewrite of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which if true might completely change my impression. Or it might not.

he wrote a short story for the new yorker, called super goat man, that is in equal measures a parody of new yorker stories, a story about the death of qausi fascist super heros, and a tender/tragic medetation on the nature of masculinity and masculine desire...it is both amusing, bitter, and something else, new and stranger, i have no idea why the new yorker decided to publish it, but i am glad they did, and that they illustrated it with a barney cremaster centaur suggested they knew what tehy were doing. i dont know where it is collected--but it is one of my favourite short stories.

They add up to an interesting growth chart:

TEENS - The isolated adolescent of Girl, her late-80s/early-80s revisionist sci-fi western setting, and the way it all disguises a fairly straigtforward story of parental disintegration.

TWENTIES - In She Crawled, post-postgrad profs plough through the Rudy Rucker playbook as they try to sort out what love is and means. The mania of discovery and newness, a sense of the fragmentated fallout of youthful idealism.

THIRTIES - Motherless Brooklyn. Here, we get the first hints of age, regret and nostalgia, as the optimistic youth of science fiction is exchanged for the embattled weariness of pulp detection. Old neighborhoods vanish, love is rueful and doomed.

Haven't read Fortress of Solitude or Gun, with Occasional Music. Wonder how those'd slot into the scheme...

Anyone read this? Looks fun, republished genre stuff from early in his career.

okay a friend of mine just loaned me You Don't Love Me Yet and I am really dreading reading it. If its like the last third of Fortress of Solitudex10 I don't think I can handle it. I miss the sci-fi surrealism

I like SF surrealism when doen well, but I thought he did it badly (based only on 'As she climbed across the table' or whatever it was called, which left me distinctly underwhelmed).

YDLMY = some nice touches, and a book cover so nicely designed i felt overfashionable reading it in public, but maybe kinda just maaaaybe a flop.

'how we got insipid' - i haven't read the other story, but 'how we got in town and out again' is in (at least the uk edition of) his back-when-he-was-an-SF-author collection the wall of the sky, the wall of the eye: it's an okayish i guess rewrite of that old noirish novel about the kids doing a dance-til-you-drop competition, but instead they're in some kind of sexed-up virtual reality environment. it at least manages to avoid being dreadful.

i reread men and cartoons after forcing myself thro fortress again for my undergrad dissertation, it's still good-to-brilliant throughout, except for the what-is-it-doing-here early-career shorty story.

s. buscemi doing motherless brooklyn sounds brilliant.

the youth/young adulthood/middle age bit doesn't so much work with those three novels as i don't think he came up with them in that order. ahem.

you liked men and cartoons? really? i remember finding it awful + i liked fortress & motherless brooklyn. i cant remember my actual problems w/ the book so my opinions arent going to be v illuminating but which was the story they included that was real old?

'access fantasy'

for 'good-to-brilliant' read maybe 'passable-to-really-good', i guess.

I finished Fortress last night. I almost loved it, but ever since I passed the liner note I've had the feeling that the whole doesn't quite add up. The first two-thirds I did love, and bits here and there in the rest (the chapter about 'Dose' in particular). It's not quite third-person-good first-person-bad - it's more like past-good present-bad. Which is maybe fitting.

What's weird is that normally, when I've read a book, it's obvious to me whether I should forget it, and if not who I should recommend it to. With Fortress, though, I have no idea what to do with it. Partly I'm not sure how good it really is. But mostly it's that the blend of references feels like it has been written for no-one but me. And I don't even like soul/comics/graffiti/cocaine that much.

The first half of Fortress is breath-taking in its gorgeous prose. The first time I read the book, I was so utterly disappointed at the tense shift for the second half that I considered the book a failure. Having read it again a few months ago, I'm coming around to it. Lethem has said that he wanted the reader to feel this sadness at the past gone by, and the abandoning of that magical sort of prose from Dylan's childhood is supposed to embody that. It's not just some capricious change of style that Lethem did just to screw with the reader. A friend of mine who read it at the same time says he understands that impulse, but wonders if there couldn't have been some other way of marking that passage of time (or loss of it, I guess), other than blowing up the prose. The "human cipher human dream" line from the end gives me goosebumps every time I think of it, though.

PS - Has anyone heard the Prisonaires? They're okay, in my opinion. Nothing real classic.

The remarks upthread about the overwritten parts of Fortress are OTM. The very first sentence is so precious I almost didn't keep going. For all its great descriptive moments and insights, the novel repeatedly stumbles over its own ambitions. In general, I wish Lethem would relax as a writer--he always seems to be trying to live up to his rep, and it's crippling his style. The stuff he's done for Rolling Stone (JB, Dylan) has been dreadful.

Partly I'm not sure how good it really is. But mostly it's that the blend of references feels like it has been written for no-one but me. And I don't even like soul/comics/graffiti/cocaine that much.

Wow, this is exactly how I felt about it. Although I liked the realist parts a lot more than the magical realist superhero parts.

One more thing: why call the first section of the book 'Underberg'?

I wish Lethem would relax as a writer--he always seems to be trying to live up to his rep, and it's crippling his style.

otm, judging from that autobiograpical thing in the new yorker about growing up w/music or whatever, he was just flailing away there. more proof that writing about yourself is a whole different process than making stuff up. and mixing the two may be the trickiest of all.

motherless brooklyn was great, a tour-de-force in some respects, but it would be a shame if that turns out to be his peak. here's hoping he snaps back with a trim, tightly constructed new novel. soon.

I really enjoyed his story in the last New Yorker!

Recently read Amnesia Moon and Men and Cartoons (after reading several other Lethem novels in quick succession a while back). Loved the wild imagination of AM, reminded me of PK Dick and Tim Powers circa Dinner at Deviant's Palace. Felt rushed, unfinished, ultimately a bit disappointing in its rush to tie everything up, but still great.

Men and Cartoons was a letdown. Much too distanced and mannered. I get the sense that he's trying to cram himself into a "respectable contemporary fiction" suit, and the results are awkward, less than memorable. In his early writing, there was this thick skin of genre storytelling through which you could nonetheless see Lethem struggling to engage with the actual material of life. That's what makes those early books so fascinating, whether or not you evaluate them in a sci-fi context.

In his recent stuff, though, that tension is absent. He's just another comfortable post-postmodernist flogging his pop-cultural baggage while writing workshop fiction. Kind of a drag.

Anybody else reading the comic book?

Thanks for the heads up about that short story, Hurting, I liked it too.

Definitely felt the Kafka influence

Liked it too, busy eating my words. No trace left of anything "postmodern" or "pop-cultural" in it. Straightforward realist fiction, but not at all dull or prissy. Elegant, creepy, well observed. Get Kafka in the neighborhood paranoia and alienation, but Cheever too.

Maybe he's better of on one side of the fence or the other, rather than straddling the middle.

I didn't think the ending was that straightforward realist - it was a tad absurd.

FAO Mark S (and whoever):

10 pages later:

'Miriam yanked Cicero by the hand into Chinatown, splendidly impatient to move him like a pawn across the mental chessboard of her city' (p.66).

This still isn't that great, as it again carries hyperbole - she has to be 'splendidly impatient', and it has to be 'her city'; these are typical of the unconvincing hyperbole around this character (who is btw roughly based on JL's mother).

But it's basically OK, as the chess metaphor is working OK -- it makes sense re what the characters are actually doing; it gives us a different, figurative / conceptual vantage on the actual scene (downtown Manhattan here is being used like a chessboard - OK); it picks up an earlier thread of metaphor without making too much fuss about it; and it might even (though I don't think this is essential) connect with the characters' own perceptions, as they have both been thinking about chess.

in that case, "manhattan seen as a chessboard" is what i'd call a shared belief system within this book -- not a particularly demanding or stakes-raising one, admittedly, and not one lethem necessarily needs to share (tho he does need to be able to identify it). morever, its status as shared belief system is initiated (ie foreshadowed) via the first description, which signals that it's more than an amusing momentary linking but a shaping attitude we shd be looking out for.

it kind of messes this up (a) by being somewhat heavyhanded but (b) also tossing in the idea of revolution. in the first place chess doesn't have revolutions, and if it did, it's not at all evident they would make the chessboard round --even if they were galilean rather than idk french- or russian-type revolutions?

(caveat again: this is all the lethem i've ever read)

I think you are calling a 'belief system' what I would call a 'metaphor'.

I agree about the problem with 'revolutions', which is also an instance of what I keep calling hyperbole.

Okay, Tom Dedlock is ilx0r Tom D plus a Dickens character from Bleak House shoved into the first sentence of Joyce’s “The Dead” walking into a thread in which said ilx0r has participated. Nothing to see here.

It's too bad, because I've really been in the mood for some literary sci-fi/genre-bending.

So, any suggestions for new entries? I feel like it's increasingly hard to find new fiction where the writing is sentence-level great and also has, shall we say, thrillpower.

I realize there may not be much market incentive these days for young authors to spend time creating work like this and satisfy my specific entertainment desires, but I'd love something that hits that old Lethem/David Mitchell sweet spot.

Karen Tidbeck

altho for more in-depth discussion I recommend that rolling spec fic thread

Thanks!

Back to CHRONIC CITY. A big book, may take me a little while.

I'm interested and for me it's the JL crux book - the one where I'm unsure whether it's a last great JL novel to date, or a lazy meander; or which of those in greatest proportion.

I have a sense that JL and others have wanted Perkus Tooth to be a great character. And I've been somewhat resistant; felt that this was forced; that the character isn't that great. But I'll reassess now.

The other thing that strikes me is that JL is much more deeply into drugs than I'd ever realized. A common problem for me as someone who's never taken drugs.

I sense that much is hanging on the idea of 'friendship with Perkus Tooth' as the essence of the book.

Friendship is quite a good theme, and friendship around discussion, culture, music (as on ilx, even) -- is probably an underrated, underwritten theme, and credit to JL for hitting on it.

But does he make this friendship very vivid or warm? I'm not too sure. I have never even really been able to picture Tooth.

My other hunch has been that JL uses Tooth as a funnel for his own obsessions - Mailer, Brando, Cassavetes - airing them in a 'deniable' way - so Tooth is a useful intellectual alter ego figure, a way of channelling material and making it daft rather than making it look like JL's own ideas.

About 250pp in, a couple of thoughts:

1: quite favourable -- the bad things about the book (the meandering, etc) don't annoy me as much as I thought. It's the last FUN JL novel, at least.

2: I think he is genuinely trying here to do some kind of 'everyday life' narrative, almost 'in real time' - kind of an experiment. The writer it's all closest to, in a way, is Geoff Dyer.

3: the twist at the end seems slightly more foreshadowed than I'd seen first time round (with a lot of hints about paranoia and secrets), but I still need to get to the end to understand it (again?). I cannot remember the real exact relations between Janice and Oona.

4: quite a lot of small nods back to other JL. An example: Perkus's apartment appears to be on the same street as the Yorkville Zendo in MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN.

5: DFW comes off worse here than I'd thought, with OBSTINATE DUST being promptly thrown into a ravine.

It's a pity, or maybe it's necessary, that Mark S hasn't read this novel as he seems to me the closest UK equivalent I know to Perkus Tooth.

Though the more intense and political side of Perkus Tooth might even be a bit like our old friend Prof Carmody.

given that this is quite good and OMEGA THE UNKNOWN is very good, as is THEY LIVE (2010) in fact -- I tend to conclude that the late 2000s were actually a surprisingly OK period for JL.

perk s

It all adds up !!

to get back to the point abt metaphor vs belief system: obviously sometimes a cigar is just a cigar! not all metaphors are more than momentary -- but if a metaphor recurs, esp. if wound into the conversation and thoughts of more than one character, then i think it's worth seeing if it's a shaping force in the (shared?) worldview of the ppl being described, since sometimes it will be!

and sometimes it goes even deeper: as per "pathetic fallacy", which is an authorial worldview or belief system, that the behaviour of the non-living world (the weather, the landscape) not only amplifies but reflects what's going on in the lives of the (written) living -- a metaphor can certainly be an indicator that "as below so above" is in operation, in the minds of character and/or in the mind of the author

but not necessarily always and it's quite likely a dangerpoint for a book, since overegged belief-systems can be alienating

example: moby dick in moby-dick, not just a metaphor -- the whale as symbol of something takes over the minds of (almost) the crew (and the narrator -- who says he's been similarly taken over but perhaps actually hasn't in the end -- spends most of the book exploring things that whales are, and also mean

All I can think of is Neil saying to Rik 'so most metaphors don't bear close examination.'

i feel that the academic study of eng lit as it has on the whole emerged is not of neil's mind here

also the young ones was written by ben elton, a man insanely over-committed to the comedy simile

Haha. Yes. The reductio ad absurdum of the left.

James Wood on Melville and metaphor: "Metaphors have a life of their own...Melville had a way of following
metaphor, and seeing where it led him. At times he is *compelled by the metaphor he inhabits...Of course no one is actually forced by metaphor, except a madman. But Melville's writing certainly displays an unusual devotion to the logic of metaphor, which is the logic of parallelism. Of all writers, he understood the independent, generative life that comes from likening something to something else. His work is deeply aware that as soon as you liken x to y, x has changed, and is now x+y, which has is its own parallel life...Melville reads as if he simply cannot tear himself away from the rival life, the alienated majesty, that metaphor offers".

This has always struck me as a good way to read Ballard. He has a series of almost universal metaphors (a cosmology?) that he pushes to a logical conclusion - like the madman in Wood's dictum.

I haven't read (most people's favourite book) MOBY-DICK, so can't comment on its metaphors.

I agree with the view that metaphors can point to ideas, feelings or, let's say, 'ways of seeing', but I probably wouldn't normally call those 'belief systems', myself.

Funnily enough the sense of metaphor as taking on its own life or becoming preponderant, as in that Wood quotation, is also something that Lethem tends to say.

I finished rereading CHRONIC CITY today. I think it has gone up in my mind from a 6-7/10 Lethem to maybe even an 8/10 Lethem -- on a par, say, with AMNESIA MOON and GIRL IN LANDSCAPE. (Actually GIRL IN LANDSCAPE is one of its closest precursors in its ranginess, though it also echoes elements of various other books.)

I still don't think that I grasp the central plot or conspiracy clearly enough. The depth of Chase's amnesia about his own life is hardly explained.

Some of characters' 'motivation' is also not plain to me at all - for instance the way successive characters lovingly adopt a 3-legged dog does not seem very real. If a friend of mine had done that with a dog, and died, I would not take on the dog and sleep with it every night. Equally Oona's overall motivation for what she does in relation to Chase is not clear.

I don't know whether I am missing something or whether JL didn't really bother to think any of this through in a realistic way at all.

The encounter with the tiger works well, is poetic and powerful.

Once I had finished the book, on a park bench, I walked up to a bookshop I knew. Somehow I wanted to find books related to it, even if not to buy them. As I approached, I saw a digger digging a hole in the road outside it, and police lines of tape cordoning off the roads and pavements all around. In the circumstances, it was uncannily reminiscent of the book itself.

Note re metaphor -- we didn't seem to have any examples of what Mark S was saying ie:

"if a metaphor recurs, esp. if wound into the conversation and thoughts of more than one character, then i think it's worth seeing if it's a shaping force in the (shared?) worldview of the ppl being described"

I can think of one. I recently saw the film GUYS & DOLLS and was awed anew by its comic and musical magnificence.

In the title song, the singers - three dedicated gamblers - repeatedly sing that if you see a male doing something, it's likely that he's doing it for a woman, and the *likelihood* element is expressed in terms of gambling. This (which I already somewhat knew) struck me as charming and wonderfully coherent at the time. I think it is a clear instance of what is mentioned above.

But as it's a song in a musical, I do not think it follows that the same thing would transfer so extensively into prose fiction.

Call it sad, call it funny
But it's better than even money
That the guy's only doing it for some doll

Call it hell, call it heaven
But it's probable twelve to seven
That the guy's only doing it for some doll

Call it dumb, call it clever
Ah, but you can get odds forever
That the guy's only doing it for some doll

https://genius.com/Frank-loesser-guys-and-dolls-lyrics

(This song is fabulous, but none of this has much to do with Lethem btw. The one actual JL connection is MARLON BRANDO.)

The more I think about it and go over it, the clearer I am that CHRONIC CITY improves with rereading. I can now almost imagine thinking it's one of the best or most important JL novels.

It doesn't have the discipline nor the humour of MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, or GUN, or the intensity of FORTRESS. But once you clear those out of the way I'm not sure it's much inferior to any of the others. In fact it might even be better, or at least more enjoyable, than the novel it perhaps thematically shares most with -- AMNESIA MOON.

The Perkus Tooth character, which I had felt overblown, now works somewhat better for me. His final statement about rock critics has real poignancy. All remarkably close to Mark S's new book.

All this, on JL's post-9/11 book, on 9/11.

wait you haven't read my book

I have heard a lot about it ! :D

Read to the end of THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE at last. This becomes very moving - it's a magnificent book as a whole, up there almost with the great JL fictions.

The one thing I still haven't read in that book is the 40-page James Brown essay. I don't really know James Brown.

he's good, he's the minister of the new new super heavy funk

Mark, you mentioned to me that you had liked JL's talk at a music conference? Was this 2007?

I think this is an article I just reread - 'dancing about architecture, or, fifth beatles'. It was OK! Considering JL's other accomplishments he is not bad at occupying the ILM-esque pop / rock / ism discussion territory.

all here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/01/popandrock.music

(actually that version is a bit confusingly different from the one in the book)

yes 2007: i enjoyed it as i listened to it but was very jet-lagged and remember not a word of it -- i will have to reacquaint myself with its content

(and i will when i get this other book-related admin done)

DISSIDENT GARDENS -- I think I can admire the jigsaw-puzzle narrative structure.

But it is still let down by an attitude to characterization, motive, idea: basically the old Pynchon / Rushdie problem.

YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET -- on the other hand, holds up surprisingly OK on a second reading. I'm even more dubious this time about a woman happily accepting the attentions of a strange older man (pre-'Me Too' content, so to speak). But the one thing this book does remarkably well is represent the actual experience of playing in a band. I can't remember ever feeling this depicted so truly anywhere else.

It is striking that YDLMY is relatively 'realist' JL, but doesn't have the bad Pynchon / Rushdie style. Proof that he didn't, doesn't, really need to go down that road just because he isn't writing SF or fantasy.

HOW WE GOT INSIPID one more time.

'Insipid Profession' stands up well as a combination of cute detective story (an obscure addition to the JL detective canon), art expertise (maybe taken too far - but there is a whole theme of visual art in JL that someone could write about), and Gothic / scary stuff.

'How We Got In Town And Out Again' has appeal in theory (SF, virtual reality, post-apocalyptic landscape) but feels maybe too inconsequential or uncompleted. The 16-year-old narrator lacks dynamism, insight, doesn't bring much life to the story.

Idiot Tooth.

http://hilobrow.com/2013/12/20/regression-toward-the-zine-18/

The trailer for MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN disappointed me.

I knew that the novel was being resituated in an earlier era, but the entire story seems to have been changed.

This seems a waste, given that the original story was tremendous, probably the best JL has ever come up with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bx7umZ8aRI

6-minute film of Lethem on Lem, adapted from recent LRB article.

This reminds me, should I read The Arrest?

It's not his best novel, but it's his most SF / speculative novel since CHRONIC CITY. If you happen to like Lethem then yes, worth a go: quite quick to read, with extremely short chapters.

Love that. I've been reading Lem Two for the last few months.

xp

I've read Motherless Brooklyn (striking!) and You Don't Love Me Yet (can't remember). I think Brooklyn makes more lasting impressions.

(but that may be the anonymity of globalized poverty safe culture)

A novel that reminds me of Motherless Brooklyn is Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon. A similar story about Los Angeles may have already been told, or I wish I could write it, but I haven't lived centrally enough and would probably need to go back in time a bit.

notes found in a bathtub is a pretty good lem, super paranoid spy farce

i actually started THE ARREST last week, and stopped when i realized that i just didn't want to learn any more about one particular character

there's nothing wrong with the book, though -- just a matter of personal preference