As a longtime fan of Lethem's, I'm sorry to say that I really did not like this book. We are told over and over that the central character is larger than life, but that didn't come across. In fact, except for scattered set pieces (mostly involving Miriam) none of it came to life for me. It was too dense, too jargony, too concerned with grand themes and too unconcerned with plot or characterization. Also, the ending was completely unsatisfying, even though it was set at the Portland Jetport, a pl...

A few weeks ago I received an email from this librarian thing I get every Monday that gives information on books coming out months away. I should read these more often, but I don't normally. This particular email had Tartt and Lethem in the subject line, so I felt like I should see what their new books were about. I have mixed feelings about Jonathan Lethem. I think I've written about that before, maybe in my review for his essays. When he's on, he's very very good, but with his novels he's not

Lethem’s new book is in theory a sweeping story of a couple generations in a family and through them a history of the American left from the thirties on, maybe in the style of Doctorow’s Book of Daniel. One can imagine what that book would be like, filled with thrilling set pieces, historical cameos, and the word epic included somewhere on the jacket. Lethem delivers a book spikier, more interesting, and that is a little bit off putting and inaccessible. Bitterness, regret, miscommunications and...

The prose in this section just sings. It's a song in the rhythm of Jewish New York.I rarely feel part of a story, the way I did as a child, but this one is doing it to me. As angry at and sad about the characters as if they were real. My ancient past coming back so clearly!

Oh, Jonathan Lethem, your sentences are smart and weedy, thick with intellectual overgrowth. All your characters, so smart they are, so erudite; their observations and recriminations could be doctoral theses. At times, you're overwriting, clotting sentences with too much description. In Dissident Gardens, a character doesn't unwrap a candy bar, the candy bar in question is "bared of its wrapper." Why? Such writing calls attention the writing, it makes me see you at the keyboard thinking, how can...

Jonathan Lethem’s new novel makes a case for political conviction being a driving force every bit as powerful as religion. Lethem’s characters embody the idea that peoples’ lives proceed more from their beliefs than their circumstances. In Dissident Gardens we meet a family with the resolve to live by their convictions. Lethem is fearless in generating characters that include an aging firebrand Jewish woman, a complex black gay man, a young Irish folk singer, a genius communist chess player, a h...

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls. Joseph CampbellJonathan Lethem is able to deftly capitalize on the settings he employs in his novels by making the neighborhoods he chooses come vividly to life. Not only do they help to define his characters, they sometimes serve as external metaphors for their internal struggles. Rose, the central character, and matriarch of a nuclear family that is perpetually on the brink of annihilation, lives most of her adult

Dissident Gardens has all the heft of a five star endeavor, unfortunately some it stuck to the pan. I read two-thirds of it this weekend, one plagued with incessant rain and a certain personal suffering from seasonal allergies. While reading such I read The Believer article about Dave Chapelle which led me to think about Bert Williams and Lenny Bruce and David Allen's chat show delivery. I thought about this http://www.pbs.org/arguing/ and the legacy of baseball and racially motivated murder.Jon...

Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude were two of my favourite reads in the past year. Dissident Gardens is more ambitious, more serious and more intellectual than those two earlier novels. However it disappointed me. Not a huge disappointment because I did really enjoy reading it but found it a bit hit and miss. It’s not without its brilliant moments and there are a couple of fabulously memorable characters – most notably Rose, the matriarch of the novel. Rose Zimmer is a Jewish comm...

Quit fucking black cops or get booted from the Communist Party.My new favorite opening line of a novel* evokes for this red-diaper baby memories of the Party bringing its members up on charges for real or imagined infractions, such as letting a ten-year-old join a corrupt capitalist organization like the Girl Scouts. The line also immediately dispels any notion that the family in “Dissident Gardens” would in any significant way resemble my own. Except for a few minor details, ours was an ordinar...

Dissident Gardens is a vibrant shout of a book,exuberant and dense,bristling with equal measures scholarship and experience.Slipping easily from the intimate to the panoramic, it is a magnificent take on the last century as well as a sobering view of what it means to be human,defined by the integrity of a belief system. JL's strong willed characters do not so much believe in their various causes they embody them.If for the longest while I resented the lack of chronology,floundering a bit in the

Is there a gene for American political activism, known in the past, maybe, as communism? Or maybe it's a virus, spread not by heredity but by contagion.Each of us working in the U.S. party felt the sway of a seductive individualism, one not so far from a kind of drug or sickness--or, perhaps, a messianic religious fervor. (Possibly this may only be viewed clearly from a vantage such as I've attained in Europe.) (p. 226)One person's religious delusion is another person's freedom from same! Shades...

Life of the Mind in QueensBet you didn't know there was a Jewish socialist commune established by the federal government in the middle of New Jersey in the 1930's. I sure didn't. Or that Sunnyside in Queens was created as a model community. Or that Abraham Lincoln declared that "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not existed first. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much higher consideration..." Th...

It is hard to decide if Jonathan Lethem is more in love with his general self-loathing or his certainty that all else be damned, he is the smartest guy in the room. And mostly he is the smartest guy in the room. His command of 20th century history (social, political, sports, philatelic, pop-culture, etc. and especially anything New York) is breathtaking, edifying, and entertaining. Until it isn't. The constant speechifying on a diverse range of topics left me unable to find any story at all in t...

I have enjoyed every novel Lethem has ever written. I was blown away when I first discovered Gun, with Occasional Music in a harvest bin at a local bookstore, and since that novel, I have made a point of getting every new Lethem novel the moment it was available. His genre-bending, his quirky plots, and his vivid prose have only grown in scope and skill over the years, and it's been a treat to watch him age as a writer.What a disappointment, then, for the first time ever, to have to say that he'...

Lethem’s 8th novel is a bouncy broken-familial mosaic, spanning over half a century in the lives of the kith and kin of Rose, a Jewish émigré trying to be a radical Communist woman in a slurry of radical Communist men. The novel hops restlessly from one character and decade to another, surgically exploring the carnage of Rose’s relationships, from her verboten affair with a black man, her strained relations with hippy daughter Miriam, to Miriam’s college professor son Cicero who oversees her dec...

This book is a masterpiece of structure, on every scale.Macro: the plot structure, switching between times and protagonists, has a form like that of a wind-sculpted rock formation. It's not like a human artifact, designed for raw utility, but it's certainly not random. It's just built according to a different set of rules than we are used to.Medium: Lethem is effortlessly insightful. The main characters are all detailed, possessed of their own philosophies, and may as well be independent actors....

This was an enjoyable read. The book seems intended for the intimate readership sitting at the cross-section of a few small American niches. If you are looking for a New York, secular Jewish, Leftist story, this book may be for you. If you are only occupying one of these niches, you may find it okay. If you are occupying two, you might think it's pretty good. However, if you were looking for all three--that prototypical New York, Jewish, Leftist story--this book tells a poignant, at times nostal...

For all the lives crushed and fortunes exhausted in the decades-long battle against communism, its collapse in Eastern Europe was a blurry affair in the annals of history. True, the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989, remains a singularly inspiring moment, but it was more an effect of long-term rot than a Battle of Yorktown. Communism, after all, had been collapsing for years, enfeebled by its own endemic inanities and the West’s dogged opposition.How’s a comrade supposed to get closure? Wh...

Nutshell: surly New York leftists re-enact simulacrum of bourgeois family drama.The presentation annoyed me immediately because it focuses on the koestlerian details of picayune totalitarianism--how one fr’instance “could get exiled from the cause for blowing your nose or blinking at suspicious intervals” (3), a primary cliché of the anti-communist genre. (Later, the offending group will, again, be found “immolating themselves in corrupt Moscow directives” (98).)That type of defect aside, text p...