Dissident Gardens (Vintage Contemporaries)

What is it about contemporary Jewish male novelists--Jonathan Franzen, Shalom Auslander, Adam Mansback, Nathan Englander, and now Jonathn Lethem--that hooks this old goy so much?I've thoroughly loved my romp through this novel, much set in the 50s and 60s in New York City, mostly Queens and Greenwich Village, a novel filled not only with left-leaning (make that communist-learning) Jews but also a wonderful Ulster Protestant guitarist-song-writer-singer referred to as a "mick," a derogatory term I'd not heard nor seen before (but thanks to Urban Dictionary I have clarity, sort of !): Tommy Gogan who'd been Geoghan back in Belfast.He marries Miriam, daughter of Rose Zimmer, the central character in the novel, so out-spoken and all-too-often rude and belligerent that she's voted out of communist party organization in Sunnyside, Queens. (I note in the negative reviews that some readers believe the author knows little about the authenticity of Sunnyside which quite possibly is true, but since I know nothing of it, nothing about Rose and her environment rings hollow to me.) I did hear the author on an NPR show ("Diane Rhem? Fresh Air?) talk about the novel and know that Rose is based on his grandmother who was part of Sunnyside, so I suspect Jonathan Lettem really does know these people rather well. He certainly has convinced me. And we have all known outspoken Jewish women, right? Just saying!Like the works of Franzen, for example, this novel is expansive, sweeping through a half century with Sergius, son of Miriam and Tommy, seeking to know more about his long-dead parents from obese homosexual Cicero Lookin, the son of one of Rose's lovers: a black cop. Cicero's and Sergius's heads are first introduced to the reader, making one wonderful where they were, only to discover they are swimming off the coast of Maine where Cicero has an expensive house amid a bunch of other expensive houses belonging to white people who'd not thought a black person would move in.This is a novel some readers might find difficult to break into with its elaborate syntax and references to historical events that many may have missed as a result of just how poorly American oh-so-slanted-to-the-whites history is too often taught. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example, are referenced. Undoubtedly those under seventy will be clueless. Zapped, leaving two orphaned sons--and all with just the most outrageous lack of evidence of their communist sympathies, their traitorism."Greenwich Village Jews struck Tommy as better fakes than the rest. Their fakery seemed to derive from a fund of dispossession and self-skeptics that made them each and all exiled kings of this preposterous city." (page 162)These are indeed displaced souls, misfits in the society of the Anglophilism that has been America although at least in this novel there is no outcry from the likes of our current racists and xenophobes in the "Tea Party."The Civil Rights movement emerges through the eyes of Tommy, climbing his way in the trio that consists of his older brothers, Peter and Rye, with songs he writes ("Khrushchev's Shoe").There are shades also of that older Jewish male novelist, Philip Roth, especially from "Portnoy's Complaint" although not quite as graphic.I can appreciate why some readers, maybe leaning more toward Victorian sitting-room novels, might not have found this as much enjoyment as a liberal like me. But I think this is a great novel. Ah, those Jewish male novelists. I just love them all.

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's lost the plot. Literally.DISSIDENT GARDENS (eesh, what a clunky title) tells the story of idealism (mostly of the Communist variety) as it waxes, wanes, and morphs through a family over the years. It's a character-driven novel, as very little of any note happens at all, most of the narration spent on describing emotions, hopes, beliefs, and the way life can grind away at your ideals with its stubborn real-world setbacks and provincialism. This might have worked had the characters been more interesting, but there's really not much to these people. They believe in certain things but -- although pages and pages are spent describing these beliefs -- they are rarely very clearly drawn or explained.That's probably because -- and I can't believe I'm saying this -- the book is overwritten to the point of exhaustion. I can't believe this is the same guy who wrote  Motherless Brooklyn  or  Chronic City . Heck, even  The Fortress of Solitude , his most florid work to date, was a sumptuous treat, a narrative that -- while vast and comprehensive -- was still delectable, dripping with vivid scenes, characters, and events. This books, however, is a long, dry, exegesis that still leaves you with almost nothing to really grasp or imagine.Maybe it would be better if I cared all that much about the book's politics, but being pretty much disillusioned with the world of politics, I can't say I get, empathize, or even care about these people and their hunger for Communism (etc.). Of course, that hunger doesn't seem to have a very visible endpoint. Rose, Miriam, Sergius, Tommy, all of these people desire a certain kind of world, but that kind of world seems vague to the point of being annoying. Maybe that's the point? I don't know. Even if it is, it doesn't make for very good reading.At one point, a character named Rose must sit and watch her husband, Albert, deliver a speech to a group of Communists in a rural New Jersey enclave. His speech is flowery and inflated, and Rose finds herself annoyed, thinking to herself, "Quit setting the table and put a meal out for them to eat." She rues the fact that her husband's speechifying has no real content, that it is basically just drawn out table dressing.I felt the same exact way about this book. The writing is so grand and verbose that it seems to think that it is paving the way for a meal fit for a king, but it's really just a lot of fancy finger twiddling. For the first time in my nearly two-decade love affair with Lethem's work, I found myself dreading returning to one of his novels, pushing my way through each chapter and even finding the rare moment of action and interest -- IRA, Nicaragua, even an obsession with Archie Bunker -- just sad punctuation to the inert rest of the book.

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 communist. She intimidates all and sundry with her fulsome and frustrated rhetoric, her high ideals. Someone for whom winning arguments is almost a matter of life or death. When she begins an affair with a black policeman she is removed from the communist party, not long before the details of Stalin’s purges are made public and the communist party loses credibility. She thus becomes a political outcast without renouncing her political ideals which she now presses on various members of her extended family, most notably her daughter Miriam and her surrogate step-son Cicero. Miriam describes her mother as “a volcano of death”, as “mothering in disappointment, in embittered moderation”. The first brilliant scene is when Miriam has decided it’s time for her to lose her virginity – “the virginity Miriam trailed around with her was an anchor, one she vowed to cast off before dawn”. She’s out with a boy who she is going to let make love to her because “he’s special but not-special enough”. But they can’t find anywhere to have sex so Miriam takes him home in the early hours of the morning. Before much can happen – “he blurted his gloop into her palm” - Rose enters the bedroom and is quickly apoplectic with fury. She wants to call the police. Her melodrama is unrelenting. Eventually she crawls on her hands and knees into the kitchen, turns on the gas and puts her head in the oven, not for one moment relenting in her furious disappointment at her daughter’s behaviour. She’s now hurling out the litany of the disappointments and betrayals she has suffered as a wife, mother and dissident, still with her head in the oven while Miriam stands by. Rose then has a change of heart. She slips out of the oven, wrestles Miriam to the ground and forces her daughter’s head into the oven. It’s a brilliant and hilarious scene in chapter one of the novel and really gets your hopes up.There are other brilliant chapters - when Miriam and her not very talented folk singer husband go to Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas; Rose in a nursing home with dementia and the final chapter when Miriam’s son is arrested by airport security for having sex in the toilets.It’s a novel that traces the traction of political opposition and idealism in America from the 1950s up to the present day. The failings for me were that unfortunately not all the characters are anywhere as near so compelling as Rose and yet these less successful characters are given equal airtime. You know that moment when you realise you’re supposed to have a clear idea of who a character is but you don’t have a clue and have to trawl back through the pages in search of clues? Cousin Lenny was that character for me. Suddenly he has a chapter to himself and I don’t know who he is. One problem with this novel is that you could remove a couple of chapters without it having any bearing whatsoever on the novel. This because there’s no plot to speak of. Letham might have written this book chronologically but he then shuffled all the chapters in an order that could easily have been arranged in a different order. I also found it acrobatically overwritten at times. Often he inverts sentence structure (reminding me of late Elizabeth Bowen). What she said I can’t comment on – that kind of thing. So, much that was brilliant but ultimately I didn’t quite feel the love.

Having enjoyed other books by Mr Lethem, I was looking forward to this one. And I did enjoy it - it is very well written. I only gave it 3 stars because it seemed a lot if the time that it was about the clever writing more than it was about the story - it felt a bit like showing off some of the time.

I absolutely loved this. I have read several of his books, but this was my favourite since Motherless Brooklyn, the first I read. Fascinating subject matter of American communists in mid 20th century. As always with Lethem, the New York settings come to life, and the characters are fascinating, lovable and amusing.

Did not enjoy,is it me but I found the book in some parts confusing.

It's wonderfully written; very funny and most of all, it makes very absorbing reading. It is recommended to other readers.