And now I have, sitting on my shelf and calling out to me, his Fortress of Solitude, Amnesia Moon, and Girl in Landscape - and I can't decide which of the three to add to my "I'm going to read something from this stack of books next" pile. Any suggestions? Thoughts? Did I miss something with Motherless Brooklyn?
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Friday, 23 January 2004 06:54 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― Leee Majors (Leee), Friday, 23 January 2004 07:04 (twenty years ago) link
― Jordan (Jordan), Friday, 23 January 2004 20:25 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Saturday, 24 January 2004 01:25 (twenty years ago) link
― Phil Christman, Saturday, 24 January 2004 05:42 (twenty years ago) link
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Monday, 26 January 2004 03:08 (twenty years ago) link
― Pete (Pete), Monday, 26 January 2004 12:43 (twenty years ago) link
So was the ending worth the chilly bathing?
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Tuesday, 27 January 2004 02:35 (twenty years ago) link
― Phil Christman, Tuesday, 27 January 2004 05:01 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Tuesday, 27 January 2004 05:30 (twenty years ago) link
On the other hand, I haven't read Fortress of Solitude, so maybe it's great!
― J. Ellenberg, Sunday, 1 February 2004 04:45 (twenty years ago) link
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).
― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Monday, 2 February 2004 21:31 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― the dreamfox, Wednesday, 2 March 2005 19:24 (nineteen years ago) link
― o. nate (onate), Wednesday, 2 March 2005 19:54 (nineteen years ago) link
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.
― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 2 March 2005 21:41 (nineteen years ago) link
― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 2 March 2005 21:44 (nineteen years ago) link
― the bellefox, Thursday, 3 March 2005 14:49 (nineteen years ago) link
― Carl Solomon, Sunday, 13 March 2005 19:06 (nineteen years ago) link
― Remy (null) (x Jeremy), Monday, 14 March 2005 09:00 (nineteen years ago) link
― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 14 March 2005 20:41 (nineteen years ago) link
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.
― Jordan (Jordan), Tuesday, 21 November 2006 20:13 (seventeen years ago) link
― tom west (thomp), Tuesday, 21 November 2006 22:43 (seventeen years ago) link
― Jordan (Jordan), Wednesday, 22 November 2006 05:41 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― pinkmoose (jacklove), Friday, 24 November 2006 03:34 (seventeen years ago) link
― realkwaint (HGULTRUILLUM), Tuesday, 16 January 2007 15:57 (seventeen years ago) link
― realkwaint (HGULTRUILLUM), Tuesday, 16 January 2007 17:09 (seventeen years ago) link
― pinkmoose (jacklove), Friday, 19 January 2007 17:02 (seventeen years ago) link
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...
― verbose, bombastic, self-immolating (Pye Poudre), Monday, 22 January 2007 19:29 (seventeen years ago) link
― Laurel (Laurel), Monday, 22 January 2007 19:48 (seventeen years ago) link
Anyone read this? Looks fun, republished genre stuff from early in his career.
― Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 22 January 2007 20:08 (seventeen years ago) link
― Jamesy (SuzyCreemcheese), Monday, 29 January 2007 14:15 (seventeen years ago) link
― Jordan (Jordan), Monday, 29 January 2007 17:19 (seventeen years ago) link
― Jamesy (SuzyCreemcheese), Monday, 29 January 2007 19:53 (seventeen years ago) link
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
― Shakey Mo Collier, Monday, 18 June 2007 18:12 (sixteen years ago) link
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).
― James Morrison, Monday, 18 June 2007 23:21 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― thomp, Wednesday, 20 June 2007 00:56 (sixteen years ago) link
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?
― t_g, Thursday, 28 June 2007 13:15 (sixteen years ago) link
'access fantasy'
for 'good-to-brilliant' read maybe 'passable-to-really-good', i guess.
― thomp, Friday, 29 June 2007 01:46 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― Ismael Klata, Friday, 29 June 2007 14:19 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― jposnan, Tuesday, 3 July 2007 01:29 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― Martin Van Burne, Thursday, 19 July 2007 15:35 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― Hurting 2, Thursday, 19 July 2007 21:16 (sixteen years ago) link
One more thing: why call the first section of the book 'Underberg'?
― Ismael Klata, Monday, 23 July 2007 09:34 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― m coleman, Monday, 23 July 2007 10:39 (sixteen years ago) link
I really enjoyed his story in the last New Yorker!
― Hurting 2, Tuesday, 18 December 2007 00:25 (sixteen years ago) link
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?
― contenderizer, Friday, 21 December 2007 00:11 (sixteen years ago) link
Thanks for the heads up about that short story, Hurting, I liked it too.
― Jordan, Friday, 21 December 2007 15:43 (sixteen years ago) link
Definitely felt the Kafka influence
― Hurting 2, Friday, 21 December 2007 18:45 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― contenderizer, Friday, 21 December 2007 22:13 (sixteen years ago) link
I didn't think the ending was that straightforward realist - it was a tad absurd.
― Hurting 2, Friday, 21 December 2007 22:46 (sixteen years ago) link
Absurd, maybe, but not in a way that seems unrealistic to me. Absurd in the way that people often are. No super goat man.
― contenderizer, Friday, 21 December 2007 23:34 (sixteen years ago) link
I don't think a writer tearing two complete strangers' clothing to shreds with his teeth and leaving them naked in a motel room is "absurd in the way that people often are," even if it's not super goat man. Kafka also had stories in which nothing genuinely fantastic happened but that nonetheless had something more subtly unreal about them - The Judgment comes to mind.
― Hurting 2, Saturday, 22 December 2007 07:48 (sixteen years ago) link
Maybe I'm reading a different Lucky Alan. Egos and identities torn, clothing left largely unruffled in mine.
― contenderizer, Wednesday, 26 December 2007 21:12 (sixteen years ago) link
Anyway, the comic book. Omega: the Unknown. Limited series from Marvel, written by Lethem and illustrated (rather badly) by Farel Dalrymple. Up to issue 3, seven to go. Anyone reading it? So far it's interesting, but I'm not sure I'd call it good. Too arch by half, at least.
― contenderizer, Wednesday, 26 December 2007 21:14 (sixteen years ago) link
Omega didn't start out great, but I think it's getting better as it goes.
― Jordan, Wednesday, 26 December 2007 22:26 (sixteen years ago) link
Uh, I'm talking about "The King of Sentences" from a couple of weeks ago
Ah I see, Jordan linked to "Lucky Alan" which is from March.
― Hurting 2, Thursday, 27 December 2007 15:46 (sixteen years ago) link
Oh!
― Jordan, Thursday, 27 December 2007 17:07 (sixteen years ago) link
Lucky Alan >>> King of Sentences
― Jordan, Thursday, 27 December 2007 19:34 (sixteen years ago) link
I liked Men & Cartoons, have been planning to read Fortress for months, and keep bypassing Gun cause I'm trying to soak up 'serious' 'literary' 9ugh) stuff for the sake of my writing reservoir for the next 6 months.
Gun is worth it overall though?
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 31 December 2007 12:21 (sixteen years ago) link
Gun is fun, you can read it in, like, a day.
― Jordan, Monday, 31 December 2007 15:37 (sixteen years ago) link
(I think ILComics has a thread about the comic?)
― Casuistry, Monday, 31 December 2007 21:01 (sixteen years ago) link
You Knew It Was Coming: Lethem Hired By Marvel
― Casuistry, Monday, 31 December 2007 21:02 (sixteen years ago) link
I just finished *Motherless Brooklyn*, which I bought in Brooklyn when trying to shed dollars, and read much of on the aeroplane back through the changing night. I thought it marvellous - probably the best thing I've read by JL. *The Fortress of Solitude* I am very fond of, in my own strange way, but it's very sprawling and long and, as said upthread, uneven, and makes more of local hip references than MB does. MB is compact, energized, driven, compelling; very dry and droll also.
In *Men & Cartoons* I quite liked the first story and 'Vivian Relf', and the cover art is smashing. *The Disappointment Artist* I think too thoroughly self-absorbed, really. I also read *The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye* (US version, different from UK I believe), some of which is again impressive, some feeling more half-baked.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 5 July 2008 12:13 (fifteen years ago) link
have you read any of the pre-fortress of solitude novels, 'fox? i kind of feel like his stuff since is trying to square the two different sorts of writer he is, or invent a whole other writer who might have written , coincidentally, one of the books he actually did write
never been that much of a fan of motherless brooklyn, although i guess finding that someone can, suddenly, write convincing and idiomatic crime fiction, without doing so before, is more of a talent than i perhaps give it credit for
his comic book, 'omega the unknown', with an artist who is called something like 'pharrell dalyrymple', is rather good
― thomp, Sunday, 6 July 2008 19:26 (fifteen years ago) link
I'm reading Disappointment Artist now, enjoying it thoroughly. The essay on The Searchers made me want to watch it again.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 6 July 2008 21:34 (fifteen years ago) link
Thomp, no I guess I haven't read any novels pre-MB, though in my own crazy way I feel like I've read a ton of JL. This must be partly just the osmosis of having so much of it looking at me from my shelves every day.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 6 July 2008 23:30 (fifteen years ago) link
i guess finding that someone can, suddenly, write convincing and idiomatic crime fiction, without doing so before, is more of a talent than i perhaps give it credit for
Weren't Gun and a couple others basically sci-fi crime novels?
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 6 July 2008 23:50 (fifteen years ago) link
Yeah, pretty much. Noir-ish.
― Laurel, Tuesday, 8 July 2008 14:57 (fifteen years ago) link
x-post: yah gun was totally a crime/noir novel - dont know abt the other ones, werent they more straight-ish sci-fi?? i'm thinking of amnesia moon + girl in landscape.
― t_g, Tuesday, 8 July 2008 14:58 (fifteen years ago) link
Amnesia Moon and Girl in Landscape are straight-up sci-fi, but they both have strong mystery elements. Each features a protagonist engaged with a central riddle that propels the story. Superficially less true of And She Climed Across the Table. That one's a love story, but it treats love and the loved as essentially unknowable, and the characters are consumed by what they can't know about one another. So, maybe it counts, too.
― contenderizer, Thursday, 24 July 2008 16:14 (fifteen years ago) link
"At perihelion Dylan felt himself to be a note of music, one delayed, now floating upward."
Just now reading Fortress of Solitude -- several years too late, I suppose. I'm only 1/4 of the way through or so, but it's spectacular. I'd worried that it would be watered down, tamed in comparison to his other novels, but it's better and richer in every way. The characters, the culture, the sense of place and time, the point of view, everything about it makes me high. Love the wish-fulfillment stuff about the ring, which has just shown up, but I'm worried that it will unblance the texture of the story. Looking forward to finding out...
― contenderizer, Wednesday, 27 August 2008 17:37 (fifteen years ago) link
regarding the post prvs to last -
gun = sci fi hardboiled moon = sci fi dystopia table = sci fi campus novel landscape = sci fi western
although that's kinda limiting.
the sentence you quote, contenderizer - is that from the baseball game ..? whenever i see sentences quoted from that novel i never remember reading them, ha
-
in re this:
-- BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Sunday, 6 July 2008 23:50 (1 month ago) Link
i don't think gun with is a convincing & idiomatic crime novel (whatever i meant by that at the time) insomuch as a sci fi novel that's wearing the idea of being a crime novel as a kind of funny hat - this isn't meant to be a slur
the pinefox upthread mentions fortress's "local hip references": this is interesting, because i thought that that book did the business of being immersed in popular culture incredibly well, and i don't know at what point i'd draw the line between the references that are local, hip & those that aren't
― thomp, Wednesday, 27 August 2008 21:20 (fifteen years ago) link
The line is from the nostalgic wallball game that Dylan and Mingus start up with Arthur Lomb, when Dylan first feels the effects, just before the bit about "Grandmaster DJ Flowers" block party set.
Agree that Lethem doesn't seem to be using Fortress to flog a set of hipster trading cards. I'd say he's chronicling a moment in a place, and since the intersection he's working carries a measure of retrospective cultural currency, some of the references do seem hip -- but that's secondary to Lethem's intent. He's just trying to get it all in.
― contenderizer, Wednesday, 27 August 2008 21:53 (fifteen years ago) link
...though, admittedly, a line is walked. "Grandmaster DJ Flowers" alone is enough to half-justify pinefox's complaint, now that I think about it.
― contenderizer, Wednesday, 27 August 2008 22:07 (fifteen years ago) link
Finally reading Gun now btw and thomp your comment is incisive and instructive!
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 27 August 2008 22:08 (fifteen years ago) link
Surprised that you didn't like Motherless Brookly, thomp, as it seems much like Fortress of Solitude to me -- in terms of how well it nails a place and time, building a cultural history as much as repeating one. The genre trappings didn't interest me half as much as the main character, setting and tone, all of which I loved. Maybe too cute by 10%, but not enough to sink things. Then again, I lived a few blocks off Court Street at the time I read it and could walk around trying to snoop out the locations mentioned, so that colors my appreciation.
― contenderizer, Wednesday, 27 August 2008 22:31 (fifteen years ago) link
-- contenderizer
^^ this, or whatever we're saying these days.
i think my problems with motherless brooklyn were i) i wanted him to do more with the narrator's Tourette's ii) the whole structure didn't really amount to much more than 'yup, i have managed to write a crime novel'—tho, now i think about it, i'm not sure any of his books have wrapped themselves up in ways that i was 100% on.
i mean it's still better than his rock novel.
the thing about the streets makes me think of rereading sherlock holmes as a grown up and instead of it being in weird old detective town everything was, like, two minutes walk from the borders on charing cross ... i'm not sure what that adds, or takes away ...
― thomp, Thursday, 28 August 2008 12:05 (fifteen years ago) link
HOOS how are you finding it? I think it's my least favorite of his skiffy ones, though possibly just because it's the only one I have reread.
― thomp, Thursday, 28 August 2008 12:28 (fifteen years ago) link
1) fortress 2) brooklyn (although this was the first one i read and it was so long ago) 3) gun 4) table 5) landscape 6) moon 7) indie band
(not counting short stories)
― Jordan, Thursday, 28 August 2008 13:14 (fifteen years ago) link
interesting. my 1) and 7) are the same, but my 2) through 6) are exactly reversed.
― thomp, Thursday, 28 August 2008 13:35 (fifteen years ago) link
which yes technically means 4) is the same as well--
― thomp, Thursday, 28 August 2008 13:36 (fifteen years ago) link
Fortress Brooklyn Landscape Moon Table
having not read the other two (forgot about Indie Band -- is it really that bad?)
― contenderizer, Thursday, 28 August 2008 16:38 (fifteen years ago) link
i think he needed to bang out a quick, low-ambition one just to be like "hey critics, i already wrote fortress, not gonna do that again, k?" so i don't think he's lost it or anything. it's not like it's unreadable but it's not great.
― Jordan, Thursday, 28 August 2008 18:48 (fifteen years ago) link
i'm w/ thomp in that i dont really get the love for motherless brooklyn. it seems to me the one that's been most acclaimed?? i remember a lot of critics finding fortress really overwritten + they were more ok w/ brooklyn.
― t_g, Friday, 29 August 2008 11:13 (fifteen years ago) link
motherless brooklyn was a lot more enjoyable than fortress of solitude. i think with FOS, he tried to write this sweeping narrative that just didn't work for me.
― Mr. Que, Friday, 29 August 2008 14:09 (fifteen years ago) link
motherless brooklyn was really fun, i thought, but fortress of solitude dragged for me
― max, Friday, 29 August 2008 14:10 (fifteen years ago) link
i really liked his plagiarism piece in harper's
yes to both of those last posts. i also hated the switch from first person to third (or from third tp first, can't remember) in fortress of solitude
― Mr. Que, Friday, 29 August 2008 14:11 (fifteen years ago) link
That ranking I posted yesterday was premature, 'cuz I haven't even finished Fortress yet. A little over halfway through now, and while it isn't dragging at all, I'm liking the book's midsection a lot less than the opening chapters, which I loved. Don't mind the shifting authorial POV, though. Fortress goes back and forth in voice all the time, 1st person to 3rd, even some 2nd person you's thrown in there. Works just fine as a means of reflecting Dylan's awareness and self-awareness at the same time.
What's starting to bother me, though, is the fact that the narrative voice digests the emotional/narrative significance of everything as it happens. I understand that Dylan is an overthinker, and that the narrative voice is mostly his, so it's appropriate for the writing to embody his obsessive self-awareness -- but nothing's left to the reader. There isn't much narrative subtlety, ambiguity or delicacy. Dylan seems to far too clearly see and understand both his own motivations and those of the people around him. And when he doesn't, the surprises seems somewhat clumsily telegraphed and programmatic.
Also starting to agree with Pinefox about the novel becoming a patchwork of hip cultural references, spat out in the manner of one of those cinematic montages that shuttle you quickly from the Vietnam era to the present day, marking the passage of time as a series of cliched "you were there!" banner images (the emergence of hip-hop!, punk rock!, crack cocaine!). Early chapters seemed to choose much less obvious cultural signifiers, and did a better job of presenting them within a framework of observational authenticity, as credible & compelling personal experience. Still liking the book quite a bit, but I'm starting to have reservations.
― contenderizer, Friday, 29 August 2008 15:45 (fifteen years ago) link
Excellent post. The "You Were There!" bits surely are justified though, because Dylan and Mingus *are* there - it's not like an 80s Wonder Years or anything. Given that it's set in Brooklyn at that time, I'm not sure how those cliches (if that is what they are) could be avoided. Plus, from reading The Disappointment Artist, it seems to be at least loosely autobiographical - so I don't think cliche is entirely fair
― Ismael Klata, Saturday, 30 August 2008 08:44 (fifteen years ago) link
reading GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC at last, about halfway through
he's amazingly good at this schtick
even better, I suppose, in M Brooklyn
really if all his 1990s work is this good, no wonder people were so blown away
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 15 April 2009 20:58 (fourteen years ago) link
I really want to read M Brooklyn, even though Fortress left a bit of a bad taste in my mind (though I devoured it in like four days)...I thought the part at the end where Lethem blasts through Mingus's life post-prison leapt off the page in a way that little else in the novel did...I also thought the hipper-than-thou references were a bit distracting...
I like Lethem as an essayist but only sometimes...his pieces on comix and Cassavettes are great-pretentious, though his essay on sampling was imo boring-pretentious...
― jagged-electronically mäandernden underbody (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, 15 April 2009 23:43 (fourteen years ago) link
Did anyone read that Lethem story about a future where all the old basketball greats have their skills embedded in their shoes, and there's a weird lotto system where NBA players get assigned these old shoes and one guy gets Michael Jordan's shoes, and of course he becomes badass?
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 16 April 2009 00:01 (fourteen years ago) link
I really want to read M Brooklyn, even though Fortress left a bit of a bad taste in my mind (though I devoured it in like four days)
Read it! It saved Lethem for me. I was ready to give him up after Fortress, but on a whim I checked MB out from the library and was sooooo pleased. I do feel that, insofar as GWOM is a rather direct aping of the Chandler style whereas MB is kinda an updating of it, GWOM is more fun (and I enjoyed it more) but MB is more resonant and richer.
Did anyone read that Lethem story about a future where all the old basketball greats have their skills embedded in their shoes, and there's a weird lotto system where NBA players get assigned these old shoes and one guy gets Michael Jordan's shoes, and of course he becomes badass?― Philip Nunez, Thursday, April 16, 2009 12:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, April 16, 2009 12:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark
Yeah they're exosuits rather than shoes, but I loved that story. It had a few moments of SEE HOW POSTMODERN I AM SEE (and how could you not with a premise like that--'what does the game mean when its just a reenactment of classic skills' etc blurgh etc we get it), but I forgave the pretensions on behalf of the wit and cleverness.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, 16 April 2009 01:34 (fourteen years ago) link
I don't remember any PM stuff in it, but I would like to see more scholarly analysis on this magic Michael Jordan shoes story.
― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 16 April 2009 18:36 (fourteen years ago) link
not a book i would have expected an pinefox to like.
― thomp, Thursday, 16 April 2009 20:21 (fourteen years ago) link
hm!
"In early 2007, Lethem began work on Chronic City,[20] which will be published on September 15, 2009.[21] In July 2008, Lethem said that Chronic City is "set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it’s strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles Finney and Hitchcock’s Vertigo and it concerns a circle of friends including a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost-writer of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange."[22]"
did anyone follow omega the unknown all the way through?
― thomp, Thursday, 16 April 2009 20:25 (fourteen years ago) link
i did, it had its moments
― Ømår Littel (Jordan), Thursday, 16 April 2009 20:27 (fourteen years ago) link
oh ok
"Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.
Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.
Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique."
― thomp, Thursday, 16 April 2009 20:29 (fourteen years ago) link
ha
"I was ready to throw off any sense that I was going to write sprawling social novels set in Brooklyn and become the Brooklyn Faulkner. Neither Motherless nor Fortress exactly fits that description, but the accumulated image of the two books seemed to project that.
I don’t know if it would have been easy or hard for someone else to follow through with it, but it was totally out of the question for me. And really, for anyone who had even glanced at the earlier work that’d be obvious. But there were a lot of people—an important critical framework—which had never glanced at the earlier work. YDLMY was a way to shrug that off with a degree of self-destructive glee, to say I’m going to disappoint people on a number of different levels so we can start over again about expectations."
i think he needed to bang out a quick, low-ambition one just to be like "hey critics, i already wrote fortress, not gonna do that again, k?"
― Jordan, Thursday, August 28, 2008 6:48 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark
― thomp, Thursday, 16 April 2009 20:32 (fourteen years ago) link
ha, so now he's writing a big manhattan novel?
i did like that story from the astronaut girlfriend's perspective that came out a few months back, i'm assuming that's in the book (although it would be cool if it was just a spin-off).
― Ømår Littel (Jordan), Thursday, 16 April 2009 21:00 (fourteen years ago) link
I'm not loving that precis. Too many writers, and some horrible names.
― Ismael Klata, Thursday, 16 April 2009 22:05 (fourteen years ago) link
I don't know...Chase Insteadman sounds like one of the great character names of our time...
but no I'm not reading that...synopsis makes it osund like horrible tripe...Lethem has def. disappeared up somebody's arse...
― jagged-electronically mäandernden underbody (Drugs A. Money), Friday, 17 April 2009 14:12 (fourteen years ago) link
short story that jordan's talking abt - http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/11/17/081117fi_fiction_lethem
― just sayin, Friday, 17 April 2009 14:19 (fourteen years ago) link
i'd rank them like this:
actual good names: Richard Abneg
eh: Janice Trumbull, Perkus Tooth
really pretty poor: Chase Insteadman
kind of just awful: Oona Laszlo
― thomp, Friday, 17 April 2009 15:38 (fourteen years ago) link
i like oona laszlo a lot more than perkus tooth, which seems like a name for a d&d character (or at least a dickens character). maybe that's just because "oona" comes in a lot of crossword puzzles though.
― Ømår Littel (Jordan), Friday, 17 April 2009 15:42 (fourteen years ago) link
i think i like all those names. i'm pretty corny tho
― just sayin, Friday, 17 April 2009 15:44 (fourteen years ago) link
i dont know...theres something amusing about the last name Insteadman to me...made doubly amusing (bcz unlikely) that the dude was once a child star...
― jagged-electronically mäandernden underbody (Drugs A. Money), Friday, 17 April 2009 16:27 (fourteen years ago) link
chase insteadman is a truly great character name ada would adore it
― chairman lmao (Lamp), Friday, 17 April 2009 16:34 (fourteen years ago) link
Lethem also had a story about Perkus Tooth in this:http://www.austinchronicle.com/binary/122e/books_readings1.jpg
Looking forward to the new one but with a measure of trepidation cos i really hated You Don't Love Me Yet.
― Number None, Monday, 20 April 2009 02:28 (fourteen years ago) link
dude in the upper right hand corner looks like a perkus tooth. or maybe the one below him???
― Ømår Littel (Jordan), Monday, 20 April 2009 02:37 (fourteen years ago) link
I finished GUN last night. Though the '6 months later' jump is stunning in a way, I wasn't very satisfied with how it wound up. He makes such a fuss about Stanhunt's Forgettol as plot device at the end, drawing out a revelation that for once I'd seen coming, but I didn't see that it did much for the story. Somehow the whole crime web lost its lustre by the end. The kangaroo's fate and the last page are good, though.
― the pinefox, Monday, 20 April 2009 13:56 (fourteen years ago) link
that is, 6 YEARS later
The only thing I remember from "gun w/OM" is the constant tearing up of bills in half for bribery/tips which struck me as a neat life skill which I'm disappointed to have never used.
What cool tricks have you guys learned from Lethem books?
― Philip Nunez, Monday, 20 April 2009 17:43 (fourteen years ago) link
"Blindsight", from AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE, kind of that freaks me out when I think about it.
There's a line in MOTHERLESS about a van being vandalized by someone with "...a lot of patience and no fear of interruption" - that description just floored me, so much so that I memorized it.
― R Baez, Monday, 20 April 2009 19:24 (fourteen years ago) link
Well I learned how to be invisible and fly.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 April 2009 09:31 (fourteen years ago) link
I just haven't acquired the equipment yet.
Why does no one ever talk about his Nabokovian, or at least Nabokov-inflected, short story 'Vivian Relf'?
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 April 2009 09:34 (fourteen years ago) link
Possibly because it's overshadowed by his Nabokovian novel Girl in Landscape
― one thousand BIG HOOS raging and pounding (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Wednesday, 22 April 2009 09:41 (fourteen years ago) link
evidently i have been reading the wrong nabokov short stories and/or novels
― thomp, Wednesday, 22 April 2009 16:41 (fourteen years ago) link
is 'vivian relf' the story about meeting the same almost-stranger at a half-dozen parties?
Yes.I think I like it.I have always remembered the title.
The poem in it he writes about Relf is surely a kind of pastiche of the pastiche that HH writes in Lolita - 'Officer, officer, there they go - over there where that lighted store is!' - well, maybe the action of the poem is different but the twee yearning verse seems to make the willed connection clear.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 23 April 2009 07:55 (fourteen years ago) link
I'm now reading AS SHE CRAWLED ACROSS THE TABLE !!
― the pinefox, Thursday, 23 April 2009 07:57 (fourteen years ago) link
maybe you shld re-read the title
― just sayin, Thursday, 23 April 2009 08:15 (fourteen years ago) link
I just did.
Now I know that it is called AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE.
I thought you might mean the title 'Vivian Relf' but couldn't see how I had got that wrong.
The TABLE book is nice and easy to read so far. I have never encountered shorter chapters !!
― the pinefox, Thursday, 23 April 2009 14:01 (fourteen years ago) link
you ever read As I Lay Dying?
― art-ghetto superstar (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, 23 April 2009 14:01 (fourteen years ago) link
yessure, those are short too, but are a different kind of 'chapter' maybe (as are those in Swift's derivative and excellent Last Orders).
Lethem on hold over the weekend but still gonna get back to him soon and might even get through the whole oeuvre some day, which is not an ambition I can sustain with most authors.
Motherless Brooklyn the best I've read yet probably, and in truth I doubt another will beat it.
― the pinefox, Monday, 27 April 2009 12:05 (fourteen years ago) link
(Tried to post the other day and it wouldn't take): AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE long had me feeling it was a pastiche of something, the same way GUN is (of Chandler and Dick). And then I realized it was DON DELILLO. Campus satire; stunted brief lines of dialogue (not to mention chapters, here); bizarre abstractions taken as everyday talk; characters who seem emblematic but just stay within a realistic frame. Am I just the last in a long line of people to make this connection?
― the pinefox, Sunday, 3 May 2009 09:10 (fourteen years ago) link
― thomp, Wednesday, August 27, 2008 9:20 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark
white noise is probably the closest model of 'campus novel' to lethem's thing, i guess. i can't think of any other delillo being set on a campus, mind, save end zone which is not really the same sort of thing.
― thomp, Sunday, 3 May 2009 10:12 (fourteen years ago) link
I prefer Fortress to Motherless Brooklyn, there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that those two are his best but I've been wondering for a while what to go for next. What do you guys recommend?
― Enormous Epic (Matt DC), Sunday, 3 May 2009 14:42 (fourteen years ago) link
Girl in Landscape is pretty great
― Mr. Que, Sunday, 3 May 2009 15:33 (fourteen years ago) link
but is TABLE actually SF? it's about Science but I'm not sure that makes it Science Fiction.
Yes White Noise = DD's campus novel, and would be the main source, but DeLillo's other work - work AFTER JL's book in fact, Body Artist and Cosmopolis - also has that flavour, in the dialogue and high concepts.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 3 May 2009 21:12 (fourteen years ago) link
Girl in Landscape is one of the few I don't have; also YDLMYet which I always mean to borrow from the library.
no, i'm pretty sure it's science fiction.
― thomp, Monday, 4 May 2009 01:14 (fourteen years ago) link
From link upthread, just read this:http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/03/19/070319fi_fiction_lethem?currentPage=1I don't really get it; can't identify with anything in it or see the point of it.
But it did make me want to subscribe to the New Yorker.
― the pinefox, Monday, 4 May 2009 10:48 (fourteen years ago) link
Contenderizer once said of TFOS: "What's starting to bother me, though, is the fact that the narrative voice digests the emotional/narrative significance of everything as it happens."
This seems to me the great watermark of all Lethem's writing: obsessiveness about the implications of what's just been said or done. Put so generally, I admit, that could be applied to a lot of writers - but it does seem actually his greatest tic, beyond the more evident things like genre play etc. I think it is a strength and / or a weakness.
― the pinefox, Monday, 4 May 2009 10:56 (fourteen years ago) link
I'm not sure I understand the meaning, if meaning there is, of the end of AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE.
I don't mind JL's very inventive conjuring of the different worlds in other dimensions - but the very end when Alice returns yet again to enter the other universe - why does she do it (again), havin seemingly abandoned the quest and gone away, and is there anything we should derive or deduce about this time that is different from earlier ones? Are her motives different, eg. does she have any inkling that Philip is now on the other side? (The novel does not say that she does.)
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 6 May 2009 08:19 (fourteen years ago) link
I'd be interested in more peoples' thoughts on YDLMY. After finding TFOS patchy but frequently brilliant, I thought I'd found a writer whose books I was really going to enjoy. I then bought YDLMY and thought it quite embarrassingly awful. I couldn't finish it (and it's not like it's a difficult read, apart from its astonishing badness). It more or less killed my interest in picking up any more of Lethem's books.
― frankiemachine, Saturday, 9 May 2009 12:04 (fourteen years ago) link
left me coldshould've been a new yorker short
― warmsherry, Saturday, 9 May 2009 12:13 (fourteen years ago) link
I haven't actually read You Don't Love Me Yet, so take this with a pinch of salt, but my problem with Lethem is that he should be more ambitious with his writing. He should be tackling big things, but he seems too content to mess around with things that ultimately don't matter. I can see why he should have a fondness for magical realism, for example, but The Fortress of Solitude is not improved as a result.
― Ismael Klata, Saturday, 9 May 2009 18:30 (fourteen years ago) link
fortress "isn't tackling big things"?
― thomp, Saturday, 9 May 2009 19:34 (fourteen years ago) link
No no no no, it definitely is - I was trying to make the point that the whimsy in it (flying ring, extended sequence where he's trying to sell his story) doesn't add anything particularly worthwhile, other than that he seems to get a kick out of writing it. Fortress is so strong that that doesn't matter, but my impression is that elsewhere it does. (To be fair, I've only really skimmed some of his other stuff precisely because it seems so slight, so it's possible that I'm wrong here)
― Ismael Klata, Saturday, 9 May 2009 20:06 (fourteen years ago) link
I'm definitely not criticising his subject matter, just his attachment to certain styles. The Disappointment Artist I found fantastic, and it's just straight-down-the-line reminiscences on pop culture - the important thing is that he fastens onto real feelings. The criticism is really of self-indulgence, I suppose. You'd only make it of a really, really good writer.
― Ismael Klata, Saturday, 9 May 2009 20:13 (fourteen years ago) link
oh, i see what you mean. tho i think the flying ring actually works: but it feels sort of schematic — you could imagine he'd mapped out every single plot point and riff related to it before he really knew how the rest of the book would feel. but yeah i actually kind of agree with you. i would say the SF novels are worth reading, though: i don't think the same scale of big-things-vs-whimsies really operates.
― thomp, Saturday, 9 May 2009 20:26 (fourteen years ago) link
The Disappointment Artist (some of which I'm sure I quite enjoyed) is surely the most self-indulgent book he has ever published. Its narcissistic obsessiveness about his own life and things he happens to have done and liked makes Woody Allen, Morrissey and Paris Hilton seem shy and selfless.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 10 May 2009 19:16 (fourteen years ago) link
Woody Allen, Morrissey and Paris Hilton
http://i250.photobucket.com/albums/gg274/generalberg/holy_trinity-1.jpg
― thomp, Sunday, 10 May 2009 21:42 (fourteen years ago) link
Its narcissistic obsessiveness about his own life and things he happens to have done and liked
lol @ this characterization of a book of essays on pop culture & childhood
― I'm not some HOOS for someone's lust to snack on! (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Sunday, 10 May 2009 22:12 (fourteen years ago) link
YDLMY really is embarrassing, especially the lyrics. "Monster Eyes" ugh
― Number None, Monday, 11 May 2009 02:09 (fourteen years ago) link
the more confirmations I hear of how bad this book is, the more I want to read it.
― the pinefox, Monday, 11 May 2009 12:34 (fourteen years ago) link
You can hear some fan submitted versions of the songs on Lethem's website, perhaps that will whet your appetite further?
― Number None, Monday, 11 May 2009 21:05 (fourteen years ago) link
YDLMY is not representative of his non-Fortress work.
― Ømår Littel (Jordan), Monday, 11 May 2009 21:16 (fourteen years ago) link
Well he intended as a fun, throwaway thing after the serious literary aspirations of Fortress but it doesn't even succeed on that level. The earlier genre stuff is plenty fun imo.
― Number None, Monday, 11 May 2009 21:24 (fourteen years ago) link
another part from his next book - http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/05/25/090525fi_fiction_lethem
― just sayin, Wednesday, 27 May 2009 09:49 (fourteen years ago) link
I got an advance copy of the new book. About 50 pages in, and I'm not sure what to think. In his fight between cultural cache Brett Easton Ellis-style name-dropping and literary merit, he seems to have totally succumbed to BEE. At least it's not half as puppy-eyed hipster trash as the last book, even if it doesn't quite seem to be as interesting or as beautiful as Fortress or Motherless.
― Mordy, Tuesday, 28 July 2009 12:24 (fourteen years ago) link
:/
― Ømår Littel (Jordan), Tuesday, 28 July 2009 14:13 (fourteen years ago) link
not a fan of this dude. enjoyed motherless brooklyn but wasn't blown away; everything else i've read by him left me underwhelmed. really wanted to like fortress of solitude but something about it was creepy, can't put my finger on it
― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, 28 July 2009 14:26 (fourteen years ago) link
a little too rolling teenpop thread??
― Mordy, Tuesday, 28 July 2009 14:27 (fourteen years ago) link
I started rereading Fortress of Solitude yesterday. No staggering new insights yet, but the kids'-street-life stuff is very good, and the mother makes for a convincing pain in the ass.
― Ismael Klata, Tuesday, 28 July 2009 17:01 (fourteen years ago) link
Arthur Lomb made his snivelling entry into my audiobook as I hurtled home this evening. I hadn't really appreciated how great he is. Many times I laughed the embarrassed, but nonetheless delicious, laugh of self-recognition.
― Ismael Klata, Thursday, 30 July 2009 22:28 (fourteen years ago) link
he lost me after disappointment artist and i haven't been interested since, but i'm still enjoying catching up on the 90s sci fi
― BIG HOOS's wacky crack variety hour (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 30 July 2009 22:40 (fourteen years ago) link
i'd like to cosign all the :/
― thomp, Thursday, 30 July 2009 22:54 (fourteen years ago) link
i ended up liking chronic city a lot; it's more uneven than fortress or motherless brooklyn but the end segment is pretty affecting
― XX Decontrol (M@tt He1ges0n), Monday, 8 February 2010 19:12 (fourteen years ago) link
Re-read GUN for the first time since 2001. Holds up better than I expected, particularly the gutpunch of those last few chapters.
― R Baez, Thursday, 1 April 2010 20:24 (thirteen years ago) link
here's hoping he snaps back with a trim, tightly constructed new novel. soon.
― m coleman, Monday, 23 July 2007 10:39 (2 years ago)
chronic city LOL
― the mighty the mighty BOHANNON (m coleman), Thursday, 1 April 2010 21:58 (thirteen years ago) link
I liked CC but found the PKD-inspired elements and the Perkus Tooth/Paul Nelson character exhausting and ultimately kind of irritating, too.
― the mighty the mighty BOHANNON (m coleman), Thursday, 1 April 2010 22:05 (thirteen years ago) link
cronenberg making a movie of 'As She Climbed Across the Table'...
― just sayin, Monday, 28 June 2010 10:57 (thirteen years ago) link
god, i completely missed the publication of chronic city
― thomp, Monday, 28 June 2010 12:31 (thirteen years ago) link
I was house/cat-sitting this weekend and read and really enjoyed "The King of Sentences" in Best American Short Stories 2008.
― gato busca pleitos (Eazy), Monday, 19 July 2010 14:49 (thirteen years ago) link
Aww, I loved Perkus. Really enjoyed the whole book. I don't know how he made things like pot and ebay so interesting, but he did. And, the bland narrator's voice, potentially a weak spot, worked as well:
I employ language the way a dog drives a car, without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible. That is, of course, if dogs drove cars.
I admired Fortress of Solitude, but I loved Chronic City.
― Cherish, Wednesday, 28 July 2010 15:26 (thirteen years ago) link
They Live reads like a Perkus Tooth riff. I'm using that as a blurb, mind you.
― Comics can't all be syringes and scalpels poised before eyes. y'know? (R Baez), Sunday, 13 March 2011 18:12 (thirteen years ago) link
ALSO: I'd like to heartily recommend his OMEGA THE UNKNOWN comic (w/ Farel Dalrymple), which hasn't been mentioned on this thread.
― Comics can't all be syringes and scalpels poised before eyes. y'know? (R Baez), Sunday, 13 March 2011 18:18 (thirteen years ago) link
i read chronic city the other week, it was definitely not awful
― thomp, Sunday, 13 March 2011 18:26 (thirteen years ago) link
just finished chronic city, which i enjoyed with reservations. i had no trouble buying into the PKD/pynchon-style paranoid-critical alternate universe, but was less than satisfied by the earthbound explanations eventually offered for all the fantastical nonsense. (no one ever thought to google "chaldron"?) agree w matt upthread that the final chapters are moving, an arguably worthy pay-off, but the hard left from the more antic first two-thirds of the novel threw me. not sure how i feel about it in retrospect.
among other things, it's about the fluidity of reality, or realities, right? about the struggles that take place at the intersection of personal, consensus and objective realities, and how new york stands in constant flux on that shore, is never less than a million cities fighting against and conspiring with one another. on that level, it's also about the ways in which the present must somehow eradicate the past in order to make space for itself, the inevitable agonies of that process. and 9/11 too. which would seem like an impossibly broad set of concerns, but it's all pulled off surprisingly well, benefiting from the fact that CC limits itself, for the most part, to loopy riffing on these and other themes - compare to fortress of solitude, which came to seem oppressive in its more serious attempts to summarize and solve for a moment in The City's life.
i notice that lethem's got a thing about using placid middle-class observer characters to report on the annihilation of their fringier and/or more passionate friends (fortress, omega, a couple of the short stories). odd pet theme, but i suppose it's well-suited to the new york stories he chooses to tell.
question: how are we to take the ending and chase's place in it? in addition to all the above, the novel concerns the ways in which we inevitably acquiesce, most of us, to the realities we're offered, to a comfortable sort complicity. chronic city mourns the human sacrifices offered in the name of "acceptable" compromise, but like chase and richard, seems ultimately to find a sort peace in surrender. what does it mean that our beautifully vacant dupe of a narrator exits focusing himself on another beautiful but pointless time-killing conquest, the angry ghost of the anarchic 1980s finally exorcised? there's an odd ambivalence to the whole thing, which i suppose suits the novel's themes: you can make of it what you will.
― normal_fantasy-unicorns (contenderizer), Friday, 22 April 2011 17:47 (twelve years ago) link
I've never even seen it, it's like it just never reached the radar here. He seems to have fallen away entirely as a serious figure after Fortress, but you make it sound like the opposite. I don't even know whether this is out in paperback yet (I presume so, it's been out for what, years now?).
― Ismael Klata, Friday, 22 April 2011 17:52 (twelve years ago) link
also love lethem's early sci-fi novels, especially amnesia moon, as she climbed across the table, and girl in landscape. some talk of gun, with occasional music upthread. anyone else struck by the strong parallels between that novel and rudy rucker's wetware? similar play with hard-boiled detective tropes, created beings and realities. would need to read them both back to back (as i did several years ago) to more clearly make the case, but the, uh, debt of inspiration seemed glaringly obvious to me at the time.
― normal_fantasy-unicorns (contenderizer), Friday, 22 April 2011 17:55 (twelve years ago) link
i tried reading wetware a few years back but the style didn't hold my interest, idk
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, 22 April 2011 18:04 (twelve years ago) link
lethem's got a thing about using placid middle-class observer characters to report on the annihilation of their fringier and/or more passionate friends
This seems like the natural narrative position if you're: (a) a bookish type writing what you know; and (b) putting everything at stake. Certainly if I was inserting myself in anything heavy, I couldn't really do it any other way.
― Ismael Klata, Friday, 22 April 2011 18:09 (twelve years ago) link
He seems to have fallen away entirely as a serious figure after Fortress, but you make it sound like the opposite.
not sure. haven't followed lethem's critical fortunes over the last few years. i wasn't interested in you don't love me yet (great song tho) and prefer his early to his recent short stories. like fortress, chronic city is a big, ambitious city novel, worth a read if you've liked lethem in the past. situated somewhere between fortress of solitude, pynchon/PKD homage and helprin's winter's tale? maybe?
― normal_fantasy-unicorns (contenderizer), Friday, 22 April 2011 18:10 (twelve years ago) link
yeah, rucker's an idea guy more than, you know, a writer guy. love him anyway, especially the master of space and time.
― normal_fantasy-unicorns (contenderizer), Friday, 22 April 2011 18:15 (twelve years ago) link
never read Wetware but my assumption would always be that there are 100 Dick knock-offs or followers (maybe good) and JL's is only ever one among them. That is, not at all surprised at the idea that his novels aren't that distinctive in this respect.
CC, yes - fond of it, despite the flaws. above, the phrase 'loopy riffing' is key - it doesn't feel very structured. Though when I sort of put this to JL once he gave the impression that this was not deliberate, and it should feel more driven than it does.
agree about the real-world incoherences, too, no doubt. the business with the chick writing letters from the astronaut - I'm still not sure I got that; or maybe I've just forgotten already how it made sense, if it ever did.
being destroyed in an earthquake was a tough way for a waitress to escape P Tooth's interest.
I think JL reuses the word 'zaftig' in this book, a word I'd never seen pre the prison sequence in Fortress, and I'm still not sure quite what it means, though it is something to do with attractiveness.
He also uses the phrase 'life during wartime' maybe 3 times in CC, which is probably 2 too many.
Stevie told me that the book referred to REM's 'carnival of sorts' but I could not find a single reference to it outside the title.
― the pinefox, Friday, 22 April 2011 19:00 (twelve years ago) link
Are you and he chums, pf?
― Ismael Klata, Friday, 22 April 2011 19:03 (twelve years ago) link
It would be nice to say yes, but no I've only met him twice and corresponded a bit.
btw, thinking about the 'placid observer' theory, it might have to adapt a bit when it comes to Motherless Brooklyn.
Apart from that novel's games, I don't think JL has varied narrative voice that much, considering how much he's written. At some level his style is quite consistent.
― the pinefox, Friday, 22 April 2011 19:13 (twelve years ago) link
zaftig
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_tAugm-UtTIw/TE1Er-4WbcI/AAAAAAAAEM8/-NE-1J5ViJo/s1600/hendricks.jpg
― adult music person (Jordan), Friday, 22 April 2011 19:19 (twelve years ago) link
one of my big questions coming away was whether or not we're meant to take chase's eventual understandings (chaldron as virtual treasure, janice as his own role's fictional backstory) as "really real", or whether these merely reflect the defeated version of reality he ultimately chooses. chronic city walks the narrator through his final disillusioning brush with massive civic power out into an eternal winter in which nothing he does or says will ever be anything more than personal, superficial.
i guess i'm tempted to read it as an indictment that, for some reason, swallows its own outrage at the last moment, a silenced indictment of both chase and his city. i say silenced because, in the end, there doesn't seem to be any other way out of the past into the future, no aerie from which he (or we) might oppose the consensus inflicted by wealth and power.
side note: it occurs to me that chronic city, like fortress of solitude, is divided by a brief section in which one narrative mode (first person, here) is exchanged for another (third person), during which massive changes in narrative topography take place. not sure it means anything, but it's an interesting device, the change in voice signaling a change in the world.
― normal_fantasy-unicorns (contenderizer), Friday, 22 April 2011 19:30 (twelve years ago) link
I don't even remember the 3rd person bit in CC! Oh, OK - Tooth going to the doctor, is it?
Your writing about this novel rather reminds me of Lethem!
― the pinefox, Friday, 22 April 2011 20:17 (twelve years ago) link
It's great how someone who hasn't even posted to this thread for 2 years, I think, can pop up and tell me what zaftig means, so vividly.
I never would have guessed that from the book (Fortress), though.
― the pinefox, Friday, 22 April 2011 20:18 (twelve years ago) link
it's the section during which chase loses track of tooth after the tiger's assault on jackson hole. think we get two short segments describing the wanderings that bring chase to the canine apartments and the subsequent reordering of his life.
i have overused the word "massive" itt
― normal_fantasy-unicorns (contenderizer), Friday, 22 April 2011 20:27 (twelve years ago) link
think we get two short segments describing the wanderings that bring chase to the canine apartments and the subsequent reordering of his life.
by "chase" i mean "tooth"
― normal_fantasy-unicorns (contenderizer), Friday, 22 April 2011 20:30 (twelve years ago) link
OK but then this reminds me that there IS the *earlier* section with Tooth going to the doctor, in the 3rd person too, non?
I recall the business with Tooth and the dog being rather lengthy.
― the pinefox, Friday, 22 April 2011 20:45 (twelve years ago) link
i guess you're right. shoots my neat little theory to shit, unless i can argue that each of the novel's major shifts takes place in a third person segment unobserved by it's bad-detective narrator. would be a cool trick given chase's ineffectuality, but i'd have to read it again with that in mind before staking anything on the idea.
and yeah, tooth's interlude with ava is only brief relative to a 500-page novel
― normal_fantasy-unicorns (contenderizer), Friday, 22 April 2011 21:00 (twelve years ago) link
contenderizer makes me want to read a Lethem novel; wow!
admittedly, I've made a massive ass about Lethem in various threads here on ILx, mostly bcz I was disappointed in Fortress of Solitude, but I alwyas thought Motherless Brooklyn and now Chronic City seems really interesting as well. Don't know about the early stuff.
― Hippie! Crack! Nitrous! Mafia! Boston! (Drugs A. Money), Saturday, 23 April 2011 01:01 (twelve years ago) link
life is like that, I guess? but yeah this seemed a bit heartless
― donut pitch (m coleman), Saturday, 23 April 2011 11:35 (twelve years ago) link
one of my big questions coming away was whether or not we're meant to take chase's eventual understandings (chaldron as virtual treasure, janice as his own role's fictional backstory) as "really real", or whether these merely reflect the defeated version of reality he ultimately chooses.
Ha! Good question. It certainly feels less real than most of the book up to that point.
As for the the third-person sections, the question “Who is writing this?” (in a novel about ghostwriting and fakery) is significantly more interesting than usual.
― Cherish, Saturday, 23 April 2011 11:51 (twelve years ago) link
I don't know: I don't think Lethem is interested enough in that kind of jiggery-pokery to put enough clues in for 'aha!' readings: I mean, I'd very much like to make the central Perkus Tooth section by the writer chick, say. But that would probably not be doable.
The section with Perkus at the doctor is contextualised as Chase reporting it, though only in a vaguely after-the-fact way.
Re: Lethem and Rucker: that schtick is very much a thing now, isn't it? 'SF noir' or whatever. Richard Morgan wrote a series of them, M. John Harrison did one for his return to SF (not v. good), I'm sure other people could name more.
― Ismael Klata, Friday, 22 April 2011 17:52 (Yesterday) Bookmark
yeah I got this for like four pounds off of amazon when I was reading it, upthread: it's in mass-market paperback, yet. I'd never seen a copy here and then when I was in New York at the start of the year I saw a bunch of remaindered copies (of the UK edition, specifically) at the Strand.
― thomp, Saturday, 23 April 2011 14:19 (twelve years ago) link
And cosign about middle-class observers: I think this is a pretty respectable thing to do, though.
Gun, With Occasional Music - i do not like parodies of hardboiled writingGirl in Landscape - very goodFortress of Solitude - gave up around 200 pages in
― jay lenonononono (abanana), Saturday, 23 April 2011 16:31 (twelve years ago) link
which is better, the UK or US cover of CC?
and is the text inside different? Probably.
I wouldn't want to read the LITTLE Faber edition of CC - it's too little.
But then I did read Fortress at the same size, so that doesn't make much sense.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 23 April 2011 16:41 (twelve years ago) link
Yeah, I didn't mean that there were clues and stuff. I just like to think about things like that.
Yes. And this time it was a joke -- the most bland, least writer-ly narrator possible.
above, the phrase 'loopy riffing' is key - it doesn't feel very structured. Though when I sort of put this to JL once he gave the impression that this was not deliberate, and it should feel more driven than it does.
But once Perkus goes to the doctor, it picks up momentum and seriousness (for Perkus), doesn't it? I can't remember how far in that was, and I've loaned out my copy.
― Cherish, Saturday, 23 April 2011 17:55 (twelve years ago) link
I have just been reminded by this thread what zaftig might mean.
http://www.businessinsider.com/jennifer-egan-just-jonathan-lethem-occupy-wall-street-2011-11
― the pinefox, Monday, 7 November 2011 23:14 (twelve years ago) link
This book of collected essays is looking pretty good to me: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/books/jonathan-lethems-ecstasy-of-influence-review.html
― Why Does Redd People Never Want To Blecch? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 03:02 (twelve years ago) link
I am reading it
it is very much about him and his life and things he has done and thought and felt
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 12:57 (twelve years ago) link
Who'd a thunk it?
― Why Does Redd People Never Want To Blecch? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 13:11 (twelve years ago) link
i'm gonna be in a book with this dude. mentioned it on ilm. should be coming out in a month or so.
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/Books/978-0-8223-5108-5_pr.jpg
http://www.amazon.com/Pop-When-World-Falls-Apart/dp/0822351080
― scott seward, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 14:49 (twelve years ago) link
nice work, scott
that article though
. He’s a novelist who has spent a lifetime creating his own subversive pantheon, a jumpy CBGB’s of the literary soul.
Mr. Lethem’s crowded pantheon, “The Ecstasy of Influence” makes clear, includes Marvel comic books and misfit writers like Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Shirley Jackson and Charles Willeford. It includes improvisational filmmakers like John Cassavetes, little-known bands like the Go-Betweens and rumpled, bohemian critics like Manny Farber.
yeah er
― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 14:59 (twelve years ago) link
that free-wheelin' j lethem, and his fondness for non-canonised and under-critically-recognised things like philip dick and ballard and kirby and the go-betweens
― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 15:01 (twelve years ago) link
Yeah, I know. I liked most of the quotes from JL himself but that reviewer sounds like he just dropped in to see what condition his condition was in.
― Why Does Redd People Never Want To Blecch? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 15:04 (twelve years ago) link
that's such an american thing. that ramshackle iconoclast thing. you look at author bios in shaggy obscure books from the 30s and 40s by american authors and you see stuff like "in his travels he has worked as a carnival sideshow barker, a gold prospector, and also dined with the Duke of Windsor." or something like that. that's why bob dylan was such catnip to journalists. and woodie guthrie before him.
― scott seward, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 15:26 (twelve years ago) link
>>> that free-wheelin' j lethem, and his fondness for non-canonised and under-critically-recognised things like philip dick and ballard and kirby and the go-betweens
I AGREE
these things are mostly hugely recognized or in some cases even overrated
though I suppose he could point to his fondness for obscure rather than famous superheroes
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 22:22 (twelve years ago) link
He does!http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_the_Unknown
― Number None, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 22:23 (twelve years ago) link
I read most of the essay collection a couple of weeks ago. The examples of reporting (e.g. James Brown) are first-rate. However, I'd real problems with a few of the formless things; and including the response to James Wood was stupid and immature.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 22:27 (twelve years ago) link
pinefox agrees with me about something, good lord
is the james wood thing online anywhere? library copy of this is 'in processing at the copyright receipt office' and i have no idea how long that takes
― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:04 (twelve years ago) link
What irritated me was Lethem concentrating on Wood's appropriately dismissive reply ("I'm sorry you feel that way," Lethem remembers Wood said in a brief note) as if it revealed Wood's innate snobbbery.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:08 (twelve years ago) link
here's that essay --- http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/12467824780/my-disappointment-criticit is not great, though i kind of appreciate his willingness to come across as so needy. or maybe that isn't what he meant at all. but lethem is obviously an author who esteems critics almost as much as artists, I think. anyhoo, the ecstasy of influence was a fun read for the most part -- alfred otm about the reporting, that james brown feature is incredible, and his dylan piece is great as well.
― tylerw, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:13 (twelve years ago) link
huh. for me 'j wood probably deserves it' trumps 'kind of a bad look for j lethem'. but, yeah, kind of a bad look.
― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:19 (twelve years ago) link
oh he definitely deserves it (tho i do like some of his writing)
― tylerw, Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:21 (twelve years ago) link
wonder when he's just going to give up and take a job at the av club
― 40oz of tears (Jordan), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:21 (twelve years ago) link
All critics deserve it, but a critic and writer as smart as Wood deserves evisceration, not kicking sand on his feet, playground style.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 6 March 2012 23:28 (twelve years ago) link
i thought you guys were wood fans.
― scott seward, Wednesday, 7 March 2012 00:44 (twelve years ago) link
or thought he was an ilx fave.
― scott seward, Wednesday, 7 March 2012 00:45 (twelve years ago) link
I'm a fan! But every critic is a target.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 7 March 2012 00:45 (twelve years ago) link
I've loved more of Wood's productions over the years than Lethem's, but that's an unfair comparison.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 7 March 2012 00:46 (twelve years ago) link
just looked at the lethem wood thing. kinda embarrassing. like listening to someone talk about getting dumped by their boyfriend.
― scott seward, Wednesday, 7 March 2012 00:52 (twelve years ago) link
I know HE probably doesn't care... (he says something like that twice in the thing)
― scott seward, Wednesday, 7 March 2012 00:53 (twelve years ago) link
like listening to someone talk about getting dumped by their boyfriend.
otm -- it's creepy in a predictable way
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 7 March 2012 00:56 (twelve years ago) link
what else was Wood supposed to say beyond "I'm sorry you feel this way"??
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 7 March 2012 01:00 (twelve years ago) link
"So I hear McG has optioned 'Gun with Occasional Music'..."
― Philip Nunez, Wednesday, 7 March 2012 01:12 (twelve years ago) link
yes the anti-Wood essay is not good
the 'Holidays' bit of fiction has its few brief moments while feeling like the work of someone else, some post-Barthelme type that Stevie T would have praised in 1997
the 'Crazy Friend' Dick essay shows some of the problems - reams of overdetermined / overcomplicated stuff about 'the shame' of telling two girls that he liked SF (probably there wasn't really any 'shame' at all; a bit of embarrassment and a recognition that his tastes were becoming different from theirs)
there is a weird tendency to over-analyze things in this way ... I suppose it's what writers do and should do, but usually they do it about others, not just themselves?
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 7 March 2012 10:12 (twelve years ago) link
Franzen appears pp.26-7 btw
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 7 March 2012 11:06 (twelve years ago) link
rereading The Fortress of Solitude, having walked down Dean Street again just yesterday.
I ventilate this yet againhttp://www.powells.com/review/2003_10_09.htmland immediately see the mixture of blindness and insight - within two paras he dismisses JL's best book but has an interesting angle on characterization.
I am finding the book much easier to read this time round, though still dense. I see its prose delicacy and lyricism (the first section, this is, the bit that Wood liked). And the dialogue feels peculiarly well judged, well heard and delivered. I think I still see some of what frustrated me about the novel too, even in Part One.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 16 April 2013 23:48 (ten years ago) link
I just gave a copy of You Don't Love Me Yet as a gift to the English prof I've been working with for the last four months. She's never heard of Lethem, but she seemed to be hitting on quite a few decidedly Lethem-y themes in the course (Canadian Poetry), particularly wrt this novel. I'm looking forward to discussing it with her.
― Public Brooding Closet (cryptosicko), Wednesday, 17 April 2013 04:03 (ten years ago) link
I admire a lot of things about this book, but there were always things I had trouble with, and I am reminded of both of these aspects as I reread it.
One thing I have trouble with is the amount of talk about graffiti, which is a thing I am not generally keen on.
I'm afraid that this book is quite paradoxical as a book that I like that is sometimes about things that I do not like. I suppose there are some other books like that, like The Line of Beauty. But in that book you are not supposed to like the Cons, whereas I feel that in this book you are supposed to like the graffiti.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 09:48 (ten years ago) link
What don't you like about graffiti?
― Ismael Klata, Sunday, 28 April 2013 09:52 (ten years ago) link
If you like it, then I would not want to get into an argument with you, or anyone, about it.
FWIW, one thing that I think I don't like about it is that it is a violation of public space by a private interest. Someone claims this space as their own, 'tagging', perhaps analogously to a cat marking its territory. But it's not theirs - it's ours.
This does not mean that I approve of corporate / neoliberal violations or enclosures of public space, either.
I also generally do not find graffiti attractive, though presumably that cannot be a universal rule as I suppose in theory graffiti could look like anything.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 10:16 (ten years ago) link
In general, this novel is much more indulgent toward crime (petty crime - graffiti, petty theft from shops, firing water hydrants at motorists, etc) than I would want to be. I am sorry to say that I feel that JL, like the character, has a desire to be cool and fit in with the big boys which makes him effectively endorse behaviour that is anti-social and wrong.
I say this having not nearly, on this rereading, reached the later section where it discusses prison and thus approaches crime from, presumably, another angle. I am just talking about the first part.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 10:19 (ten years ago) link
But the notion of public space as "ours" is incredibly problematic within The Fortress of Solitude anyway because it's clear that the people within the book don't see it that way - "ours" never means everyone's. And I mean both the characters we spend time with and the changing swathe of humanity in the background. I think Lethem gets gentrification better than any author I've read (except maybe Richard price) - the faultlines where "theirs" becomes "ours" and vice-versa.
― Matt DC, Sunday, 28 April 2013 10:32 (ten years ago) link
I suppose that graffiti and petty crime, maybe crime in general, is one expression of the conflicting tiers of 'ownership' within cities, from the theft of Dylan's bike onwards.
Chronic City addresses similar themes as well, less successfully.
― Matt DC, Sunday, 28 April 2013 10:43 (ten years ago) link
From my POV the theft of the bike is a heinous act by a horrible person. Such a theft is arguably less of a victimless crime than graffiti (though for the reason I've given I don't think graffiti is victimless either).
I want to reread CC, as recently going to NYC made me think again about the specificity of Manhattan, especially upper Manhattan, as part of the theme of that book.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 10:48 (ten years ago) link
The racist bullying, humiliation and intimidation of the central character, in general, upset or annoy me in the first part of TFOS.
But this should perhaps be set against the occasional, or increasing, obnoxiousness of that character, which might make all this seem 'deserved' or something (though such a trade-off doesn't really add up).
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 10:49 (ten years ago) link
Surely it's supposed to upset you? The later obnoxiousness of the character doesn't come into it at the time. It's been a while since I read this though, I seem to remember the book sagging considerably in the adulthood section, but what came before that was so great I almost didn't care at the time.
― Matt DC, Sunday, 28 April 2013 10:55 (ten years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 11:05 (ten years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 11:28 (ten years ago) link
re the crime theme, somewhat contradicting my earlier perception, I should note that the Aeroman project involves 'fighting crime'. I like this.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 13:47 (ten years ago) link
A lot of drugs are taken in this book.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 21:14 (ten years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 21:37 (ten years ago) link
I liked O-Jay-Jay-Jay, he still makes me chuckle
― Ismael Klata, Sunday, 28 April 2013 21:42 (ten years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 28 April 2013 21:52 (ten years ago) link
I reached it.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 4 May 2013 22:47 (ten years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8ZuRuZNIQo
― Blue Yodel No. 9 Dream (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 4 May 2013 22:49 (ten years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 4 May 2013 22:51 (ten years ago) link
I finally read THIS SHAPE WE'RE IN. It's very imaginative. JL on top of odd, fizzing language, one of his strengths.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 30 June 2013 15:45 (ten years ago) link
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/outborough-destiny-jonathan-lethems-dissident-gardens/
― j., Monday, 9 September 2013 16:53 (ten years ago) link
http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/79685/
― j., Monday, 9 September 2013 16:55 (ten years ago) link
this guy fell off so hard
― what's up ugly girls? (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 9 September 2013 19:22 (ten years ago) link
just reading the character names gets me riled up now
― Number None, Monday, 9 September 2013 19:34 (ten years ago) link
she's named Rose, get it? GET IT?
― what's up ugly girls? (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 9 September 2013 19:54 (ten years ago) link
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.
― #fomo that's the motto (Hurting 2), Monday, 9 September 2013 19:56 (ten years ago) link
Starts off well but not sure if I'll make it all the way
― I can't keep up, I can't keep up, I can't keep up (calstars), Thursday, 26 September 2013 12:14 (ten years ago) link
The difficulties inherent in this project of redemption are evident in the novel’s greatest human creation, Lenny Angrush.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Thursday, 26 September 2013 21:30 (ten years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 13 July 2016 13:51 (seven years ago) link
fwiw my brother who has tourette's loved the book
― Mordy, Wednesday, 13 July 2016 14:16 (seven years ago) link
forgot to read dissident gardens, anyone read it?
― socka flocka-jones (man alive), Wednesday, 13 July 2016 14:18 (seven years ago) link
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
― Mordy, Wednesday, 13 July 2016 14:19 (seven years ago) link
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 !
― the pinefox, Thursday, 14 July 2016 05:24 (seven years ago) link
JL near his best! (TFOS)
― the pinefox, Sunday, April 28, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― the pinefox, Thursday, 14 July 2016 09:39 (seven years ago) link
A book AND a film:
http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/949151-wb-acquires-jonathan-lethems-new-novel-the-feral-detective
― the pinefox, Sunday, 22 July 2018 15:38 (five years ago) link
I liked Dissident Gardens a lot
― The Desus & Mero Chain (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Sunday, 22 July 2018 16:30 (five years ago) link
I still haven't read his last two.
― Police, Academy (cryptosicko), Sunday, 22 July 2018 16:33 (five years ago) link
I think them possibly his least successful novels. But the news of a novel with 'detective' in the title gives me hope.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 22 July 2018 16:58 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 7 August 2018 12:43 (five years ago) link
I don't know why I wrote 'for the first time': it's the third time.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 7 August 2018 12:44 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 7 August 2018 21:41 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Monday, 13 August 2018 07:18 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 15 August 2018 08:05 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 16 August 2018 18:22 (five years ago) link
Does Men & Cartoons have "Vivian Relf?" A lovely, haunting short story.
― Police, Academy (cryptosicko), Friday, 17 August 2018 01:25 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Friday, 17 August 2018 09:23 (five years ago) link
'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.
― the pinefox, Friday, 17 August 2018 09:25 (five years ago) link
Access Fantasy has always stuck in my mind from that collection
― Οὖτις, Saturday, 18 August 2018 02:04 (five years ago) link
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'?
― the pinefox, Saturday, 18 August 2018 07:40 (five years ago) link
OMEGA THE UNKNOWN at last. Terrific. I think you could venture that it was JL's last great fictional work.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 18 August 2018 09:39 (five years ago) link
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/
― the pinefox, Monday, 20 August 2018 18:05 (five years ago) link
links to a page advertising a 'juicer'
Would it be asking too much for the linked item to be the infamous Juicero?
― A is for (Aimless), Monday, 20 August 2018 18:10 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 09:24 (five years ago) link
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)
― mark s, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 10:34 (five years ago) link
Quit talking and start chalking!
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 21 August 2018 13:56 (five years ago) link
Sorry, wrong thread
Not really
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 21 August 2018 14:22 (five years ago) link
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.
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 21 August 2018 14:24 (five years ago) link
Oh, with John Clute
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, 21 August 2018 14:30 (five years ago) link
So nothing after Fortress is very good, huh? I haven't read or re-read him awhile. It's too bad, because I've really been in the mood for some literary sci-fi/genre-bending.
― change display name (Jordan), Tuesday, 21 August 2018 14:36 (five years ago) link
the indie rock one is SO BAD
― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 15:19 (five years ago) link
the last one I read was A Gambler's Anatomy, which was eh. I couldn't really get over how silly the central conceit was
― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 15:20 (five years ago) link
Mark S: I would say both.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 16:26 (five years ago) link
Jordan - fwiw I think the best in that period are
CHRONIC CITYOMEGA THE UNKNOWN
and the nonfiction, much of which is compelling.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 16:27 (five years ago) link
ok but i understand the first claim (tho i'm not sure i agree with it) (certainly not in all of his books) but i don't understand the second really (tho lol i feel that possibly i do agree with it)
― mark s, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 16:35 (five years ago) link
agreed on his nonfiction being much better than his fiction post-Fortress. His time-travelling James Brown piece is excellent.
― Οὖτις, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 16:37 (five years ago) link
1st claim = TP exaggerates and makes hyperbolic statements
2nd claim would be something like: TP writes elaborately, lengthily, acrobatically?, breathlessly?, and this amounts to a kind of rhetorical hyperbole.
My first thought on both, or at least the first, was Rushdie, and then I thought SR partly derives it from TP. So even if you don't want to apply the claims to TP you could ignore TP and try applying them to SR.
The simplest point is the way that every character who is introduced is somehow special - 'Mr Tiswas, you see, dear reader, had an unparalleled, no don't interrupt, gift for figures. Numbers, yah. Mathematics, that was his game, a whiz and a genius'.
I feel JL doing something like this in DG (specifically with teen Miriam's magic knowledge of NYC) and it feels childish and irritating in the Rushdie way.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 17:33 (five years ago) link
Outis, TBH the James Brown piece is one of the few I've never managed to read, having no real appreciation of that artist.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 21 August 2018 17:34 (five years ago) link
Starting to take a different view of DISSIDENT GARDENS - as something you can actually read quite fast, unlike the inching way I would read the first half of FORTRESS - more like a beach-read page-turner of the kind people recommend. So don't worry about how it compares to GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC or whatever, just read it the way you might the new Jennifer Egan or ... David Guterson? Michael Cunningham? - it might as well not be Lethem at all, except that at moments he'll flash back into it. Maybe this way it can actually be quite diverting.
Or: it seems to me a combination of Pynchon + [The Jewish American Novel] [which probably means Philip Roth, a novelist I haven't really read]. I feel that the Jewish element is played up in a pantomime way that doesn't especially appeal to me, though I think I can just about see the black comedy in the mother's wailing (in ch2 for instance). Would people who really like Philip Roth like this novel? I don't know. I know someone who loves some Pynchon, who thinks this is bad Pynchon.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 07:34 (five years ago) link
An example.
'Miriam in her flyaway hair and long houndstooth coat, hypnotic pattern of the black-and-white squares like some devilishly blurred chessboard, but one you couldn't play on, couldn't see in its entirety at once, because it wrapped around her - Cicero should have known at that moment that Miriam was here to foster revolutions in him, to demonstrate that the chessboard, like the world, wasn't flat but round' (pp.56-7).
This starts as a comparison of the pattern on the character's coat to a chessboard (as another character likes playing chess). I think where it goes wrong is after the dash, in trying to draw personal meaning from this accidental resemblance. 'Cicero should have known' - this can't be meant literally - it can't be the case that because a character turned up wearing that coat, he should have drawn a conclusion about the nature of the world and his life. And if it doesn't work literally, then how does it work? Either the coat does signal something for the character or it doesn't.
It seems to me that in reality, we don't draw this kind of symbolic conclusion from an item of clothing someone wears. And the fact that we wouldn't do it in life makes it risky for the novelist to do it - it's his imposition on the action - without getting anything valuable in return.
I think of how an early JL story might have handled the same thing. Either the details of clothing wouldn't have been mentioned at all, or they'd be mentioned briskly, or a character's perception of them would be quickly registered (which isn't the case here - Cicero doesn't have the implausible thought about the board and the world being round), or the coat would actually have some kind of fantastic / SF power in which it eg affected the game of chess. What wouldn't happen is the sentence above, which strains for a meaning that isn't really present or credible.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 09:25 (five years ago) link
Conrad Metcalf?
'She was wearing a houndstooth coat patterned like a checkerboard. Me, I didn't play chess, but with a board that shape I might make an exception'.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 09:33 (five years ago) link
Lionel Essrog?
'As she spoke, my eyes stayed on her houndstooth coat, which was long and patterned like a checkerboard. The black and white squares had a hypnotic effect. I couldn't stop thinking about how although the coat was like a chessboard, you couldn't play chess on it.
- Unplayable Chessrog! I blurted.'
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 09:36 (five years ago) link
one you couldn't play on strikes me as entirely pointless if not wrong, or at least unimaginative re: the possibilities of chess variations.
― home, home and deranged (ledge), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 09:42 (five years ago) link
i don't think this example of it is good -- the foreshadowing is too on-the-nose and the conceptual pun is clumsily realised ("it's like a chessboard! er except round!")-- but the history of novels since the gothic era* is packed with the first description of someone (look, clothes) referencing or unleashing the role they will go on to play: there's a whole column in perry's essay on powell & proust explaining why powell is much better at this (than proust, than most)
*it's like pathetic fallacy except smaller scale and focused, plus semi-controlled and managed (like all power dressing, political or erotic or w/ev) by the actual character in question
― mark s, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 09:43 (five years ago) link
yes you could use those double-sided sticky pad we used to stick photos into albums with
rowr
― mark s, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 09:44 (five years ago) link
actually to be fair "should have known" is shading in a square of *conrad's* character not miriam's: it means "this kind of person always played havoc with him but he never remembered till it was too late"
― mark s, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 09:50 (five years ago) link
Mark you should read this novel and give a running commentary on it! :P
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 09:58 (five years ago) link
The kind of foreshadowing you describe, I don't think sounds like a good aesthetic.
If I wrote a roman a clef about ilx, with pseudonyms for each person, and it said "The first time I met former Wire editor Clark Clinker, at the FAP in the Betsey Trotwood, he was wearing a voluminous thick woollen pullover" -- then the best thing to do would be to describe richly what the pullover was like, and then more things about what Clark actually said at that moment.
Not so good: "What I didn't know then was that the pullover was typical of Clark - warm, capacious, a tangle of wool that one could pursue almost to infinity". This might be true to Clark's character, but it would be false and strained to say that Clark's pullover reflected his personality so neatly (they are two different kinds of item), and it would obviously take the attention away from the reality of the moment at the Betsey and into the realm of general homily. The reality of the encounter would be quite lost amid the straining for symbolism - something I am broadly opposed to.
And JL's symbolic moment above actually strikes me as, unbelievably, more strained and less convincing than the one I have just concocted.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 10:05 (five years ago) link
ok fair -- but this kind of symbolism, the physical world rhyming with the internal with larger implications, is as old* as the first time the villain turned up in a clap of thunder and a scary hat
(plus for some -- characters as well as authors -- "the universe has a pattern", "our future is in the stars", "as above so below", "as it started so it ends" and so on, are integral to their sense of reality and hence their realism: if a bunch of ppl in yr roman a clef thought along these lines there would be case, managed comedy-fashion or satirically perhaps, for you to make such a move)
*older obviously
― mark s, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 10:45 (five years ago) link
'Miriam in her flyaway hair and long houndstooth coat, hypnotic pattern of the black-and-white squares like some devilishly blurred chessboard, but one you couldn't play on, couldn't see in its entirety at once, because it wrapped around her - Cicero should have known at that moment that Miriam was here to foster revolutions in him, to demonstrate that the chessboard, like the world, wasn't flat but round'
- also another example of what I meant by 'hyperbole' above. When you meet someone, they might come to have effects on you, that might turn out to be important. But 'here to foster revolutions' in you is too high a bar - especially if you maintain this kind of tone throughout a novel.
I think that if you think of more dogged, quiet writers of realist fiction, they wouldn't raise the stakes this way so early. As Mark S says above: even Powell, recently brought to our attention so much -- PA shows that he often describes people's first impressions, but would he say: 'Miriam was here to foster revolutions in him'? It would surely be out of keeping with the more cautious and exact register of most of what PA quotes.
'I should have known, the first time that Clark Clinker's pullover brushed mine at the bar of the Betsey, that music would never sound the same to me again'.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 11:08 (five years ago) link
well you should
― mark s, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 11:10 (five years ago) link
tho actually the aesthetic yr resisting is the very essence of the influenza-permeated :D
― mark s, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 11:11 (five years ago) link
and there's a politics to its embrace and its resistance, tho it's not at all a simple politics
― mark s, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 11:16 (five years ago) link
Tell me more about this Clark Clinker.
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 14:26 (five years ago) link
he's a scoundrel, shun him
― mark s, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 14:32 (five years ago) link
Actually the thing I read most recently with a strong chess metaphor was Barrington Bayley writing in a Coleridgean haze, so this “Like a chessboard, but NOT!” business jars like a Person from Porlock.
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 14:35 (five years ago) link
no one here seems to be defending it in particular
(i am defending the approach in general: as PF is intimating, "it's a pynchon thing, therefore quite bad", and as i wd then smartly rejoin, "bad or good, there's a reason he's using it to fashion the world he's fashioning, which reflects both his politics and how many of his characters see this world") (however i have read very little lethem so can't make this argument -- he gave a good keystone at EMP in seattle in 2007, so i am on the whole pro him, just not so pro i've ever picked up one of his books)
― mark s, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 14:39 (five years ago) link
Right, I just wanted to join the chorus.
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 14:43 (five years ago) link
Love me some chessy SF eg:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Jth2-O8jL._SX295_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 14:47 (five years ago) link
Wanting more of these teh pinefox prose pastiches involving REEL ilx0rs. Tempted to try myself but not sure I have the training or talent for it.
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 18:07 (five years ago) link
“Tom Dedlock was literally swept off his feat as he tiptoed into Frank Zappa’s JOE’S GARAGE.”
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 18:08 (five years ago) link
“The soul-patched pretensions of the self-styled maestro and guitar messiah did not sit well with the saturnine Scotsman, to whom a more parsimonious misanthropy came naturally.”
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 18:21 (five years ago) link
Ward: you couldn't play chess on that board! It's too big !!
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 18:25 (five years ago) link
Is it on some sort of pseudosphere?
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 18:27 (five years ago) link
I think Pynchon himself is a bit of a red herring here, as he hasn't been quoted, just mentioned as a comparison (along with Rushdie). The bad prose is JL's responsibility, though I definitely think it's true that this novel moves in a Pynchonian prose direction.
I didn't know that when Mark S said 'politics' he meant TP's - I hoped he might mean something broader, like Jeremy Corbyn or Aaron Bastani promoting community organization. I hope he will make it to the FAP to tell me more about that. I hope Mark will too.
James Redd: actually I was prouder of the two Lethem pastiches I knocked off a few posts up, which are presumably meaningless to all who haven't read those novels.
There was an ilx thread maybe about 16 years ago where we wrote pastiches of each other - it was very good at times and DR C was the extraordinary maestro. I was disappointed that all the (few) pastiches of me were brief and nondescript.
Your own two pastiches leave me slightly in the dark and I hope to hear more about them.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 18:32 (five years ago) link
Mine were two parts of one thing. Don’t feel up to explaining them right now. I remember hearing about and finally finding that Dr. C thread when I participated on a similar thread a few years later. I believe I attempted to imitate you there, can’t remember if I succeeded.
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 18:44 (five years ago) link
Ah yes, here it is: this is the thread where you impersonate other ilxors
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, 22 August 2018 18:45 (five years ago) link
Some of what I see on that thread I don't get or recognize, but what really does impress me is - MATT DC writing good impressions of a number of people I do recognize. Good work in 2005 DC !
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 22 August 2018 19:10 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 23 August 2018 10:32 (five years ago) link
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)
― mark s, Thursday, 23 August 2018 10:48 (five years ago) link
I think you are calling a 'belief system' what I would call a 'metaphor'.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 23 August 2018 17:07 (five years ago) link
I agree about the problem with 'revolutions', which is also an instance of what I keep calling hyperbole.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 23 August 2018 17:08 (five years ago) link
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.
― The Vermilion Sand Reckoner (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 23 August 2018 18:47 (five years ago) link
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.
― change display name (Jordan), Wednesday, 29 August 2018 20:49 (five years ago) link
Karen Tidbeck
― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 29 August 2018 20:55 (five years ago) link
altho for more in-depth discussion I recommend that rolling spec fic thread
Thanks!
― change display name (Jordan), Wednesday, 29 August 2018 20:57 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Friday, 7 September 2018 14:29 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Friday, 7 September 2018 14:46 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 8 September 2018 17:54 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 8 September 2018 17:56 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 8 September 2018 17:57 (five years ago) link
perk s
― mark s, Saturday, 8 September 2018 20:44 (five years ago) link
It all adds up !!
― the pinefox, Sunday, 9 September 2018 07:08 (five years ago) link
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
― mark s, Sunday, 9 September 2018 10:06 (five years ago) link
All I can think of is Neil saying to Rik 'so most metaphors don't bear close examination.'
― The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums (Chinaski), Sunday, 9 September 2018 10:26 (five years ago) link
i feel that the academic study of eng lit as it has on the whole emerged is not of neil's mind here
― mark s, Sunday, 9 September 2018 10:28 (five years ago) link
also the young ones was written by ben elton, a man insanely over-committed to the comedy simile
― mark s, Sunday, 9 September 2018 10:31 (five years ago) link
Haha. Yes. The reductio ad absurdum of the left.
― The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums (Chinaski), Sunday, 9 September 2018 10:33 (five years ago) link
James Wood on Melville and metaphor: "Metaphors have a life of their own...Melville had a way of followingmetaphor, 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.
― the pinefox, Monday, 10 September 2018 15:16 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Monday, 10 September 2018 15:23 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Monday, 10 September 2018 22:16 (five years ago) link
Call it sad, call it funnyBut it's better than even moneyThat the guy's only doing it for some doll
Call it hell, call it heavenBut it's probable twelve to sevenThat the guy's only doing it for some doll
Call it dumb, call it cleverAh, but you can get odds foreverThat 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 pinefox, Monday, 10 September 2018 22:17 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 11 September 2018 19:13 (five years ago) link
wait you haven't read my book
― mark s, Tuesday, 11 September 2018 21:24 (five years ago) link
I have heard a lot about it ! :D
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 11 September 2018 22:45 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 12 September 2018 10:00 (five years ago) link
he's good, he's the minister of the new new super heavy funk
― mark s, Wednesday, 12 September 2018 10:05 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 12 September 2018 10:57 (five years ago) link
all here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/01/popandrock.music
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 12 September 2018 10:58 (five years ago) link
(actually that version is a bit confusingly different from the one in the book)
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 12 September 2018 11:00 (five years ago) link
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)
― mark s, Wednesday, 12 September 2018 11:06 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 18 September 2018 09:41 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 18 September 2018 09:43 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 18 September 2018 09:46 (five years ago) link
Idiot Tooth.
http://hilobrow.com/2013/12/20/regression-toward-the-zine-18/
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 25 September 2018 07:41 (five years ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 29 August 2019 07:33 (four years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bx7umZ8aRI
6-minute film of Lethem on Lem, adapted from recent LRB article.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 4 May 2022 09:21 (one year ago) link
This reminds me, should I read The Arrest?
― Les hommes de bonbons (cryptosicko), Wednesday, 4 May 2022 14:31 (one year ago) link
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.
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 4 May 2022 15:03 (one year ago) link
Love that. I've been reading Lem Two for the last few months.
xp
― change display name (Jordan), Wednesday, 4 May 2022 15:04 (one year ago) link
I've read Motherless Brooklyn (striking!) and You Don't Love Me Yet (can't remember). I think Brooklyn makes more lasting impressions.
― youn, Wednesday, 4 May 2022 18:56 (one year ago) link
(but that may be the anonymity of globalized poverty safe culture)
― youn, Wednesday, 4 May 2022 18:58 (one year ago) link
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.
― youn, Wednesday, 4 May 2022 19:02 (one year ago) link
notes found in a bathtub is a pretty good lem, super paranoid spy farce
― Bongo Jongus, Wednesday, 4 May 2022 19:18 (one year ago) link
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
― mookieproof, Wednesday, 4 May 2022 19:33 (one year ago) link
Recent Lethem article in New Yorker.
*The Invention of a Neighborhood*
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/boerum-hill-brooklyn-gentrification-jonathan-lethem
**
In 1977, a staff writer for The New Yorker named Jervis Anderson journeyed to Dean Street in Brooklyn, to the neighborhood now known as Boerum Hill, to interview the people who lived there. His article in the November 14th issue, titled “The Making of Boerum Hill,” portrayed the place as a microcosm of “one of the remarkable urban developments in recent times—the brownstone-renovation movement.” What drew Anderson to Boerum Hill isn’t certain. It’s possible he’d lived there when he first moved to the city from Jamaica, in 1958, to study at N.Y.U. In an autobiographical essay from 1966, he wrote, “In those early days, New York was to me Washington Square, the A train, and Brooklyn.”
What seems to have fascinated Anderson about Boerum Hill was the tenuousness of the neighborhood’s creation. “The name had been coined so recently, and by such a small number of the residents, that people who had been living in the area all their lives had never heard of Boerum Hill and hadn’t the slightest idea where it was,” Anderson writes. Initially, he explains, the campaign to establish the neighborhood, undertaken in order to protect dilapidated row houses from being condemned and demolished, “faltered in the face of a firm conviction that Boerum Hill existed only in the heads of the people who had thought it up.”
Boerum Hill was thought up in my lifetime, by people I knew. Anderson’s account of them is prescient. It reveals a white middle-class population not only dislodging a poor and diverse one but defining them out of the picture. Yet few seemed aware that they were doing anything wrong.
The blocks that became Boerum Hill were ringed, mostly, by older and more clearly defined precincts, like the traditionally posh Brooklyn Heights, the Italian-immigrant enclave Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope and Fort Greene, shaped by long-standing Irish and Black homeownership, respectively. None of these places were simple. Their fortunes rose and fell with changes typical of urban life in the postwar twentieth century—white flight, and redlining by banks that preferred “urban renewal” projects and deals with developers to the renovation of old buildings. But those had been recognized neighborhoods to begin with.
The new Boerum Hill was something less, or more. Scooped out of what was loosely known as North Gowanus, it was bounded on the north by downtown Brooklyn, a district of commerce and civic institutions, and on the south by two large housing projects, built in 1949 and 1966, and by the famously polluted industrial Gowanus Canal. In the early nineteen-sixties, when the brownstoners Anderson interviewed first moved there, the blocks of Dean Street, Pacific Street, and Bergen Street, now known for the beauty of their restoration—or for their scandalous multimillion-dollar listings—were at risk of wholesale demolition. Some buildings were vacant and crumbling; others were rooming houses filled with men, many of them retired dockworkers, or they were home to Black or Puerto Rican or Dominican families. A community of Native Americans from Canada and upstate New York, Mohawks who’d come to build skyscrapers, had also lived in the area, and their traces were still in evidence.
The zone was more a crossroads than a neighborhood. In a process now familiar, it was transformed, not by real-estate speculation—at the start, bankers and developers wanted no part of these buildings—but by the arrival of white artists and idealistic leftists who valorized integration.
Igrew up on Dean Street. Some of Jervis Anderson’s subjects were parents of the children I ran with on the block; he might have passed us on his way up the stoop of a brownstone. The New Yorker was a common token among the aspirant middle class in the neighborhood. I learned to leaf through it backward, for the cartoons and for Pauline Kael. Yet I missed Anderson’s piece—perhaps that issue wasn’t one that was left out on the coffee table. When I discovered it, four years ago, I felt not only that I’d tunnelled through time to 1977 but that it offered something I’d long been denied. I’d spent years trying to conjugate the divisions I detected, as a child, among the white adults in my neighborhood. They’d chosen sides, at some point, over minute differences in attitude concerning their presence in Boerum Hill, and then covered the disagreement in silence. Here they were, talking.
I’d stumbled across a companion I hadn’t known to wish for—yet an elusive one. Anderson’s presence is sublimated, as was typical of the style of The New Yorker under William Shawn’s editorship, and typical, too, of Anderson’s own style: self-effacing, to an unusual degree.
There had been Black staffers at The New Yorker before Anderson. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who with her classmate Hamilton Holmes broke the color line at the University of Georgia, did the same for the magazine’s writing staff when she was elevated from assistant to staff writer, in 1964. Dorothy Dean, whose fabulous, tragic life is portrayed in Hilton Als’s book “The Women,” worked in the fact-checking department in the same period. Yet Anderson, from the time of his hiring, in 1968, until the arrival of Jamaica Kincaid, in 1976, was the lone Black staff writer at the magazine. He wrote pieces on Alex Haley and Ralph Ellison, and a four-part series about Harlem, later collected as “This Was Harlem,” by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Anderson also wrote biographies of the civil-rights leader A. Philip Randolph and of Randolph’s extroverted lieutenant Bayard Rustin, an early mentor of Anderson’s.
Unlike Rustin, and unlike his hero James Baldwin, Anderson was soft-spoken. Few staffers who recalled him to me failed to mention his reserve. “He was a solitary guy,” Ian Frazier said. Of their conversations in the hall, Frazier told me, “Mostly these were about Shawn not running our pieces.” Jamaica Kincaid, who worked alongside Frazier—known as Sandy—as a writer for the Talk of the Town, shared a story about how Anderson had once given her a kiss as he passed her in the hallway. “I immediately ran to Sandy’s office,” she said. “I told him what had just happened and we laughed ourselves silly because Jervis was so mild-mannered, not seemingly vulnerable to such passionate outbursts. The kiss was most welcomed by me because he was attractive and brilliant.” Anderson was a democratic socialist, according to the staff writer Hendrik Hertzberg. The two men bonded in the magazine’s offices over politics, and Hertzberg suggested to me that Anderson’s deeper commitments may have been outside The New Yorker: “The Irving Howe crowd, the whole Dissent masthead, those were Jervis’s real friends.”
Nowadays, the term “gentrification” has become as familiar, and as blandly elastic, as “Kafkaesque” or “fascism.” The word doesn’t appear in Anderson’s article. (It doesn’t seem to have appeared in The New Yorker until November, 1982, in a piece about shopping uptown: those who consider Columbus Avenue a “style ghetto,” readers are told, will be pleased to find that “gentrification has brought a host of often admirable and attractive new boutiques.”) The word already existed, though, coined in 1964 by the German-born British sociologist Ruth Glass.
As it happens, the term “Boerum Hill” was coined that same year. At the time, it named an audacious promise, or a bluff. The name was created by an author of nonfiction named Helen Buckler, who had moved to Dean Street in 1962. It was popularized by, among others, another author, a novelist and journalist named L. J. Davis. Anderson interviewed them both. In both cases, I knew their houses from the inside.
Like “Boerum Hill” and “gentrification,” I was born in 1964. In that year, my parents lived in an illegal loft on West Broadway, where my father had a painting studio. We came to Dean Street in 1968.
My father was led there by a fellow-painter, Patricia Stegman. She and her husband, Robert Snyder, had purchased a building on the same block as Helen Buckler, and a second on Pacific Street, to serve as her studio. Bob and Pat Snyder, as they were known locally, were, according to Anderson, “the first middle-class home buyers to follow Miss Buckler.” The Snyders showed my parents a house, and, when my parents borrowed a down payment of three thousand dollars from my grandmother in Queens, Bob Snyder acted as the broker.
Snyder had taken up a real-estate license not out of any desire for a career but in the cause of keeping crumbling houses from being demolished; Realtors had turned their backs on these buildings. Hundred-year-old marble mantelpieces weren’t then a consensus taste. Among people who could afford to choose, many preferred modern buildings, often in the suburbs. It was Buckler who had suggested to the couple that they begin showing the houses. As the conjurer of the neighborhood’s existence, Buckler was the Wizard of Oz. The Snyders were Dorothy and her companions—the Wizard’s emissaries.
The house I grew up in was across from the Snyders, and five doors down from Helen Buckler. With the exception of a handful of children on the block—my friends Karl Rusnak and Lynn and Aaron Nottage, and the Snyders’ son, Adam—these adults were the first people I knew outside my home. One Saturday morning when I was ten, old enough to walk alone as far as the post office on Atlantic Avenue, I was sent to Helen Buckler’s parlor to take up my first employment, as her gofer. In that capacity, I walked Miss Buckler’s many handwritten letters to the post office, emptied her garbage cans, and changed her cat’s litter. She must have been eighty by then.
Before Brooklyn, Buckler had lived in Manhattan, and worked as a secretary and editorial writer at The Nation, and as an advertising copywriter at J. Walter Thompson. In her parlor, I’d sneak looks at the papers on her roll-top writing desk, trying to understand a world of Wasp provenance and taste that was to me utterly mysterious. As a child, I collected postcards. She gave me a set of old deckle-edged black-and-white postcards of a riverside hamlet in Hampshire, England, called Buckler’s Hard, to which, I understood, she traced her family origins. She seemed vaguely famous to me, as a revered elder of the Brooklyn Friends Meeting; Quaker families from all over Brooklyn took turns, Sunday mornings, driving her to the Meeting House on Schermerhorn Street.
Buckler, known to her friends and correspondents as Bobbie, was tiny, opinionated, and odd. She was nearly blind. In the sixties, she’d suffered both a hip infection and a bad fall, which was recounted to me by my mother: slipping in her bathroom, Helen had grabbed at a towel rack, which had snapped in two and pierced her ribs as she fell. The result, after a long recovery, was a spinal deformation that required her to walk with a cane; I’m ashamed of the horror this inspired in me. I didn’t want to keep visiting Miss Buckler’s well-appointed parlor, let alone the dank basement level, where the cat box was kept. I wanted to be out on the street, running amok.
“Miss Buckler’s friends were shocked to hear that she had bought a house in North Gowanus,” Jervis Anderson wrote. “To them, living in such an area was unthinkable. Nor was her confidence strengthened when some of the older residents told her that except for the rooming-house speculators she was the first ‘outside person’ in years to buy a house in the community. She herself could not help noticing how shabby the area was, that there were ‘gaps in some of the blocks, like teeth missing in a face,’ that ‘there were a lot of noisy people’ on the streets, who ‘were always fighting.’ But she reminded herself that those conditions could be found in many other sections of New York.” Anderson focusses on Buckler’s zeal for architectural detail—above all, for fireplaces. “I was lucky to find all the original etched-glass doors intact,” she told him. “I found the round over-mantle mirror gathering dust in the cellar.” She went on, “Since fireplaces are my passion, the chimney was the first thing I did. And now I have four good working fireplaces.”
Buckler set about the formation of a neighborhood association. “She called a meeting in her parlor,” Anderson wrote, “attended by seven or eight representatives of the old home-owning families.” In Buckler’s search, aided by the Long Island Historical Society, for an appropriate name, she almost settled on Sycamore Hill, but was perhaps unsatisfied by something so vague. “Looking over the names of the old farmers,” Anderson continued, “Miss Buckler found herself drawn to the name Boerum, which was already the name of a street in the neighborhood. The most famous member of that family was Simon Boerum, who, historians say, would have been one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence if he had not died in 1775.”
Anderson’s appetite for historical research suffuses his article. This likely helped him gain the trust of the brownstoners, whose eagerness for tracing lineages, between their restoration of the houses and the early history of the area, bordered on the fanatic. In 1964, it was unlikely that Helen Buckler or her enablers at the Historical Society would have troubled to notice that Boerum was the name of a slaveholding family. In 1977, Anderson quotes Franklin Burdge, Simon Boerum’s biographer: “Brooklyn at that time was a pleasant agricultural town of about 700 white and 200 black inhabitants, the latter almost all slaves.” Characteristically, Anderson leaves the implication for his reader to unpack.
Anderson reports that an early response to Buckler’s effort was a story in the Brooklyn section of the World-Telegram & Sun on March 26, 1964, titled “Rescue Operation on ‘Boerum Hill.’ ” As the newspaper explains, Buckler, “who likes old brownstones with a fireplace in every room, is spearheading a campaign to win public acceptance of a new name, ‘Boerum Hill’ for a run-down section of downtown Brooklyn.”
The World-Telegram & Sun story includes a map. It represents the propositional neighborhood as a solid black rectangle plopped into Brooklyn’s established terrain, with boundaries that would startle anyone who knows the current definition of Boerum Hill. Buckler, in carving out an island of safety from the objectionable terrain on either side, laid claim to only six city blocks: the boundaries ran along Bergen and Pacific Streets, and between Smith and Nevins. Atlantic Avenue, with its mess of storefronts—then mostly empty—was too enmeshed, perhaps, in the difficulties of “downtown Brooklyn.” These confines required the sacrifice of State Street, north of Atlantic, despite its several blocks of splendid, rescue-ready brownstones.
Even stranger, in avoidance of Wyckoff Gardens, the housing projects facing Wyckoff Street, not all of Bergen Street had been included in Boerum Hill’s first perimeter. Were this map to have been taken literally, the owners on Bergen’s south face, looking across the street, would have been met with a new neighborhood that had left them behind. The same weirdness would have pertained on Pacific Street. Buckler’s earliest draft of Boerum Hill was, essentially, a box around three blocks of Dean Street.
A “block association” defines a material fact. If you live on the block, you may choose to ignore its activities, yet you still live there. A “neighborhood association” describes an assertion in free space—civic space, historical space, racial space. The Boerum Hill Association believed that the houses on certain blocks held a meaning and a value that had become endangered by neglect—neglect by city and bank officials, but also by many of the people who occupied them.
Two years later, when the new name found its way into the Times, an updated map expanded the boundaries. Now Boerum Hill touched Schermerhorn Street to the north and Wyckoff to the south. In the 1966 story—“Brooklyn Renewal Is an Uphill Fight”—the bankers refusing to grant mortgages are given a chance to defend themselves. One, Frederick L. Kriete, an assistant vice-president of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, called Boerum Hill an “odd case.” He puzzled over the brownstoners. “Generally, they’re cultivated, artistic people, with an appreciation for antiques and art—they’re a class all to themselves. I admire and appreciate their taste, but you wonder if the bank should get involved.”
Half a century later, the word “renewal” is widely understood as a euphemism for an intrinsically racist program of neighborhood demolition, favorable only to the financiers of freeways, shopping malls, and stadiums. The Times article quotes Bob Snyder, who recounts his difficulties with the banks. “They said we needed a sunken bathtub to get a loan,” Snyder said, “but we have a really wild Victorian bathtub.”
He added, “These are pretexts—they’re shielding the real reason, which is that the area is integrated.”
In 1967, a pamphlet appeared, limited to two hundred and forty copies, bearing the title “A History of Boerum Hill.” In seven pages of deliberately antique-looking Goudy Mediaeval font, it retails a saga beginning with the clearing of land north of Gowanus Cove by the Marechkawieck people, and “a minor land rush into the area” by Dutch tradesmen and farmers, including “Jacob Stoffelsen, the Dutch West India Company’s overseer of Negros.” Starting with colonial lore, the pamphlet centers Boerum Hill in the settling and development of Brooklyn, as if the name had always existed. It makes hasty work of the immediate past: “Although the neighborhood became steadily poorer in the years between the Second World War and 1962, in a strange way it was an architectural blessing.” It explains, “Boerum Hill was spared because of its poverty: simply, nobody could afford to ruin the fronts of their buildings. Following years of careful preservation, economic deterioration had the paradoxical effect of presenting to us, in the purest possible form, a perfectly preserved, mid-nineteenth-century neighborhood—a bit nibbled on the edges perhaps.”
L. J. Davis, the pamphlet’s author, bought a brownstone on Dean Street in 1965. A native of Idaho, Davis moved his young family to Brooklyn after completing a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, in a cohort that included the novelist Stephen Dixon and the poet Robert Pinsky. Davis wrote four novels—published between 1968 and 1974—comedies portraying confused young men drowning in the squalor and diversity of the city. He is as much a master of what is now called “cringe” as Larry David or Nathan Fielder. “Like a comic actor with the crucial willingness to make himself look ridiculous, Davis sacrifices our good opinion for the sake of the art,” Evan Hughes, the author of “Literary Brooklyn,” writes. “He makes you think hard about whether this L. J. Davis guy is a bigot, and that means thinking hard about what bigotry is.”
Of these novels, “A Meaningful Life” is the fiercest. (I wrote the introduction for a 2009 reissue by New York Review Books Classics.) Hughes describes it as “the most lacerating portrait of the folly and shame that gentrification brings with it everywhere it goes.” Davis’s subject is the brownstoners: “They are the most house-proud people you could ever hope to meet. To start with, most of them were doing their own renovation, so they became obsessed.”
Davis wrote from within what he ironized. A house-proud renovator himself, and a working journalist, Davis was not only Boerum Hill’s needling existentialist but its early popularizer, one with a stake in the outcome, since he’d sunk his family’s future—its financial and emotional well-being—into the precarious situation. When, in 1969, New York magazine’s cover trumpeted “Brooklyn: The Sane Alternative,” Pete Hamill’s title essay made an overture to the borough’s revival; in the same issue, in a piece on brownstones, Davis advertised Boerum Hill houses to space-hungry Manhattanites—still available but going fast.
Davis bragged to Anderson about how he’d researched the first occupant of his house: “His name was Malachi Murray, and he was a stonemason. Murray lost the house in the financial crash of 1873.” Davis’s knack for history must have gratified the other brownstoners, whose zeal for marble mantelpieces and gas-fitted street lamps needed justification. The neighborhood’s entrancing past cried out from under the layers of lead paint; the effort of individuals to beautify their homes gained an ethical dimension when viewed as a collective mission of curation. The word “Victorian” was everywhere, knitting the area’s white future to its white past. The populations that had defined the postwar decades could be seen as a kind of placeholder, until the eleventh-hour rescue. Brownstoners even posed in their houses dressed in Victorian costumes, such as Park Slope’s Joy and Paul Wilkes, on the cover of their 1973 book, “You Don’t Have to Be Rich to Own a Brownstone.” Davis’s limited-edition 1967 pamphlet was reprinted in 1973 by Renaissance Properties—other brokers had by then stepped in, relieving Bob Snyder’s burden as a vigilante real-estate agent. If Helen Buckler was the first “author” of Boerum Hill, L. J. Davis was the second.
The scene had other novelist witnesses. Paula Fox moved to Dean Street in the late sixties, and got to know Davis. In an admiring 2009 review in The New York Review of Books, she compared him to Céline. Fox’s second novel, “Desperate Characters,” depicts their shared block in terms similar to Davis’s, as crime-ridden and garbage-strewn. When her book was filmed, partly in a brownstone on Pacific Street, in 1970, with Shirley MacLaine in the lead, Davis played a policeman investigating a break-in. The novel is celebrated, justly, for allegorizing urban fear as an existential condition: the risk of a break-in stands for an inchoate crisis in the life of a married couple who coexist in parallel silence. Yet readers on Dean Street at the time would have understood the risk literally. It was a commonplace, then, that every house would suffer regular break-ins until the ironwork defending the parlor windows and the basement entrance had been sufficiently strengthened, and the inviting fire escapes had been stripped away. And much early brownstoner energy was expended trying to rouse policemen to the task of pushing open-air prostitution and drug dealing beyond Helen Buckler’s boundary.
Rosellen Brown wasn’t a renovator, only a renter. She left Dean Street after three years, for New Hampshire, but her 1974 story collection, “Street Games,” depicts a cross-section of her block’s white, Hispanic, and Black inhabitants with precision and sympathy. In “Why I Quit the Gowanus Liberation Front,” Brown anatomizes the improbable blend of self-absolving idealisms that make the brownstoners, from this distance, so slippery to define. The scene is a neighborhood meeting, held in what Brown confirmed to me was a fictionalization of L. J. Davis’s parlor. “So I went to this meeting,” Brown writes. “It was in the house of a writer, a cat who gets his kicks out of having six working fireplaces.” She continues, “We had decided to have a multiethnic Street Fair complete with police barricades at both ends of the block to close it off even to the rest of George Street, thus indicating true inner-block solidarity (as opposed to intra-block, which comes later). We would find a cause to use the money for at our second meeting, when we could fight about how many people could relate to flower boxes, how many to gas lamps.”
L. J. Davis’s elder son, Jeremy, was one of my best friends during my high-school years. I spent many days and nights in their home. Their family included L.J.’s wife, a younger son, and two adopted daughters, who were Black.
I was fascinated with L.J., for his working writer’s office, for his collection of books and LPs so different from that of my parents, for his weird anecdotes and clench-jawed speaking style, full of invisible punctuation marks and eyebrow-arched pauses to allow implications to sink in. L.J. would, if we pleaded, cook us eggs Benedict, a dish I’d never heard of before. He took me to a matinée of “Sweeney Todd,” with Len Cariou—the first time I’d entered a Broadway auditorium. The only theatre I’d seen at that point had been enacted by giant puppets at antiwar protests.
By the time I was a visitor to L.J.’s home, the brownstoners had split into enemy camps. One was made up of the hippies and commune dwellers (my parents were both) who opposed what was then called displacement and vilified speculators. Despite that special irony which torments the community-minded who move into poor neighborhoods—our presence made the area whiter, and therefore, from the city’s point of view, more worthy of investment and policing—my parents’ camp regarded those, including L.J., who acquired buildings in addition to their own homes as culpable.
In the opposing camp were the brownstoners who opened their parlors to one another in yearly house tours. Proud of what they’d accomplished, they regarded the decrease in street crime and the increase in trees and property values as obvious goods, and the hippies as political dreamers. I suspect that my mother, an outspoken radical, came into direct conflict with L.J. She died before I befriended him.
It’s worth noting that local preservationists, in the sixties and early seventies, fought and won underdog battles against the forces of predatory urban renewal. Their defense of the houses equated, in the beginning, to protection for anyone living in the area, white or otherwise. “Boerum Hill Building Gets Temporary Lease on Life,” reads a headline in the April 20, 1967, edition of the Times: “A group of young property owners pushing baby carriages and carrying signs succeeded yesterday in temporarily preventing the city from razing a town house.” The story centers on the Snyders: “ ‘He’s a veteran picket. He helped save 434 State Street,’ said Mrs. Robert T. Snyder, pointing to her 13-month-old son Adam.” It goes on, “The structure, between Hoyt and Smith Streets, in a historic but deteriorated section of the borough, was to be torn down by helmeted wreckers sent by the Department of Real Estate. The building has been empty for two years and the Department of Buildings said it was a fire hazard and a gathering place for undesirables.”
A year earlier, the Times had written, “In a sense the battle of Boerum Hill epitomizes in miniature the nationwide tug-of-war between two principal schools of urban-renewal thought. Ranged on one side are those like the Brooklyn bankers, who envision renewal in the broad terms of clearance and complete rebuilding, even if it means sacrificing some sound old buildings. And on the other side are those, like Jane Jacobs, the author and caustic critic of many city planners, who see vitality even in slums.”
Jacobs, the author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” is a name usually linked with that of her nemesis, New York City’s unelected, power-mad city planner Robert Moses. Though by this time he’d been impugned as a bully, and his power had waned, the Moses-inspired Cross-Brooklyn Expressway attracted passionate opposition by Brooklyn civic groups as late as 1969. The David and Goliath struggle felt immediate, not theoretical.
The moral calculus lent righteousness to the brownstoners’ preservationist stance. Yet a tone had crept in, that of an élitist cult. The brownstoners seemed oblivious to the intimations lurking in materials such as an announcement in the “Community Forum” column of The Phoenix, Boerum Hill’s new local paper, advertising an insurance company’s offering. “The Brownstone Package Policy was not designed to offer coverage to everybody with a bit of cracked brown sandstone on any old city house,” the policy’s originator explained. “We’re not really insuring houses, we’re insuring homeowners of brownstones. . . . We will not consider slumlords or other ‘high-risk’ people.”
I’ve tried to picture Jervis Anderson sitting patiently in the brownstoners’ parlors, recording their declarations. “This thing about renovating an old house sounds very esoteric,” Patricia Snyder told him. “But it often goes together with a commitment to living in an area that is mixed in every way.” She continued, “We have much more diversity than Cobble Hill or Brooklyn Heights. Everybody shouldn’t be the same.” L. J. Davis struck a similar note: “I myself don’t need to live around people who all look like me. If I wanted to do that, I would not have come to New York City. I would have stayed in Boise, Idaho, where everybody looks just like me.”
It had seemed unlikely at first, in the teeth of the banks’ opposition and the indifference of the city officials: the brownstoners’ triumph. Yet here it was. In bringing the cultural gravitas of The New Yorker into the scene, Anderson had become a third “author” of Boerum Hill—the one who could ratify both Helen Buckler’s dream and L. J. Davis’s historical sleuthing. His article ends with the words “Boerum Hill is not a rumor anymore. It exists.” Declaring the brownstoners’ victory, Anderson also highlighted the contradictions that gnawed at the liberal renovators’ good intentions. His article predicts the heel turn the renovators were at that moment taking, from underdogs to overdogs, from “defenders” to “displacers.”
I visited William Harris, the founder of Renaissance Properties, who moved to the neighborhood in 1970, and asked him to describe the impact of Anderson’s reporting at the time. “The article was supposed to be a two-part piece, you know,” Harris told me. “And they said he stretched it out so that he could have all the free dinners that came along with the reporting.”
I was disconcerted by the tartness of the gossip. A newcomer by the standards of Buckler or Davis, Harris made up for lost time by opening Renaissance Properties in 1973 and, with a partner, snapping up eleven buildings on Atlantic Avenue in one swoop, for three thousand dollars apiece. When I mentioned the homes lived in by children I’d known growing up, or the once vacant storefront now housing Rucola, a fashionable restaurant, Harris routinely interjected, “I brokered that house.”
Buckler died in 1988, Davis in 2011. Harris remains a keeper of the flame. In his eighties, he still displays a fervor for the zone’s deep provenances. Thrilled by the recent rediscovery of a Revolutionary-era stone-lined well beneath the pavement near his house—possibly a remnant of the Continental Army’s Fort Box, captured by Redcoats during the Battle of Brooklyn—Harris helped contrive a plaque commemorating the well on the exterior wall of a dry cleaner.
As to Anderson’s article, Harris shrugged. “I wasn’t a subscriber,” he said. “I didn’t draw a tremendous amount from it.” He was struck, however, by how little attention Anderson gave to the Kahnawake and Akwesasne tribal people still living in the neighborhood then: “The Indians were here all over the place, and they’re only mentioned fleetingly, in about a line and a half.” The union hall frequented by Mohawk ironworkers was above the post office where I took Helen Buckler’s letters. At one point, their numbers were large enough that a Presbyterian church on Pacific Street gave services in their language. Hank’s Saloon, a late, lamented hipster bar, was during my childhood a Mohawk dive called the Doray Tavern.
Yet the emphasis on the Native Americans seems a substitution. The neighborhood’s Mohawk residents, made famous in a 1949 New Yorker piece by Joseph Mitchell, were scant by the late seventies. I recall widows in basement apartments. The local families whose children filled the public schools I attended, and the kids I played with on the street, weren’t Native American—they were Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Black. The urgency in the commemoration of various histories—architectural Victorianism, nineteenth-century middle-class urbanites, Washington’s soldiers, Mohawk ironworkers—corresponds precisely to the need to leave others unmentioned.
Mary Jane Melish, another Dean Street neighbor, was once a famous Communist. She and her husband, the Reverend William Howard Melish, were prominent in the American Party’s outreach to the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-fifties, a McCarthyist purge cost Melish his post at Brooklyn Heights’ Church of the Holy Trinity (now known as St. Ann & the Holy Trinity). In 1963, the Reverend Melish travelled to Ghana to deliver the memorial address at W. E. B. Du Bois’s funeral; several years earlier, when the American Friends Service Committee arranged for a teen-age Angela Davis to move from Birmingham, Alabama, to New York City to attend high school, she was placed in the Melishes’ home. “From the first moment I had heard about them, and the sacrifices they had made for the progressive movement, I had a great respect for both of them,” Davis writes in her autobiography. “Their suffering had simply made them stronger and more determined.”
Mary Jane Melish directed a youth center on the corner of Atlantic and Bond, part of the nineteenth-century settlement-house system that still survives across the five boroughs. Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins stopped by, while working on “West Side Story,” to meet the street gangs that coexisted inside. I spent a lot of time at the center myself, since my father taught a woodworking class there. I barely recall Howard Melish, but the cherubic, bright-eyed Mary Jane was a regular presence in my mother’s circle, revered by our leftist friends for reasons I couldn’t have grasped at the time.
Jervis Anderson would have known of the Melishes’ radicalism, but he underplays it in his piece, even as he lets Mary Jane write his conclusion for him. She told Anderson, “The attitude of some of the renovators toward the poorer people—those who live in the run-down apartments or over storefronts—is very negative. The renovators are resented by these people, who feel that the community belongs to them as much as it belongs to the newcomers. They don’t like being looked down upon, they don’t like being excluded, and they don’t like being pushed out.” She goes on, “I believe that houses are things to be used. They are not museums. And it seems to me that to a lot of the renovators houses come first and people come later.”
Mary Jane Melish is gone, as is Robert Snyder, but Patricia Stegman, the painter who married and later divorced Snyder, and who directed her son’s stroller into the path of a wrecking crew, still lives on Dean Street. Her brownstone, the one with the “wild Victorian bathtub,” holds a special aura. The house, which had been in the possession of only one family, was bequeathed to the Salvation Army, which kept it sealed until the Snyders opted to buy it, in 1963. This represented a kind of immaculate conception. “Every doorknob is original,” Stegman told me this year. Not only had the property been conveyed intact, with details like front and back shutters, an ironwork patio, and a back-yard cistern, but it had required no eviction to take occupancy.
At ninety-three, Stegman no longer paints. The last exhibition listed on her Web site is the Gowanus Open Studios in 2016; it must be strange, for the first-generation brownstoners, to consider the voguishness of the place-name Gowanus, which the Boerum Hill Association was once so eager to distance itself from. I sat with Stegman and her son, Adam, in the same time-stopped parlor where, in 1970, she consented to pose, in Victorian dress, for a feature in the Times Magazine. Like Anderson, I brought a tape recorder, though interviewing her felt odd. Once, while babysitting me, Stegman had had to rush me to the emergency room with a spiking fever.
I handed her a copy of the 1977 article.
“They described me as tall, attractive, and mild-tempered. They don’t know me.”
“Two out of three ain’t bad,” Adam said.
Stegman remains angry at the bankers who redlined the neighborhood: “We went to millions of banks. They all said, ‘We’ve given a lot of mortgages in that neighborhood and we’re not going to give any more, because the neighborhood is no good now.’ ” As she paged through my tattered copy of the magazine, Anderson’s words rekindled wonder in Stegman, at the distance Dean Street has travelled, from rooming houses, demolition, and garbage-piled streets. The Snyders were central to the story: Bob’s real-estate license, the protests, the coverage they drew from the Times and elsewhere. “I feel I am responsible for making Brooklyn, not just Boerum Hill, a chic place to live,” she said. It seemed only a slight exaggeration.
The ethical line that Pat Stegman and Bob Snyder drew was firm: “People offered us many houses to buy. I would be rich if I had bought them. One man owned a whole flock of rooming houses. He offered them to me very cheaply. I said, ‘I don’t want to be a landlord of rooming houses.’ We would have had to evict or manage them.”
She added, “We had a chance to buy a house in Carroll Gardens. But I found the people there were bigoted. They said, ‘Oh, we’d be so thrilled to show to you and your husband, because we’d never sell to a Black person.’ Well, I had friends who were Black, and so I said, ‘They wouldn’t be comfortable coming here to visit me, right?’ ”
In 1993, I was shelving books at Moe’s, in Berkeley, where I worked as a clerk—at the time, Dean Street was far from my thoughts—when a blue-jacketed hardcover came into my hands: “Daniel Hale Williams: Negro Surgeon.” The author’s name was Helen Buckler. It took me an instant to recognize her in the photo on the back, above a citation from the National Council of Negro Women. “The surprises in the story were many,” Buckler wrote in the introduction. “It turned out to bear little resemblance to the usual Negro story. There are no slave cabins, no cotton fields, no city slums, no lynchings—only the slow crucifixion of the spirit.”
In March, I explored Helen Buckler’s papers, which are stored at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Among get-well cards and newspaper clippings on the founding of Boerum Hill are drafts of articles on racial equality, with titles like “Little Known Facts About Negroes” and “The Race Question: A Woman’s Problem.” In the latter, in which Buckler tackles the spectre of miscegenation panic head on, she writes, “Willingly or not, woman was made the crux of the matter. Whatever the economic and political forces surging and battling underneath the surface, the banner unfurled to lead the crusaders always carried the slogan: Defend White Womanhood!” Beneath dated language, her thinking is lucid.
The founders of Boerum Hill all avowed a desire to live in an integrated neighborhood. Many had participated in the cause of civil rights—even William Harris, who bought and sold so many houses. In his twenties, in Virginia, when Prince Edward County shut down its public schools to avoid forced integration, he’d volunteered as a teacher in a makeshift integrated school. How had these crusaders—against the “little boxes” of suburbia, against eminent domain, against blandly uniform lives—ended up on the wrong side of Mary Jane Melish’s formula of “houses come first and people come later”? Had some intoxicant in the solvent they’d used to strip paint from the old moldings led them astray? Or was there an original sin in Buckler’s drawing of a boundary around Boerum Hill in the first place?
By the time of Jervis Anderson’s piece, L. J. Davis had stopped writing boosterish articles. Brownstone advocacy was redundant. The craze was official. Davis’s fiction had never sold much—the manuscript of a fifth novel went into a drawer—and he refashioned himself as an investigative reporter, specializing in financial scandal. A 1979 Harper’s cover story, “The Money Vanishes,” dissected the Carter Administration official Bert Lance; Davis’s 1982 book, “Bad Money,” exposed the credit crisis.
L.J. was by then also done opening his parlor, either to the house tours or to meetings of the Gowanus Liberation Front. He’d become a curmudgeon, our local Mencken or Vonnegut. In his columns in The Phoenix, alongside sunny coverage of the annual Atlantic Antic street fair and the openings of new restaurants, L.J. fulminated about Erica Jong, H. P. Lovecraft, and the degeneration of written English. “Descartes was a lucky dog,” one column begins, explaining that “he did not live on a bus stop” and “was therefore spared the small agonies of citizenship at its rawest: drunken softball teams celebrating on his stoop at two in the morning, beer cans in his shrubbery.” Another starts, “I sometimes wonder if I’m a safe person for me to know.” Elsewhere, he refers to himself as “the Darth Vader of Dean Street.”
L.J.’s neighbors would have detected, in this arch tone, that he felt cornered by leftist voices. A 1980 column, written in tribute to Helen Buckler, resorts to bitter sarcasm. “It looks so easy,” he writes. “You take a declining neighborhood, move into it, fix up the premises, and encourage other, like-minded souls to do the same. Hey presto, a rejuvenated neighborhood or a gentrified one, take your pick.” The piece spirals into a rant: “Nor was it, as certain ageing hippies would have us believe, an act of dark and sinister cunning.” He continues, “There was still no neighborhood here, just a lot of desperate poor people crammed into structures built to contain a tenth of their number—and at night, the sound of children being beaten unmercifully. This was the earthly paradise we are now called upon to admire by people who, in those days, wouldn’t have lived here on a bet.” Then it turns horrible: “It is hard to see what could have been done, short of some sort of concentration camp.” Elsewhere, L.J. makes shrouded reference to “the Indian reservation.” He means the Gowanus Houses projects, the setting, fifteen years later, of Spike Lee’s “Clockers.”
Had L.J.—to use the phrase he would have chosen himself—“gone mad”? For me, he is an emblem of the complex intellect who, feeling a critique of his privilege, jumps calamitously the wrong way.
L.J. Davis wrecked his journalistic credibility with a single pratfall. In 1994, The New Republic sent him on assignment to Little Rock, Arkansas, to sleuth around the financial paper trail known as Whitewater. L.J. mistook an alcoholic blackout episode in his hotel room for a possible assault. The Wall Street Journal reported that pages had been torn from his research notebook. L.J. later said that they had only ripped—and the hotel bartender observed that he’d had perhaps six Martinis before ascending to his room—but it was too late. The Republican conspiracy machine relished the suggestion that a journalist researching the Clintons had been attacked, and read the incident into the Congressional Record; L.J. was ahead of his time yet again. Still, he wrote two books afterward: one on cable-television moguls, and a passion project on the history of electrification. In his final years, he was a garrulous daytime drinker. His neighbors would sometimes cross the street to avoid being subject to his monologues. I did this myself.
Jervis Anderson died in 1999 or 2000, sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Day. His body was found early in January, when neighbors noticed mail piling up. He’d retired from The New Yorker the year before, after thirty years, publishing little in the magazine toward the end. Known once for his formality and dignity, he’d become a figure of isolation, and there were rumors of solitary drinking. Unlike Joseph Mitchell, he didn’t gain a legend for his reluctance. He showed up until he didn’t, and then he died at home.
I’ve spent the past four years wishing I could speak with Anderson, wishing I could cajole him into telling me what he thought about the white people on Dean Street. More recently, I’ve sought out those who knew him, hoping they’d make him more legible. Hendrik Hertzberg’s Talk of the Town obituary describes Anderson as a “product of British colonialism and West Indian anticolonialism, leavened by Harlem and the Upper West Side.” I spoke with Anne Nelson, who became good friends with Anderson during her time in The New Yorker’s typing pool, before a career as an author and playwright. “Jervis didn’t express the anger of ‘I’m living with the descendants of my slaveowners,’ ” she told me. “He didn’t share that attitude. He was analyzing, he was reporting. His writing was about advancing African American civil rights, but doing so systematically.” Discussing his first years as a writer in New York, she said, “This could have put him in conflict with people who might assume he would be an ally. Here is Jervis, the stately Jamaican wearing a suit—out of step, and out of time.” In his 1966 autobiographical essay, which was published in the Teachers College Record, Anderson himself develops this image: “We had been colonials for a long time and had grown to be as chauvinistic about English taste and English tradition as the English themselves. The involuntary reverence that most West Indians feel for the English sensibility and the English way of life must—even now that the Empire has been liquidated—stand as one of the sweeter and more deadly triumphs of imperialism.” The tone, both wistful and remorseless, is that of a writer who allows the reader—and history—to be the judge. Perhaps it also accounts for Anderson’s capacity to occupy the role of The New Yorker’s sole Black staff writer for so long. His instantiation of a psychic position somewhere between the dominant culture and the point of view of the oppressed was his tool and his method, until—I’m speculating—this method collapsed on him.
At some stage, it occurred to me that I might be searching in the wrong place, or asking of Anderson something he shouldn’t have to deliver. If what I craved was to hear from a Black person who’d spent time in L. J. Davis’s house, I needed only to search out one of L.J.’s daughters.
When I spoke with Tina, the younger of the two, it was the first time in forty-odd years. We compared notes on the experience of growing up in a time and place where a vision was being propagated of integration as a mission accomplished. The lives of the children playing on Dean Street were supposed to be a victory lap. Tina called it “a bubble”—a thing destined to burst, a dream deferred.
“When I stepped out of that bubble, I saw things,” she said, explaining what happened when she started attending school in Manhattan. “It was scary. Things went haywire when I started meeting people from other neighborhoods. People realized I wasn’t a part of them, I wasn’t from their world. I’d get picked on. I started realizing I would have to act more Black. Like, what does that mean? Why can’t I do this right?”
I was a little surprised that the reckoning had waited until Tina left the neighborhood. I pointed out that the housing projects were just two blocks away.
Tina said simply, “I wasn’t allowed to go over there.”
She continued, “I love my dad. He was a strong man, who stood up for all of us. And who laughed.” Then she clarified his prohibition against her walking in the direction of the projects: “Dad was classist. If you had a different economic standard, he was, like, ‘You’re a Davis, and you don’t go over there.’ With me and my sister, it was: ‘You need to find a different class of people.’ ”
Tina didn’t need to explain further. There was a time when I’d had friends in the Wyckoff Gardens towers—grade-school kids, Black and Chinese and Puerto Rican and Dominican—whose birthday parties I attended, or whom I unself-consciously followed home. Then, as if a memo went out sometime in the mid-seventies, most of the children from Dean Street stopped going to the projects to play, if we ever had. We tried to stay in the bubble, to make integration work on our blocks alone. It couldn’t, of course.
The white people who arrived in that part of Brooklyn in the sixties and seventies saw divisions among themselves. In one home lived speculators willing to manage tenants—and to evict them. In another, Maoists lived communally and worked to overthrow the state. Elsewhere, everything in between: artists, eccentrics, families. The long lens of time blurs these distinctions, making us see the brownstoners instead as collectively deluded about their culpability. This remains the case even as historians of civic life have been slowly picking apart the notion that what we call “gentrification” is simple or predictable in its effects. (Some, like Bo McMillan, a researcher for the Redress Movement, suggest that the term has itself gradually become an obscuring fiction.) Jervis Anderson’s gift was to portray the brownstoners as I recall them: people trying, and largely failing, to grasp their place in history in real time. You and I may be doing the same now.
Not everyone who moved onto those blocks ran a youth center, like Mary Jane Melish, or taught carpentry there, like my father (who also gave art lessons at the Brooklyn House of Detention). Some merely wished to live in a place that was diverse and yet neither crime-ridden nor scheduled for demolition. They might ask now: was that wish a crime? I’ve come to see this quandary as historically specific. What if theirs was a generation who believed that their desire for a just society had been addressed by the civil-rights movement—in which many had played some part—more fully than was the case? For those trying to inhabit Helen Buckler’s dream, the two enormous housing projects were a truth hidden in plain sight. Boerum Hill, that invention, was a gated community bounded only by a concept. The concept didn’t stop anyone walking down the street, except when it did.
The projects sat a mere five hundred feet from Tina’s childhood home, as from mine. Yet the situation within them was, at best, not our concern. At worst, it was a daily emergency we were prohibited from giving a name. What happened there happened elsewhere. For, according to Miss Buckler’s boundary, it was elsewhere. The boundary was a recipe for cognitive dissonance, for a preëmptive turning aside, in favor of more solvable matters, like how to restore a ceiling’s crumbling plaster scrollwork. It wasn’t only Tina Davis, or L. J. Davis, who couldn’t square the circle, couldn’t do the moral or emotional math. Helen Buckler didn’t intend to drive us all mad, in drawing an invisible line down Bergen Street, but she did so nonetheless. ♦
― the pinefox, Thursday, 14 September 2023 09:53 (six months ago) link