Reading Jonathan Lethem ...?

A book AND a film:

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

I liked Dissident Gardens a lot

I still haven't read his last two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Access Fantasy has always stuck in my mind from that collection

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

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

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

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

http://www.omegatheunknown.com/

links to a page advertising a 'juicer'

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

Juicy thought.

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

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

(i know we will never agree on pynchon)

Quit talking and start chalking!

Sorry, wrong thread

Not really

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

Oh, with John Clute

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.

the indie rock one is SO BAD

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

Mark S: I would say both.

Jordan - fwiw I think the best in that period are

CHRONIC CITY
OMEGA THE UNKNOWN

and the nonfiction, much of which is compelling.

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)

agreed on his nonfiction being much better than his fiction post-Fortress. His time-travelling James Brown piece is excellent.

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.

Outis, TBH the James Brown piece is one of the few I've never managed to read, having no real appreciation of that artist.

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.

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.

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'.

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.'

one you couldn't play on strikes me as entirely pointless if not wrong, or at least unimaginative re: the possibilities of chess variations.

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

yes you could use those double-sided sticky pad we used to stick photos into albums with

rowr

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 you should read this novel and give a running commentary on it! :P

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.

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

'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'.

well you should

tho actually the aesthetic yr resisting is the very essence of the influenza-permeated :D

and there's a politics to its embrace and its resistance, tho it's not at all a simple politics