Reading Jonathan Lethem ...?

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

Tell me more about this Clark Clinker.

he's a scoundrel, shun him

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.

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)

Right, I just wanted to join the chorus.

Love me some chessy SF eg:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Jth2-O8jL._SX295_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

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.

“Tom Dedlock was literally swept off his feat as he tiptoed into Frank Zappa’s JOE’S GARAGE.”

“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.”

Ward: you couldn't play chess on that board! It's too big !!

Is it on some sort of pseudosphere?

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.

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.

Ah yes, here it is: this is the thread where you impersonate other ilxors

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 !

FAO Mark S (and whoever):

10 pages later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Tidbeck

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