Reading Jonathan Lethem ...?

Possibly because it's overshadowed by his Nabokovian novel Girl in Landscape

evidently i have been reading the wrong nabokov short stories and/or novels

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.

I'm now reading AS SHE CRAWLED ACROSS THE TABLE !!

maybe you shld re-read the title

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 !!

you ever read As I Lay Dying?

yes
sure, 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.

(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?

gun = sci fi hardboiled
moon = sci fi dystopia
table = sci fi campus novel
landscape = sci fi western

― 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.

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?

Girl in Landscape is pretty great

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.

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.

From link upthread, just read this:
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2007/03/19/070319fi_fiction_lethem?currentPage=1
I 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.

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.

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.)

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.

left me cold
should've been a new yorker short

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.

fortress "isn't tackling big things"?

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)

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.

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.

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.

Woody Allen, Morrissey and Paris Hilton

http://i250.photobucket.com/albums/gg274/generalberg/holy_trinity-1.jpg

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

YDLMY really is embarrassing, especially the lyrics. "Monster Eyes" ugh

the more confirmations I hear of how bad this book is, the more I want to read it.

You can hear some fan submitted versions of the songs on Lethem's website, perhaps that will whet your appetite further?

YDLMY is not representative of his non-Fortress work.

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.

another part from his next book - http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/05/25/090525fi_fiction_lethem

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.

:/

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

a little too rolling teenpop thread??

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.

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.

:/

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

i'd like to cosign all the :/

i ended up liking chronic city a lot; it's more uneven than fortress or motherless brooklyn but the end segment is pretty affecting

Re-read GUN for the first time since 2001. Holds up better than I expected, particularly the gutpunch of those last few chapters.

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

I liked CC but found the PKD-inspired elements and the Perkus Tooth/Paul Nelson character exhausting and ultimately kind of irritating, too.

cronenberg making a movie of 'As She Climbed Across the Table'...

god, i completely missed the publication of chronic city

I was house/cat-sitting this weekend and read and really enjoyed "The King of Sentences" in Best American Short Stories 2008.