Reading Jonathan Lethem ...?

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.

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

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.

They Live reads like a Perkus Tooth riff. I'm using that as a blurb, mind you.

ALSO: I'd like to heartily recommend his OMEGA THE UNKNOWN comic (w/ Farel Dalrymple), which hasn't been mentioned on this thread.

i read chronic city the other week, it was definitely not awful

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.

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?).

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.

i tried reading wetware a few years back but the style didn't hold my interest, idk

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.

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?

He seems to have fallen away entirely as a serious figure after Fortress, but you make it sound like the opposite.

yeah, rucker's an idea guy more than, you know, a writer guy. love him anyway, especially the master of space and time.

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.