Reading Jonathan Lethem ...?

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

Thanks!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

perk s

It all adds up !!

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

All I can think of is Neil saying to Rik 'so most metaphors don't bear close examination.'

i feel that the academic study of eng lit as it has on the whole emerged is not of neil's mind here

also the young ones was written by ben elton, a man insanely over-committed to the comedy simile

Haha. Yes. The reductio ad absurdum of the left.

James Wood on Melville and metaphor: "Metaphors have a life of their own...Melville had a way of following
metaphor, 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.

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.

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.

Call it sad, call it funny
But it's better than even money
That the guy's only doing it for some doll

Call it hell, call it heaven
But it's probable twelve to seven
That the guy's only doing it for some doll

Call it dumb, call it clever
Ah, but you can get odds forever
That 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 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.

wait you haven't read my book

I have heard a lot about it ! :D

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.

he's good, he's the minister of the new new super heavy funk

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.

all here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/01/popandrock.music

(actually that version is a bit confusingly different from the one in the book)

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)

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.

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.

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.

Idiot Tooth.

http://hilobrow.com/2013/12/20/regression-toward-the-zine-18/

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bx7umZ8aRI

6-minute film of Lethem on Lem, adapted from recent LRB article.

This reminds me, should I read The Arrest?

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.