Reading Jonathan Lethem ...?

interesting. my 1) and 7) are the same, but my 2) through 6) are exactly reversed.

which yes technically means 4) is the same as well--

Fortress
Brooklyn
Landscape
Moon
Table

having not read the other two (forgot about Indie Band -- is it really that bad?)

i think he needed to bang out a quick, low-ambition one just to be like "hey critics, i already wrote fortress, not gonna do that again, k?" so i don't think he's lost it or anything. it's not like it's unreadable but it's not great.

i'm w/ thomp in that i dont really get the love for motherless brooklyn. it seems to me the one that's been most acclaimed?? i remember a lot of critics finding fortress really overwritten + they were more ok w/ brooklyn.

motherless brooklyn was a lot more enjoyable than fortress of solitude. i think with FOS, he tried to write this sweeping narrative that just didn't work for me.

motherless brooklyn was really fun, i thought, but fortress of solitude dragged for me

i really liked his plagiarism piece in harper's

yes to both of those last posts. i also hated the switch from first person to third (or from third tp first, can't remember) in fortress of solitude

That ranking I posted yesterday was premature, 'cuz I haven't even finished Fortress yet. A little over halfway through now, and while it isn't dragging at all, I'm liking the book's midsection a lot less than the opening chapters, which I loved. Don't mind the shifting authorial POV, though. Fortress goes back and forth in voice all the time, 1st person to 3rd, even some 2nd person you's thrown in there. Works just fine as a means of reflecting Dylan's awareness and self-awareness at the same time.

What's starting to bother me, though, is the fact that the narrative voice digests the emotional/narrative significance of everything as it happens. I understand that Dylan is an overthinker, and that the narrative voice is mostly his, so it's appropriate for the writing to embody his obsessive self-awareness -- but nothing's left to the reader. There isn't much narrative subtlety, ambiguity or delicacy. Dylan seems to far too clearly see and understand both his own motivations and those of the people around him. And when he doesn't, the surprises seems somewhat clumsily telegraphed and programmatic.

Also starting to agree with Pinefox about the novel becoming a patchwork of hip cultural references, spat out in the manner of one of those cinematic montages that shuttle you quickly from the Vietnam era to the present day, marking the passage of time as a series of cliched "you were there!" banner images (the emergence of hip-hop!, punk rock!, crack cocaine!). Early chapters seemed to choose much less obvious cultural signifiers, and did a better job of presenting them within a framework of observational authenticity, as credible & compelling personal experience. Still liking the book quite a bit, but I'm starting to have reservations.

Excellent post. The "You Were There!" bits surely are justified though, because Dylan and Mingus *are* there - it's not like an 80s Wonder Years or anything. Given that it's set in Brooklyn at that time, I'm not sure how those cliches (if that is what they are) could be avoided. Plus, from reading The Disappointment Artist, it seems to be at least loosely autobiographical - so I don't think cliche is entirely fair

reading GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC at last, about halfway through

he's amazingly good at this schtick

even better, I suppose, in M Brooklyn

really if all his 1990s work is this good, no wonder people were so blown away

I really want to read M Brooklyn, even though Fortress left a bit of a bad taste in my mind (though I devoured it in like four days)...I thought the part at the end where Lethem blasts through Mingus's life post-prison leapt off the page in a way that little else in the novel did...I also thought the hipper-than-thou references were a bit distracting...

I like Lethem as an essayist but only sometimes...his pieces on comix and Cassavettes are great-pretentious, though his essay on sampling was imo boring-pretentious...

Did anyone read that Lethem story about a future where all the old basketball greats have their skills embedded in their shoes, and there's a weird lotto system where NBA players get assigned these old shoes and one guy gets Michael Jordan's shoes, and of course he becomes badass?

I really want to read M Brooklyn, even though Fortress left a bit of a bad taste in my mind (though I devoured it in like four days)

Read it! It saved Lethem for me. I was ready to give him up after Fortress, but on a whim I checked MB out from the library and was sooooo pleased. I do feel that, insofar as GWOM is a rather direct aping of the Chandler style whereas MB is kinda an updating of it, GWOM is more fun (and I enjoyed it more) but MB is more resonant and richer.

Did anyone read that Lethem story about a future where all the old basketball greats have their skills embedded in their shoes, and there's a weird lotto system where NBA players get assigned these old shoes and one guy gets Michael Jordan's shoes, and of course he becomes badass?

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, April 16, 2009 12:01 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Yeah they're exosuits rather than shoes, but I loved that story. It had a few moments of SEE HOW POSTMODERN I AM SEE (and how could you not with a premise like that--'what does the game mean when its just a reenactment of classic skills' etc blurgh etc we get it), but I forgave the pretensions on behalf of the wit and cleverness.

I don't remember any PM stuff in it, but I would like to see more scholarly analysis on this magic Michael Jordan shoes story.

not a book i would have expected an pinefox to like.

hm!

"In early 2007, Lethem began work on Chronic City,[20] which will be published on September 15, 2009.[21] In July 2008, Lethem said that Chronic City is "set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, it’s strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles Finney and Hitchcock’s Vertigo and it concerns a circle of friends including a faded child-star actor, a cultural critic, a hack ghost-writer of autobiographies, and a city official. And it’s long and strange."[22]"

did anyone follow omega the unknown all the way through?

i did, it had its moments

oh ok

"Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.

Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.

Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique."

ha

"I was ready to throw off any sense that I was going to write sprawling social novels set in Brooklyn and become the Brooklyn Faulkner. Neither Motherless nor Fortress exactly fits that description, but the accumulated image of the two books seemed to project that.

I don’t know if it would have been easy or hard for someone else to follow through with it, but it was totally out of the question for me. And really, for anyone who had even glanced at the earlier work that’d be obvious. But there were a lot of people—an important critical framework—which had never glanced at the earlier work. YDLMY was a way to shrug that off with a degree of self-destructive glee, to say I’m going to disappoint people on a number of different levels so we can start over again about expectations."

i think he needed to bang out a quick, low-ambition one just to be like "hey critics, i already wrote fortress, not gonna do that again, k?"

― Jordan, Thursday, August 28, 2008 6:48 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark

ha, so now he's writing a big manhattan novel?

i did like that story from the astronaut girlfriend's perspective that came out a few months back, i'm assuming that's in the book (although it would be cool if it was just a spin-off).

I'm not loving that precis. Too many writers, and some horrible names.

I don't know...Chase Insteadman sounds like one of the great character names of our time...

but no I'm not reading that...synopsis makes it osund like horrible tripe...Lethem has def. disappeared up somebody's arse...

short story that jordan's talking abt - http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/11/17/081117fi_fiction_lethem

i'd rank them like this:

actual good names: Richard Abneg

eh: Janice Trumbull, Perkus Tooth

really pretty poor: Chase Insteadman

kind of just awful: Oona Laszlo

i like oona laszlo a lot more than perkus tooth, which seems like a name for a d&d character (or at least a dickens character). maybe that's just because "oona" comes in a lot of crossword puzzles though.

i think i like all those names. i'm pretty corny tho

i dont know...theres something amusing about the last name Insteadman to me...made doubly amusing (bcz unlikely) that the dude was once a child star...

chase insteadman is a truly great character name ada would adore it

Lethem also had a story about Perkus Tooth in this:
http://www.austinchronicle.com/binary/122e/books_readings1.jpg

Looking forward to the new one but with a measure of trepidation cos i really hated You Don't Love Me Yet.

dude in the upper right hand corner looks like a perkus tooth. or maybe the one below him???

I finished GUN last night. Though the '6 months later' jump is stunning in a way, I wasn't very satisfied with how it wound up. He makes such a fuss about Stanhunt's Forgettol as plot device at the end, drawing out a revelation that for once I'd seen coming, but I didn't see that it did much for the story. Somehow the whole crime web lost its lustre by the end. The kangaroo's fate and the last page are good, though.

that is, 6 YEARS later

The only thing I remember from "gun w/OM" is the constant tearing up of bills in half for bribery/tips which struck me as a neat life skill which I'm disappointed to have never used.

What cool tricks have you guys learned from Lethem books?

"Blindsight", from AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE, kind of that freaks me out when I think about it.

There's a line in MOTHERLESS about a van being vandalized by someone with "...a lot of patience and no fear of interruption" - that description just floored me, so much so that I memorized it.

Well I learned how to be invisible and fly.

I just haven't acquired the equipment yet.

Why does no one ever talk about his Nabokovian, or at least Nabokov-inflected, short story 'Vivian Relf'?

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?