Jonathan Lethem has been one of my favorite writers since February 2007 when I read his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism” in Harper’s Magazine in my freshman dorm room at Syracuse University. I can still picture the unadorned, white-walled room with its two beds and desks. My roommate was pleasant enough, but his temperature ran hot, and he would leave the window cracked overnight to upstate winters. I’d lie awake shivering, thinking.
When I stumbled across Lethem, I shivered with the electric thrill of his ideas. His worldview nurtured my own burgeoning cerebral sense of myself in the world. I do not use the “g” word lightly—I bristle that we must call the MacArthur Fellowship, which Lethem won in 2005, the genius grant—but the profundity and lasting influence of that essay tempt me.
I have since read two of Lethem’s essay collections, The Ecstasy of Influence and The Disappointment Artist, and almost all of his novels: Gun, with Occasional Music, Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, Girl in Landscape, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City, and Dissident Gardens. In 2013, Lethem published Dissident Gardens into the wake of the 2007-2008 global economic crisis and the fall of 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement (“We are the 99%!”). The book incorporates these contemporary upheavals into a century of revolutionary angst and ideology. The book’s six protagonist characters are motivated by social and psychological forces which we might variously call revolutionary animus, resistance to hegemonic systems, radical hope, and persistence in defeat.
In this historical novel, Lethem profiles four generations that come of age into personal and historic disappointment. Like most of Lethem's more social-realism work—he also works a sci-fi angle—the book centers on New York City, where he grew up. It starts out in the city in the 1930s in Queens and tends to return there, despite several characters escapes.
Lethem’s characters are bound together by social relationships and ideological tendency towards revolutionary ideas, often subtle. Otherwise, they are very different. Lethem writes from the perspective of a disillusioned Jewish communist, Rose; Rose’s horny, nerdy, cousin, Lenny; Rose’s hippyish revolutionary daughter, Miriam; Rose’s black cop lover’s fat, black, and gay chess prodigy turned cultural theorist professor, Cicero; Miriam’s husband, the Irish Protestant turned Greenwich Village folk singer Tommy Gogan; and Miriam and Tommy’s kid, Sergius, who becomes a music teacher and Occupy Wall Street wannabe. If the list of names and characteristics boggles your mind, consider how much erudition and skill Lethem must bring to bear to master so many minds and times.
This is a bit of a break for Lethem, who has rarely addressed identity so nakedly in his novels. Lethem’s mother is Jewish, and his relationship to various strands of Jewish experience is clearly important, if nuanced and layered, like anything Lethem. In earlier novels, Jewish markers hide in plain sight, requiring no special qualifications to decode, but rarely stated outright. Jewish identity is an important but not integral layer of experience, additive, but not necessary to enjoy or understand the books. Protagonists Lionel Essrog of Motherless Brooklyn and Dylan Ebdus of Fortress of Solitude may seem Jewish by their names, if nothing else. Ebdus is finally described as a Jew by his girlfriend on page 460, who observes that he has always called Jewishiness the least important part of his identity.
In Dissident Gardens, Jewishness is central. Lethem illuminates identity from inside and out, the way it is experienced. Even when we see the world from a non-Jewish character, Jews play central roles. Folk singer Tommy Gogan’s manager is Jewish, his Jewishness as important in the 1960s Greenwich Village scene as that of Bob Dylan and Jack Elliott, "the most authentic cowboy singer Tommy or anyone had met." Tommy “stalks chimeras of authenticity in the counterfeit world,” pondering the unparalleled and exalted fakery of these Jewish folk figures, as Lethem puts it. Lethem seems to be both wrestling with and celebrating the history of American Jews in New York, his own history.
Three of the six protagonists are Jewish: Rose, Lenny, and Miriam. They come first and Rose and Miriam cast influence on the rest. But their identity is no more vital or exhaustively plumbed than that of Cicero, Tommy, and Sergius. Lethem treats Jewish experience as black experience, gay experience, female experience, immigrant experience, Commie experience, Queens experience, radical hope, revolutionary zeal, striving and disappointment, love and disillusion, all, with great humanity and scintillating detail. To some degree, markers and boundaries blend or fade into the mosaic. More importantly, Lethem writes individuals, not stereotypes, communities, or generalities. Each character is singular and whole.
Tommy Gogan arrives like any number of immigrants into New York City’s 1960s cultural ferment, invited by two older brothers to join their Irish folk trio. He soon finds himself an exalted fake, and grows disillusioned with the narrow stereotype of Irish culture he and his brothers feel forced to fit into. He doesn’t seem capable of finding himself, or fitting his found self into New York City, so he makes a new self, or is made anew. Tommy gravitates to what he sees as authentic America: black, rural blues. But can he make authentic what is not his, and will anybody care anyway? Cicero ends up in a similar mess. He escapes New York to get a PhD in the kind of convoluted cultural theory that is so deep and devious it’s devoid of meaning. As a gay black man at Princeton, in buttoned-up New Jersey suburbs, he escapes right back to New York City to participate in anonymous orgies in uptown trailers, and to visit Rose. Lethem builds this sense of recurrence.
Lethem celebrates detail with a discriminating and omnivorous eye. Everything deserves his attention, a riff. Here are some examples: “The morbidity behind the sales pitch.” “Fershlugginer blues.” Shea Stadium, a "Sterno can in Band-Aids of orange and blue" that "heaved into view two stops before the Willets Point exit." Library books arranged on a bookshelf. Bob Dylan. Cicero’s dreadlocks. German chocolate. Jazz. Dim Sum is Chinese soul food. He balances the concrete with the abstract; pop culture with ideology, history and politics; sex and ideas. Kid Cicero wonders how Miriam makes it seem like "everything was secretly and sexily connected."
Kid Cicero falls innocently in love with Miriam because of the “efflorescence of Miriam’s details.” You might wonder, as I did, what is efflorescence? It is the migration of a salt to the surface of a porous material, or the action or process of developing and unfolding as if coming into flower. Efflorescence is a process.
Lethem's character become, find, strive, fall, hope and despair. They are born and molded into being in front us in the face of implacable forces. They play parts, affix themselves to causes, improvise identities, and clutch at each other for purchase in a world where change happens at levels entirely out of their control. They are not heroes slaying dragons. They face more prosaic and for that more heroic, more revolutionary challenges. "The true Communist pulled the tab on another tin of sardines in her kitchen...The true Communist was waiting."
Dissident Gardens is Jonatham Lethem's most ambitious novel yet. It’s wise, compassionate, brilliant, wide-ranging. Not every section is a home run. Some set pieces, like Sandinistas and Archie Bunker, strain my appreciation. Some unruly demises seem more preposterous than meaningfully symbolic, or sympathetic. Lethem does a better job winding up than winding down. He has a magic for connecting everything in seamless, sinuous sentences, but sometimes I got fatigued by them, or lost in them. Still, you could do worse than getting lost in Lethem’s intricate and rich worlds.
Like the characters in Dissident Gardens, I latch on to Lethem's voice and, to me, ingenuous striving to make meaning (not to mention money) in open art. I identify myself with his many identifications. I feel the richer for it. A decade and counting, and I am still mesmerized.
Like the characters in Dissident Gardens, I latch on to Lethem's voice and, to me, ingenuous striving to make meaning (not to mention money) in open art. I identify myself with his many identifications. I feel the richer for it. A decade and counting, and I am still mesmerized.
