first appeared in
Dissident Gardens,
by Jonathan Lethem. Doubleday, 384 pages, $27.95.
By Harvey Blume
The word is that that Jonathan Lethem's new novel shows that
he's outgrown the urge, manifest in The fortress of Solitude (2003), among his
other fictions, to meld realism with Marvel Comic fabulism. It's true there's
no one in Dissident Gardens quite like Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude, characters
who, in The fortress of Solitude, can fly, or, if in lucky possession of a
certain ring, become invisible. Still the fabulous is very much in evidence in
Dissident Gardens, albeit in non-comic book form.
Dissident Gardens is the tale of three generations of a
family rooted in radical politics, from the Old Left, to New Leftism of a sort,
Quaker pacifism, Occupy, and a brief, misbegotten flirtation with the Third
World guerilla approach. Genuine events mold the story, none more than Khrushchev's
1956 speech about the crimes of Stalin, which proves traumatic for many who had
hewed to the Communist Party line, however twisted or opaque.
Suddenly Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York, just
yesterday a hot bed for Party meetings and organizers, sheds its Red. Rose
Zimmer, the great and awful matriarch of Dissident Gardens is now bereft of illusions:
"No Trotsky diversions now. . . No Popular Front, no This Guitar Kills
Fascists, no Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism. The true Communist
pulled the tab on another tin of sardines in her kitchen."
Sunnyside Gardens does in fact exist and was, as Lethem
writes, designed by "Lewis Mumford borrowing from the Berlin architects'
vision of a garden city, a human environment grounded in deep theory, houses
bounded around courtyard gardens, neighbors venting their lives to one another
across a shared commons." Khrushchev's venting about Stalin takes the air
out of Sunnyside's socializing across the common. Residents who might yesterday
have greeted each other as "comrade" at the local library or grocery
store suddenly avoid looking each other in the eye.
For some, Khrushchev's speech is preamble to what's as bad
or worse, namely the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn in 1957. This second calamity may
not have resounded all the way to Prague, Warsaw or Beijing but for quite a few
in the greater New York area — notably one Lenin aka Lenny Angrush, Rose's
nephew — it signifies that there was no longer a team capable of shouldering
the anti-fascist (anyway anti-Yankee) burden: "The mighty correctors of
segregated baseball, secret official team of the American Communist Party, now
flirted with year-round sunshine."
Lenny, anyway, does not therefore cease to be a Communist.
On the contrary, like Rose, his role model, he now attains to the highest stage
of Communism, that of being a Last Communist. "In 1956 Khrushchev wrecked
the Soviet illusion and it was at that moment that true Communism had floated
free of history, like smoke." Communism freed from idiotic Party dictates
and the implacable hostility of the masses now belongs to raddled, lone,
increasingly deracinated types — chess players, screwy academics and maybe even
novelists.
As Rose conceives it, when she defies a Party directive to
move to New Jersey to organize farmers, "it was in the parlor that the
nascent flame of American revolution could be nurtured, and it was in the
bovine calloused imagination of the American worker that it went to flicker and
die." No factory floor activism or chicken farm organizing for Rose.
Argument, not least of all, inner argument, is the destiny of her Communism.
Still, in this well-trodden history, as re-imagined by
Lethem, there is much room for the fabulous. The fabulous, in fact, is crucial.
For example: Miriam, Rose's formidable teenage daughter, wants to lead a bunch
of newly acquired pals from a Greenwich Village folk club, where the likes of
the Gogan brothers dully strum, over the Brooklyn Bridge, to the party rumored
to be taking place at Norman Mailer's place. One in that crowd, not keen for
the trek to Brooklyn — Lethem characterizes this aversion as Boroughphobia — asks
how Miriam plans to get them into Mailer's party.
"How? With my secret Commie powers, of course."
Saying so, Miriam grasps at once "that her Secret
Commie [yes, Commie, not Comic Book] Powers were not actually a joke."
This is a blatant example of Lethem's resort to the
fabulous, an appetizer, whereas Dissident Gardens is anything but a blatant
book. As Lethem would have it, the sleep of dialectical reason breeds all manner
of fantasy. The realist core of the book is beset and infected by fictions —
from film, music, video games, and, not least of all, television.
For example: Rose is reduced in her last years to a crush on
a figure who could not be any more antithetical —Archie Bunker. She conceives
of herself on his show, haunts him, among his cronies, at his television tavern,
and finds "herself plunging ever deeper into the maze of his charismatic
stupidity." Nor is she put off when Archie refuses to "bandage words" with her, as it were. The last Commie wants Archie as her last lover: "She
wanted to seize his calf-like cheeks in her hands and scream Bubbelah! She
wanted to gnaw on his jowls."
The abundance of fantasy frames the pathos and the humor of
the novel.
Cicero Lookins is the son of Rose's ex-lover, Douglas
Lookins — a black cop who fought in the Battle of the Bulge and became an Eisenhower
Republican. The Communist Party had expressly ordered Rose to desist from
sleeping with Lookins. In fact, the book begins with this admonition from an Important
Communist:
Quit fucking black cops or get booted from the Communist
Party
Why the Party rules against "fucking black cops" remains
moot. But faced with this choice Rose takes being booted over surrendering control
of her sex life. It's not a simple decision for her. Outside the context of
Communism who is there to appreciate, for example, that, "I once forced a
Wobbly to sit down and talk calmly to a Kropotkinite. It may mean nothing to
you but worlds hung in the balance at that particular moment in time."
As the book draws to a close, Rose is in a nursing home, and
Cicero Lookins — a mountainous, gay, postmodernist academic best known for his
course on Disgust and Proximity, pays some visits. By then Rose is beyond
patrolling Sunnyside Gardens, as had been her wont. "She patrolled
memories instead, tried to incite against former neighbors and comrades’ —
against her betrayers on the library board, against a misguided Zionist grocer
who died in 1973, against a Real's Radish & Pickle shop steward who'd
Red-baited her in 1957."
To Cicero, this Last Communist, who had long ago kindled his
own intelligence, confides her final hope:
"What I pine for," she tells him, "is a bowel
movement."
"The food goes in," she tells him. "It must
come out eventually."
Cicero says: "I'm sure it has been somehow."
"No, Cicero," she objects "I'm being
converted into a block of solid human waste. That's the only explanation."
There is no one but Cicero to visit her at this point,
except, perhaps, so she tells a nurse, this guy called Archie.
Cicero finds that Rose had, "begun reminiscing about
the Lower East Side, dullish shit regarding icemen and rag pickers, a lover's
career on the Yiddish stage, and he'd thought the fragments weren't even hers.
Rather, it appeared she'd been cribbing from Howe's World of Our Fathers.
Rose had long ago suppressed all trace of being Jewish — any
local accent (she sends Miriam to an elocution class to accomplish the same for
her daughter), any hint of the Yiddish her family, the Angrushes (Lethem and
his wordplay) spoke amongst themselves in order to turn into a true —
denatured, generic — internationalist. She gets her Jewishness back in her last
days, distilled from collective memory, cribbed mostly from Irving Howe.
***
Dissident Gardens has problems. There are times when the
propulsive, run-on and occasionally exhausting energy of the prose threatens to
occlude events. (A long, satisfying epistolary exchange between Miriam and her
father, who long ago decamped to East Germany, shows that Lethem writes very
well in a calmer key). And Dissident Gardens cuts away from, then back to,
unfolding events often enough to create anxiety about chronology.
Perhaps my favorite of Lethem's novels is Motherless
Brooklyn (1999), but that novel, for all its delicious exuberance, is many
times less ambitious than Dissident Gardens. It's hard to grasp how Lethem
assimilated all this material — historical and fantastic — and gave it new
narrative life, except by granting, at the very least, his particular genius for
absorption.
When I interviewed Lethem about his novel "You Don't
Love Me Yet" (2007), he talked about why it was set in L.A. about which he
was happy to know nothing. Knowing nothing was a relief. After "The
Fortress of Solitude" (2003), with its deep in the dark of Brooklyn
setting, Lethem wanted only to avoid the fate of being the "Faulkner of
Dean Street", the Brooklyn address in Boerum Hill where he was raised and
was, again, living.
But Lethem has not completed his escape. To put it another
way, he's overcome his Boroughphobia. With Dissident Gardens he proves himself
ever more deeply ensnared in the New York City that is his fertile Yoknapatawpha.
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
P.S. "If you think Roth
and Mailer and Bellow defined American culture, I don't think that's such a
great thing. They were interesting writers but there's no reason to prefer
having three or four literary giants looming over us to the current situation
where there's enormous vitality in an extremely disunified way."
So Lethem said to me in a 1998 interview I conducted with him for the Boston Book Review. It is archived at: http://www.harveyblume.com/1998/12/q-jonathan-lethem-kafka-cartoons.html
So Lethem said to me in a 1998 interview I conducted with him for the Boston Book Review. It is archived at: http://www.harveyblume.com/1998/12/q-jonathan-lethem-kafka-cartoons.html
No comments:
Post a Comment