Dissident Gardens (Vintage Contemporaries)

"Dissident Gardens" is one of the rare books that you could open on a random page and within reading a couple paragraphs get to appreciate its worth. The narration is so beautifully rich that it makes you slow down and savor it, like exquisite food or wine would. Boris Pasternak, the author of "Doctor Zhivago" and one of the most renowned Russian poets, in one of his poems mentions the "scary beauty", the awareness of which makes poets out of children. The scary beauty of "Dissident Gardens" creates the "aha" moment for the senses, when you stop in your tracks because you just came into contact with something exquisite.

The many dissident characters of the novel cannot be anything but themselves, would not be associated with a group and defy stereotyping. The queen of dissidents, Rose, a Jewish mother almost gassing her daughter to death, a Communist revolted at the idea of a communal living (granted, on a Jersey farm), she was probably a dissident to the core: even when she had largely lost her mind she was a picture of defiance. Rose's court included her grandson, apprehended at the Portland International Jetport on a suspicion of terrorism, nudged by a well intentioned security officer towards defining himself as a dissident; an anti-Semite object of Rose's amorous attention who has adopted a Jewish girl; the son of Rose's lover, an enigma to his father for being gay and an enigma to his students for being an intellectual; Rose's daughter, one of the more literal dissidents in the book, joining rebels in a foreign country.

New York, New York of the book, the rest of the country and by extension the book itself are the dissident gardens where these characters can live, blossom and die, and do it their way.

1958 Greenwich Village to Occupy Wall Street - Extraordinary novel of the legacy of American Communism, set in Queens and Greenwich Village New York City. First Lathem novel for me. I completely set aside any expectations that I might have. I love the author's command of the language and the setting was one I greatly enjoy. It's an epic multigenerational story which also I favor.

My only quibble is I found certain elements unbelievable that it took me right out of the story. One of the biggest speed bumps was Rose's relationship with Officer Lookins. Officer Lookins himself didn't ring true for me. I am sure I am wrong but at times I felt like I was looking at the emperor's new clothes.

If asked to name the finest American novelists working today, one can hardly imagine a list lacking Jonathan Lethem. His prose, often electric, spark on the page and kindle fires in the minds of his readers. More importantly, in an age where post-modernism often puts literary elegance on a perch well above plot, Lethem's characters and their situations speak to an age of more classical - and I'd argue often better - novels, where story was king. Though the sensitivity of his characters might belie the comparison, his prose style, those complex rollicking sentences that bespeak a love of words, often brings to mind Roth at his best. And on these points, "Dissident Gardens" doesn't disappoint. The characters at times walk from the story right into the reader's consciousness. Likewise, Lethem's limber sentences often demand one reread in wonder at his ability with words. Despite these strengths, one wonders about Lethem's structural decision to write a work that leaps through time and points of view, a triumph of stylistic skill, but one which does his actual story no favors.

"Dissident Gardens" tells a multi-generational story among a family of revolutionary radicals who probably have an easier time recovering from the fall of communism than they do surviving the scars left by Rose Zimmer, the titan of a character at the heart of this novel. From the very first sentence we learn that Rose is too explosive, not merely for the morays of post-WWII American society but for her radical political colleagues. "Quit f$%^ing black cops or get booted from the Communist Party." Yet the American Communist Party can no more contain Rose than anything else could. Like an atomic bomb, her fallout radiates over the novel's other characters. There's her beautiful precocious daughter, Miriam, "this raven-haired Jewess with a vocabulary like Lionel Trilling," who moves the story into the 60's where she forms a commune, marries a folk singer, and has a son. Cicero Lookins, the legitimate son of Rose's previously mentioned cop lover, who as a youth is shown struggling with his identity and as an adult having moved beyond Rose's politics as an Ivy League educated professor with a post modern bend --who, being black, gay, and over-weight, can count himself as a "miraculous triple token." And then there's Cousin Lenny, sort of a pathetic type holding onto his radical communism even when it is long out of fashion who yearns to sleep with his cousin Miriam and bring "proletarian baseball" to Queens.

Yet despite this riot of great characters and magnificent prose, Lethem's novel at times gets lost in its byzantine structure. Leaps in time and perspective seem intended to raise questions for which the author hopes we will look forward to getting answers. Instead, it becomes a jumble on which even a careful reader may trip. While I have no issues with author's bending time, it should realize a payoff worth the demands it makes on the reader. Here, in a novel that ends at the chronological ending, it just feels like a burden, a feat of authorial gymnastics without a reward.

Despite this shortcoming, "Dissident Gardens" is still a fine piece of work. On an absolute basis it would count as a great novel. Perhaps it is only on a curve, against Lethem's previous extraordinary novels, that it may be found wanting.

There's nothing wrong with a book about people you wouldn't necessarily want to know in real life, as long as something about them is sympathetic or you're really interested in their lives.

In Dissident Gardens, Lethem gives us two women, who aren't that likable but for the fact that they are surrounded by people less likable than themselves.

In Motherless Brooklyn, Lethem made the reader feel what it was like to have Tourette's Syndrome. His protagonist was so fresh and interesting, and his plight so sympathetic, that it didn't matter that the story was a kind of silly, mediocre mystery.

Here, the action takes place largely in the area of the perceived Red Menace, and the lead characters are a Jewish communist party member and her daughter.

Maybe if you are really interested in the subject matter and era, you won't mind that the characters don't feel fresh. I felt sometimes that I was reading someone trying to write like Junot Diaz and not quite succeeding.

Maybe next time Lethem will go back to writing like Lethem, which he does really well.

Reading all these reviews leaves no doubt that Jonathan Lethem has many fans, even if this book has not necessarily pleased every one of them. Perhaps inevitable when you have an author that challenges his limits with each new work, not content to merely turn out more of the same, unsatisfied with the tried and true. 'Dissident Gardens' is different enough to represent another leap in the body of work created by Mr. Lethem. Is it a step forward, or a backslide into a morass of prose? You be the judge.
The jacket says this is a "family saga about three generations of all-American Radicals". The book is actually dominated by one character, Rose Angrush, community organizer and member of the Communist Party, who, in spite of living in a world dominated by men, manages to carve out a life where she lives by her principles alone, and exerts her influence over succeeding generations.
The book is set in and around New York City and covers the years from the late 30's through to the twentieth Century. For those of us who know it memories come back in a flood: Sunnyside, Queens, the Village, McDougal Street, Chinatown, the Bowery, McSorley's Cafe, Shea Stadium, the Dodgers, the Jersey Homesteads. Not to mention Dave van Ronk, Bob Dylan, the East Village Other, the Who, What, and Where game and Archie Bunker.
So what's the point of contention, why all the naysayers, wherefore the unhappy reviews? Most of it seems centered around the prose. Too much verbiage. Difficult to understand. Writing for writers and not for readers. Perhaps so! This is the very leap that Lethem has made, the strength of his narrative style. He seems to be flexing all his literary muscles for our benefit, striving for total control of the reader's mind. When he describes a scene he includes every thought, every aside, all the visual and sensory cues that set the time and place as thoroughly as if he is leading you by the hand. Mostly it works but at times it is overpowering.
Take this scene between Rose's activist daughter Miriam and Tommy, her folksinger fiance. "Her attentions had seemed to him like a glorious bottle into which he'd hoped to slip himself and then expand, like a model ship, sails tucked until the moment they rose to occupy every corner. Instead, he felt like a lightening bug, zooming inside only to be swallowed, rebounding against the impassible glass, pulsing a small light so as not to be lost inside." So evocative! Sweet! But then immediately following-"Oughtn't the reefer have made her distractible? It hadn't. The world was close around them, eye of the storm, dark fallen entirely outside the windows." Whoops! What's the image here? There's much of this, especially when it come to describing Cicero Lookins' world (The academic son of Rose's black cop lover, perhaps being an intellectual Cicero has headier thoughts) and a lot of his antics went over my head. Still, if you can put up with the heavy bits there is a lot of good writing in here.
On the whole the story is a bit thin. Once you've been introduced to all the significant characters, and shared in all the significant events, the book keeps rolling even though we've run out of interesting bits. But in the final analysis, the caliber of the writing is what stands out. Mr. Lethem has attempted (and succeeded) in putting together a monument to the art of letters, in spite of having only a single person to eulogize, and barely a whiff of a story.

"Dissident Gardens: A Novel" by Jonathan Lethem wasn't, in my opinion, as good as his prior book. Still, it is good read and well worth your time if you enjoy his work. He does manage to reel in the strange and bizarre then spin it into magnificent stories as nobody else can.

What I didn't enjoy was the book seemed to be longer than it really needed to be. Some of the chapter really dragged on more than they really needed to and almost caused me to lose interest in the book a few times.

Overall, I'm glad I stuck with it and am glad I did.

I took me longer to read Jonathan Lethem’s novel, Dissident Gardens, than any other book in the past decade. That’s not because I’m a slow reader: I read two hundred other books since I first opened this novel eight months ago. What kept me constrained in rushing along with this one is that Lethem’s sentences are worth close attention, and the plot creates no sense of urgency. He explores three generations of a family and uses multiple narrators to present their story. Each of the key characters in the novel is radical in some way, and each develops identity in the context of family and as individuals breaking away from family. The radicalism is something of an inheritance, and provides strength to the bonds across generations. We look to novels to tell us something about human nature, and Lethem does that in this quirky novel, and he does it by constructing sentences that are worth reading slowly and more than once. Readers who appreciate literary fiction are those most likely to enjoy this novel.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

Jonathan Lethem's sardonic, multiple-point-of-view saga looks at three generations of the American Left as focused on a house in a development in Queens. The novel features such a bizarre group of characters, from the communist-activist Rose down to a 300-pound, black, gay postmodernist professor, that you are continually fascinated. Lethem brings out a whole series of narrative tricks, including letters, to give you multiple perspectives on the family, including Rose, her sexy, committed daughter Miriam and Miriam's son, Sergius. The novel is full of New York City color, especially the parts set in Queens, and focuses more on characters seeking to be authentic to themselves almost in spite of the politics they assume as a mantle. Tragic, comic and densely written, Dissident Gardens is a novel to be cultivated. Plus, the novel has a funny origin story for the Mets, in which one character, Miriam's cousin, tries to turn the team into a proletarian symbol.

What do you get when you combine the oddest possible cast of characters, an unlikely plot that combines real life with fantasies, an author who seems to favor a profusion of metaphors and big words when simple declarative language would suffice? Well, you get the point: You get this novel.

I read it following its inclusion on some "best books" list, and I'm still not sure what to think of it. The central character,Rose, a Jewish woman whose family was from the wrong side of Europe (read Poland), her husband, whose family was from the right side (read Germany), their daughter, who marries an Irish folk singer, lives in a commune in NYC and ends up perishing in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution. Rose takes a black lover, Douglas, an NYC policeman, and this apparently gets her kicked out of the local communist party. In later life she has a fantasy affair with Archie Bunker (yes, that one on TV), and ends up demented in Brooklyn nursing home. Then there's Douglas' son, turned gay college teacher in Maine, who before AIDS arrives enjoys anonymous sex at some truck depot by the Hudson River. There's more, but that's enough.

One problem, in my opinion, is that early in the book the author mentions all these people and only much later in the book are their histories told, and this makes for some confusion given the nature of the characters. The use of unusual words and excessive use of metatphors adds to the difficulty in reading, at times.

The novel is enjoyable at times but I'm not sure it's worth the effort to read it.

Although the name of infamous Marxist, Che Guevara, is not so much as mentioned even once in Jonathan Lethem's latest chronicle about a family of Queens, NY lefties, his homonym, Bill Shea is. Shea, the New York lawyer, who along with Branch Rickey announced the formation of what would have been a third Baseball league in the early 1960's, the Continental League - if it wasn't ultimately absorbed into the National league with the assurance of a New York expansion team: the Metropolitans - and for whom Shea Stadium was named, becomes, because of his sound-alike, Guevara, a fortuitous pun and convenient symbol for Lethem to employ in this story about, among other things, the withering defeat of the American radical left-wing.

In the world of sports, Shea Stadium had always loomed large in Flushing, Queens, its shocking blue and radio-active orange facade an in-your-face statement to the traitorous manifest destiny of the legacy clubs from Brooklyn and upper Manhattan. In Dissident Gardens, Lenny (short for Lenin) Angrush has a slightly different idea for the replacement baseball team . He lives, along with his second cousin Rose, in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, where - the Angrush family having transplanted their Russian Jewish roots to the outer boroughs earlier in the 20th century - he aspires, in the thrall of the American Communist Party, to pay tribute to the common worker with a team called the Sunnyside Proletariat ( the Pros for short). He goes to visit Shea equipped with a newly penned theme song for the proposed club. The team and theme both: enduring reminders of the working class's struggle over the power of wealth. Ah, what might have been.

In this paean to leftist New York politics and indeed progressive political dissent in general, Lethem is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking. His main protagonist, Rose Angrush Zimmer is both a heroine and a disappointment; she's a cranky martyr, betrayed by her husband, daughter, grandson, the American Communist Party, you name it. She is a disappointment to all of the above and more. Rose carries on an extramarital affair with an African-American cop, Douglas Lookins; she fosteringly protects and defends his young son Cicero while having forced her own daughter's head into a gas flooded oven. In one of Lethem's more playful scenarios, Rose fantasizes a romantic encounter with Archie Bunker: "It's Like this Rose, a Jew and a Gentile don't have a Chinaman's chance" says Archie ingenuous in his bigotry. But Rose does not give up. "Can you not see I'm a subversive foremost and a Jew only negligibly? Very well, if it makes you hot, f*** a sorrow maddened Commie Jew lady." "Yeeeeeeeze...." replies Archie

Rose's fiercely independent daughter, Miriam, marries Tommy Gogan, a Bob Dylan wannabe, a protest songwriter maybe more in the vein of Phil Ochs. They have a son, Sergius, whom they raise in a commune set in Alphabet City. But when they venture off to Nicaragua in search of real-life revolution not to mention great song material, Sergius is farmed off to a Quaker school in Pennsylvania. Later in life Miriam's Sergius and Rose's Cicero, now out of the closet and grossly overweight, reconnect in a second-generation attempt at reconciliation, both are now teachers carrying on their surrogate guardian's respective legacies. Though, in the end, Sergius becomes emblematic of vainglorious rebellion; imbuing the qualities of a kind of spiteful dissident.

During the Reagan years, Cicero liberates Rose from her nursing home bonds, and escorts her to a Met game at Shea (Che) stadium. Rose insists they sit in the "Upper level reserved, the cheap seats". "Up with God" she calls it. For Rose and Cicero, the game becomes a final bonding experience:
"It's not much but it's pretty good," said Rose.
"Yeah."
"Why didn't we do this a long time ago?"
"We're doing it now."
Under the eaves of Shea, where the hapless Mets are losing again, the old Communist Rose Zimmer finds herself with some hope for redemption. But it's only hope, for months later she and Cicero discuss her personal theology. "God creates the world by going away from the world," She says, and goes on to explain that it is only by leaving that He creates enough space for life to occur. And with this, Lethem seems to say by analogy: Alas, what might have been if only the God of American Capitalism hadn't gotten in the way.

While we most certainly inherit traits and idiosyncrasies from our parents, we are also in many important ways reactions to them, some of us choosing to follow similar paths, others of us veering off in wildly different directions. Lethem’s ninth novel , epic in scope and rich in telling details, exploits these tensions in welcome and surprising ways, telling the stories of three generations of leftists and of several different social movements, set against the diverse backdrop that only the environs of New York City could provide. Is it his best? I favor Gun, With Occasional Music and Motherless Brooklyn myself, but Dissident Gardens IS vintage Lethem, funny and knowing and compulsively readable, full of memorable set pieces, especially those involving matriarch Rose Zimmer and America’s favorite bigot, Archie Bunker. As such, it is well worth your time and attention.

Being a Vine reviewer comes with some drawbacks. Having to read DISSIDENT GARDENS has been one of them. I reserve one-star reviews for books that are not only bad, but so horrible as to offend my sense of existence. I may have given this rather unreadable jumble of words two stars, but it was a close call. I did have to really think about it.

There are two main problems with the book, one with what is there, the other with what is not. What is there is prose so overly verbose as to tax the patience of even the most diligent of readers. Lethem seems, in this book about several generations of Communists in the family, to have adopted the Communist method of numbing his audience through sheer volume. Why use ten words to describe something when 154 will do instead? Such verbiage would be nice if it added texture to the prose, providing shade and nuance to character or plot development. It does not. It merely drones on.

Time and again reading DISSIDENT GARDENS, I was reminded of that other author whose works touched upon Communism: Ayn Rand. I recently re-read the first 25 pages of ATLAS SHRUGGED after about 20 years. I did not realize it the first time around, but I sure did this time: her critics are right; she is not only overly wordy, but extremely so. The experience was mind-numbing.

The other problem with DISSIDENT GARDENS, the problem about what is not there, is that the book never provided the true subjectively experienced belief in Communism. It has been said for years, by both those on the Right and even by many on the Left, that for the Right, politics is an unpleasant necessity, but for the Left, it is a religion. Many ideologies of the Left seem to act as mental bear traps, ensnaring psyches in a grip as tight as it is sharp. I wanted to experience that in DISSIDENT GARDENS, if only vicariously.

We get none of it. Indeed, if the book had been a multi-generational account of Eisenhower Republicans rather than Communists, it would not have required much tweaking for the re-write.

Just this past week I found myself in a conversation with someone intricately involved in the publishing world. I described my experience with this book, and she hit it on the head, stating that Lethem is writing for other writers, showing off for those within his own club. I shall refrain from trying to become a member and suggest you do, as well. Skipping DISSIDENT GARDENS is a good place to start.

Beneath the wittily ironic history of three generations' worth of New York City radicalism, Jonathan Lethem's latest novel is a rather conventional saga of family dysfunction and devotion. Politically-engaged readers may find frustrating this reduction of ideology to personality, and of personality to family history, and even readers who have no idea what I mean by that may feel that the protagonists, for all their fierce, quirky charm, lack the psychological richness that would make their story rewarding as well as amusing. When late in the novel a character falls in love with Archie Bunker (it's complicated), you realize that that's a perfect opposites-attract match: the lovable but hopelessly bigoted Archie, and one of Lethem's lovable but hopelessly left-wing heroes. The characters often seem, in other words, to have escaped from an episode of MAUDE.

But I shouldn't sell DISSIDENT GARDENS short. The family dynamics may be simplistically represented, but they're real enough, capturing the way children at once accept and reject what their parents hand down. And Lethem's convoluted, knowing language is both a pleasure in itself and a match for the characters and setting. His use of detail demonstrates that he's no tourist in the worlds of American radicalism and New York history, but someone with firsthand knowledge. His affection for these elements verges, to my mind, on the patronizing: too sympathetic to be coldly satiric, but too superior to take any of it quite seriously. This is an uncanny valley from which no meaningful thematic or character material can escape, but it makes for an entertaining and well-observed variation on traditional themes.

The very first sentence (a homage to Philip Roth's masterpiece "Sabbath''s Theater"), put my back up for some reason. Mr. Lethem writes good sentences and has good ideas, but nothing more. Aside from Rose Zimmer,the characters are one-dimensional - none are alive. He should stick to essays and introductions, he's pretty good at those. Life's too short to read banal novels - give this one a pass.

Some may be disconcerted by the novel's hopping around time periods from the 1930's to the present time, but it definitely works in giving an overview of America's political movements and their influence on the personal lives of several related characters. We are exposed ton communism and to McCarthyism. We share varied perspectives from the mother Rose, her daughter Miriam, Cicero who's the son of Roses' Black cop lover, chess player Lenny who's Rose's nephew, and somehow the author weaves these all together to give us the feel of the high points during our country's last 80 or so years. Though it can be confusing occasionally, this is a quite rewarding read in its journey through time, through various perspectives, and from satire to realism. On the trip, us older readers will enjoy nostalgic references to entertainment and sports personalities. As an instance, remember Burl Ives? Be that azs it may, this is a book to read and experience.

The description for the book says that in America radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility and indifference. Here, the author is in the hostility camp. The characters are cartoons. It is a cruel book. Very cruel. Occasional bemusement comes along and there is a comic flash reminiscent of Philip Roth but otherwise endless writing about people their creator thinks are fools,

This is my first exposure to Johnathan Lethem. A fascinating and sometimes confusing novel, well written, cynical, humorous, and correctly placed in all its "times." As the cover says, 1930's to the occupy movement. I enjoyed it once I got past the initial two chapters. Then it flows well.

Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, NY is a real place on the roster of US Historical Places, built, I believe beginning in the 1920's. It is the first example of US megablock style housing projects, in this case garden apartments. The story, which builds from that background, is about ordinary people, chapter by chapter, mixed up in time, place, identity, self-importance, ancestors, and not recognizing being part of the flotsam and muck of much larger happenings.

Rose, our fire-breathing, always right communist who discarded her Jewish identity is strong, overbearing and remarkably willing to take various forms of 'no' as her daughter and others either move-in, move out, move on or throw her out of their lives. As she gets on in years her local bar scene in Queens takes her on and over.

Miriam, Rose's daughter, also leaves Judaism behind. She moves out when at 16, flirts with but never finishes college, lives in a variety of Manhattan communes, gets married to Tommy, a failing folksinging Irishman and has a son, Sergius, with him. She and her husband are killed while chasing 'revolution in Nicaragua. Her son is taken in by a Quaker residential academy and - grows up.

Cicero, the child of Rose's black NY police lieutenant lover is taken under her wing and pushed to/through higher education. His path is gay and becoming a true academic, well insulated from the real world. He succeeds, within his own developmental confusion.

At the end, Cicero is there for Rose as she goes through the trauma of dying in a Queens nursing home. Sergius meets his grandmother Rose just before her death, and later has a brief fling with a woman picked up at an 'occupy' event. This chapter is partially flat. It ends with his being picked up at the Maine airport by TSA, done as a putdown of TSA practices.

In all, a highly unusual and enthralling, mind catching book with lots of minor characters, both confusing and solid. For parts of it you need to be living in or having grown up in NYC to fully appreciate some of the stuff happening or the characters living in dreams. The immediate switch from Rose in chapter 1 to chapter 2 and grown-up kids was not well-linked together, confusing and to me the only real 'flowability' issue in the book. All in all, very worth reading. I will try some of his others.

He brings an intimate perspective, flaws for all to see, to a utopia unrealized. And the elegance of the words allows easy navigation of turbulent waters in an American landscape that has receded too quickly from our thoughts. He lets us imagine again, what was and what could have been, and what never had a chance.
Real or not, I saw all the characters clearly, and I have seen them before and still.

A pretty humorous portrayal of a sad family of communist dissidents. Things just seem to not go well for this family. The novel does contain some very interesting characters and the story goes very quickly. Highly intelligent use of language and vocabulary. I enjoyed the tale although the motivations of the characters were foreign to me.

What a brilliant novel! It is entertaining, fun, and nearly impossible to put down. I carried it with me wherever I went to use every opportunity I got to read at least a couple more pages. I felt like I could recognize many of the people I know in the novel's characters.

The first sentence in this novel turned me off to such an extent that I doubt I'll read the rest of it.

My grandfather built Sunnyside Gardens, and I was raised there. My wife also spent the first six months of her life there. I bought this book with eager anticipation. That anticipation has been destroyed. I can assure you that nobody would have spoken that way at that time.

Jonathan Lethem again puts forward an original timepiece of Americana, a compassionate study of some left-wing folks who are no longer in the politically correct conversation anywhere else but in memory. How does he do it? Again and again, his works amaze and delight us. What a genius! What a national treasure!

A wonderful book which I heartily recommend to all those who have ever frequented the Queensboro Plaza IRT/BMT subway stop, or who would have been happy to root for a major league baseball club called the Sunnyside Proletarians, or who might have taken a college seminar on "Disgust and Proximity," or who are just moved and amused by the pathos and humor of our human condition.

Promised much didn't deliver. The main female character didn't develop. The book about harry Gold "the invisible spy " deals with this fascinating time and american jewish communism. Non fiction. Was excellent. I knew several chidren of this era.

I first read Motherless Brooklyn some years ago but the author captured me with his haunting characters. He does it again here. These are you neighbors and they are nuts, wholesome, do-gooders. A perplexing novel - is it satire or is it real lfe? An American legend gives us another slice of life of this great or not so great country of ours.

What the Minstrel Show did for black people, Lethem has tried to do for New York lefties. "Raven-haired Jewess"?!!! What's next, Jonathan, "darkies rolling their eyes"?

Paul Werner
Editor, WOID: a journal of visual language