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    Dissident Gardens: A Novel
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    Dissident Gardens: A Novel
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    Dissident Gardens: A Novel
    Audiobook16 hours

    Dissident Gardens: A Novel

    Written by Jonathan Lethem

    Narrated by Mark Bramhall

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers-an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals

    At the center of Jonathan Lethem's superb new novel stand two extraordinary women: Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist who savages neighbors, family, and political comrades with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her precocious and willful daughter, Miriam, equally passionate in her activism, flees Rose's influence to embrace the dawning counterculture of Greenwich Village.

    These women cast spells over the men in their lives: Rose's aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her cousin, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriam's (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. Flawed and idealistic, Lethem's characters struggle to inhabit the utopian dream in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.

    As the decades pass-from the parlor communism of the '30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged '70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the moment-we come to understand through Lethem's extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.

    Lethem's characters may pursue their fates within History with a capital H, but his novel is-at its mesmerizing, beating heart-about love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 10, 2013
    ISBN9780307940902
    Unavailable
    Dissident Gardens: A Novel
    Author

    Jonathan Lethem

    Jonathan Lethem is the bestselling author of twelve novels, including The Arrest, The Feral Detective, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

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    Reviews for Dissident Gardens

    3.5/5

    103 ratings14 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Brilliantly written, obviously the creation of a deep and wide-ranging mind. (I did occasionally wish the brilliance would dim just a bit in service of the story, but maybe that's just me .) Loved the characters and the wonderful sense of time and place.
    • 2/5
      It is hard to decide if Jonathan Lethem is more in love with his general self-loathing or his certainty that all else be damned, he is the smartest guy in the room. And mostly he is the smartest guy in the room. His command of 20th century history (social, political, sports, philatelic pop-culture, etc. and especially anything New York) is breathtaking, edifying, and entertaining. Until it isn't. The constant speechifying on a diverse range of topics left me unable to find any story at all in this book. I am not a person who needs much of a plot. My tastes definitely run to novels which are more character studies than page turners. Even with character driven novels though, there has to be some story, and this had none. That though, is not the only reason Dissident Gardens doesn't work as a character study. The biggest problem here is that the book purports to tell the story of two women, and Lethem apparently knows nothing about women, nothing about mothers and daughters, nothing about the frustration of being silenced because you have a vagina. Many people complain about this issue with respect to several of my favorite writers: Phillip Roth; Saul Bellow; Kurt Vonnegut; Michael Chabon; Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jonathan Franzen (who made me laugh when he wrote about "a plague of literary Jonathans.") I can't correct those who complain, they are not wrong. The difference though is that Roth, Bellow, Vonnegut and Chabon did not really try to understand women, their perspective was their very own and the women in the books only serve to help us understand the men at the centers of their respective universes. The Jonathans, Safran Foer and Franzen, have both tried to write from a woman's perspective with varying degrees of success. Lethem though is a total failure. I know Miriam is supposedly based on his mother, but I will say absolutely that Lethem did not know shit about his mother. That seems arrogant, after all it is his mother and I did not know her, but I do know that no human being in history, regardless of their place on the gender spectrum, has ever borne any resemblance to the character of Miriam or her mother Rose. And this book hangs on these women. Since they are badly drawn characters the book fails.This book took me three months to read, and though I love to savor books I read a lot and fairly quickly. I read 25 other books in the time that I was reading this one. I kept putting it down, and found myself without the will to pick it back up. It sat on my bedside table week after week. Every night I looked at it and it glared back, almost accusatory in its silent presence. When I picked it up I would always think; "Why did I stop reading? This is funny and smart." And then I would come out of whatever entertaining digression I came in on and get back to the central characters. I would then think "ah, that is what I was thinking!"There are passages of this book that are incredibly delightful, but the whole is a mess.
    • 3/5
      I loved one of Lethem's books. I liked a couple of others. So I was surprised to be so uninvolved with this one that, for the last third of the book, I just wished it would end. Either that or DO something: come together. make a point, resolve. .. But no, it just meandered to an ending that could as easily have been the end of one of the endless chapters as the end of a book. That said, Lethem is a beautiful writer. I can get lost in his sentences. I will be certain to keep him on my list of favorite authors and hope I won't be disappointed.
    • 3/5
      An ambitious and rewarding read but it tends to spend too much time and space on less interesting characters and doesn't delve deeply enough into the main character and, in particular, her relationship with the black police officer which kicks off the whole novel.
    • 1/5
      I wasn't going to add this into my list since I only read until page 75 or so but I detested it so much I wanted credit for trying. Jonathan Lethem has been one of my favorite writers. I loved Motherless Brooklyn and his book of essays are one of my favorites. I have been moved to tears by some of his writing. With Dissident Gardens I was moved by tears of rage. Besides that the characters are so unsympathetic (which is OK, I like reading about unsympathetic characters)his caricature of a Jewish mother and her daughter was unbearably stereotypical. I think I will stick to his non-fiction.
    • 3/5
      I schlogged through this book, wanting to love it and at times feeling close, but never really getting there. In the end I felt sorry for Rose, she was so dedicated to improving the lot of mankind, that she left every person in her family adrift, unhappy, alone and in most cases dead. Lethem presents some beautiful writing evoking the period, but the characters that I should've related to wholeheartedly, instead made me wonder why I read books in the first place. I wanted badly to write a review that refuted the first two here, because I"ve been such a fan of his earlier fiction, and it was that impulse that made me stick with the story, but I really felt I had wasted my time.
    • 3/5
      Dissident Gardens displays the great writing that Lethem employs in the previous works that I have read by him. But like a great chef who uses the best ingredients but whose recipe doesn't come together, it is the case in this novel. He seemed to have too many characters across too long a time period for it all to come together. The book covers a long time period from the 30's until the present but doesn't really make you feel the time period he is writing about. Characters are introduced that are not as interesting as other characters in the book so why introduce them. Of course you can always marvel at Lethem's writing but I would suggest to anyone who has not read Lethem that "Fortress of Solitude" is the book that I would read first. Having just read "The Circle " by Dave Eggers, I was struck by the contrast in styles. Egger's told a interesting story in a simple narrative style, while Lethem did a character study in a dense creative narrative but the story was inert and not that compelling. When I am just trying to get through a book then I know that it hasn't grabbed me. Of course, I will read the next book he does but I would like to see something outside the city of New York.
    • 5/5
      The book leaps around in time and place among many characters. In the end the effect is more of a collection of short stories. These are fascinating characters but all the time is spent setting them up on the chessboard and very little is focused on their actual moves. All that said, I loved the book. Lethem at the height of his powers. Seems to be working his way through the boroughs. Bronx is up next. Will he get to Staten Island?
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing book by an author who is willing to take on complex female, as well as complex male, characters. Lethem's use of language is incredible; the historical scope is broad. Being a Quaker, I think that the Quakers and their unique history, for example, got bleached out in the blinding ray of Lethem's focus on Communism and the dissolution of Communism. But I can understand this as his characters' perspective.
      Others may be put off by the relegation of Occupy to a latter day irrelevancy. The point, I think, is worth hearing, even if we don't agree. This seems to me a very much longer version of Eliot's Wasteland,
      including at least one quote from it. I don't agree with the viewpoint of the protagonist of the book's second half, but he is a hell of a great character, and one I wanted to meet.
    • 3/5
      i.I anticipated this book more than any other in 2013.ii. As they say of Cleveland Browns football franchise, “You are a factory of sadness!”iii.Not that the book was disappointing. The characters are just dismal people. iv.I read this book twice. This is the first time I have done that in a decade. v. Lethem made a huge leap here with his prose but there is really no plot, and the characters offer little to admire. Lethem made a similar leap forward with regards to structure in his previous novel Chronic City. Chronic City was the first of his books to really feel cohesive. He really made a world, sustained a tone, and it really felt like every piece fit. Though little happened in the plot of Chronic City it hung together well. It did not feel disjunctive. Dissident Gardens is a world unto itself but it is tarpit that only gets thicker and darker until there is eventually, literally, a delusional fantasy about Archie Bunker. I felt the same way I felt when I finished Chronic City: I can’t wait for Jonathan Lethem’s next novel.
    • 3/5
      With the end of WWII and the failure of the Nazis, the forties are overrun with the fear of the spread of Communism. As the fifties begin, Joe McCarthy finds them under every rock. The Korean War enters the headlines. In the sixties, the hippies and flower children spout “make love not war”. Vietnam takes center stage. By the time the novel ends, in the 21st century, the Occupy movement, supposedly representing “the 99%” of the population, is in the headlines. The protest movement is alive and well and the reader may well wonder if the story begins and ends in practically the same place, with disenchanted characters helpless to really effect any lasting change, regardless of the intervening decades, still actively marching. With the touch of humor that the author injects, the reader is relieved from the constant tension and hopelessness of the novel’s major theme.Rose and Albert Zimmer live in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, a hotbed of Communism after World War II. It is a community that does not live up to its name. They have one child, Miriam, and when Albert is sent back to his native Germany, to establish a Communist cell, Rose is left to raise their child alone. Already bitter and angry, she becomes harder and more forceful, pushing the envelope at every opportunity, looking for causes to support and causes to protest, not always following party guidelines. After many years, she is excommunicated from the Communist Party for fraternizing with a black policeman with whom she falls in love and develops a relationship. He is already married and the father of a child, Cicero, so their romantic relationship is doomed to eventual failure. Rose seems rightly perceived as a kind of loose cannon as well as a rather loose woman. She flaunts her sexuality, even though she is no longer young, and has a pretty much one-track mind when it comes to what she wants out of life. She is like a steamroller and people get out of her way, and even Cicero, who remains loyal to her until her death, is not her greatest fan.Miriam comes of age when the flower children are carrying signs saying “make love not war” and the hippies are singing about the “age of Aquarius”. She is loved by her cousin Lenin, but his love for her is unrequited since she marries a folk singer, Tommy Gogan, and they eventually go off together to Nicaragua and the Sandinistas, basically abandoning their only child, a son, Sergius, as her father and then her mother, had once abandoned and/or disappointed Miriam. Sergio grows up in a private school situation where he eventually obtains a full scholarship and is mentored by Professor Murphy who hopes that his relationship with Sergius will help him to gain the attention of Miriam’s best friend, free thinking Stella.Each of the characters appears to be a hapless creature with some kind of a personal flaw or issue causing conflict in their lives. Stella is a free spirit who will not be tied down, Professor Murphy has a hare-lip, Lenin has unusually short thumbs, Cicero, a teacher and author, is gay, Sergius is a songwriter, like his father, searching for a cause. Lydia is an activist and she and Sergius eventually find each other to begin a life similar to Rose and Miriam’s, that of militant and protester. Although the characters seemed to represent different social issues, from adultery to religious fervor to Communism, to Nationalism, to homosexuality, interracial relationships and interreligious unions, from revolutionaries to freedom fighters, depending on one’s viewpoint, to the imperfect and those that thought they were more perfect than others, they all also seemed to be caricatures of themselves, always unhappy, never quite achieving their goals, often dwelling on the mundane, rather than the crucial issues facing them. They were Job-like in the way life treated them, for whatever good they thought they were trying to achieve, they really seemed to have achieved little. The same restlessness seemed to plague all of the characters and screamed from the pages. The narrative sometimes seemed to randomly jump from place to place, character to character, theme to theme, borough to borough, nursing home to subway, classroom to apartment, in order to make jarring points which all seemed to come together, unexpectedly, in the end, almost as one common theme; discontent and activism was and still is alive and well. Rose was a radical, as Miriam matures, she too fights the establishment, and when her son grows up, he is preoccupied with the search for a cause. When Sergius becomes involved with Lydia, the theme rolls on with them as they camp in the tent cities of the Occupiers.Famous names were strewn throughout the novel, from Hitler to Che Guevara to Joseph Stalin, Robert Moses, and William Shea of Shea Stadium’s fame. The author was well versed in the history of the era, and the corruption and protests of the times were described in staccato like fashion. The words and sentence structure were like bullets coming at the reader, only occasionally relieved by the author’s witty narrative. Although the prose was essentially excellent, it sometimes waxed too long. Sometimes the language was inappropriate and offensive when it didn’t need to be so crude. Light and heavy themes occurred adjacent to each other, there was an odd juxtaposition of ideas, so that war and free love seemed to occur on the same page, and the inner light within a person coexisted with the dangers of the pilot light on a stove, and the suffering of a horse and human being were equalized. Rose, who started out as an idealistic communist, wound up worshiping Archie Bunker. Rose often lived within her imagination and in the end was a shadow of her former self. Her diminishment was a commentary on the meaning of the novel. In the end, the purpose for which one fights is often corrupted and the strength one has often becomes weakness as the task becomes futile and the hero or heroine slackens with the cause and its importance fades. As we age and diminish, waste and wane away, so do our efforts and our causes. Rose is no longer preoccupied with political and civil injustice but is left more concerned with the injustice her body is inflicting upon her as she dwells upon her bodily functions, first and foremost. She witnesses the truth that often the people we hold dearest, our closest allies, those we expect to stand by us through thick and thin are absent and we are supported by the unexpected friend, but she does not show much appreciation. Her life has not changed or taught her very much. Although the prose was essentially excellent, it waxed too long and a bit too poetic.All of the characters were radicals at heart; but nothing was resolved for them over the intervening decades. They were led by their idealism and their dogma, whether based in realism or whimsy. This story seemed to be about nonconformists struggling to create a world in which they would fit, but each seemed to be waving the same flag for what they perceived as injustice in their attempt to create a better world to little effect.The discordance and dissonance of the novel was made more apparent by the reader’s interpretation of this audio book. Although not my kind of dialogue, it was well-written and in the end, Albert, mentioned only in the beginning, a man who began his “career with his disillusionment in America’s democracy, is shown at the end of the book tending his own gardens, the ones he cultivates in Germany, still sowing the same seeds of discontentment, in a place owning a name that translates to Dissident Gardens. In the end, weren’t all the characters trying to sow their own seeds, in their own gardens? Did any ever find peace and contentment? Was this entire novel a metaphor for The Garden of Eden, which also yielded disappointment that was inspired by discontent?
    • 4/5
      A cascade, a torrent, a maelstrom of words tumbling from the pages to inundate the reader. A concise writer Lethem is not. In this long case study novel of New York Jewish communists, hippie hangouts, and a black Yaley, three generations come and many go, one back to Germany, one to…oops that would be a spoiler--except for the fact that temporal order is not important in the book. Lethem time travels in his pages.

      His characters are as intense as his words. Readers are worn out after a dozen pages. (well, this reader was.) And as a treat for all you golden years folks, Letham uses references to Dylan and Dave van Ronk, and pulls snips of lyrics that younger folks will have to google. So this is your book, much like the grocery store musak that now plays big hits of the 70s as you carouse with the veggies and tomatoes.

      A long read, one that is easy to put down--it is segmented into separate stories (including a STASI file). But one that feels satisfying when finished. Like a big hippie feast or maybe a big kosher spread.
    • 3/5
      Despite its elegant writing style and interesting structure, I often found this novel difficult to follow, thus had trouble maintaining my enthusiasm for it. The syntax was inviting and conversational, but too often broken by aside references, many of which were obscure. However, those that I did understand, I found to be clever and frequently humorous. Rose’s assessment of nursing home conversations is priceless: “What remained was a bunch of harmless old people gossiping about Florida and death—of the two destinations, Rose couldn’t say which was worse.” The non-linear narrative structure leads to confusion that is only clarified later. One needs to stick to this story to fully appreciate it because all things that at first seem obscure are clarified at some point. However, I fear that many readers may become frustrated by this structure and abandon reading the novel.The plot follows a group of radicals—most related to each other in some way—through various American dissident movements—Communism, war protesting, hippies, Quakerism, Latin American revolutionaries and the Occupy movement. The characters are true-believers of one type or another and self-absorbed. In the novel, Lethem explores the consequences of American indifference, flexible ethics, racism and materialism on this ardor. “The century’s great comedy: that Communism never existed, not once. So what was there to oppose?” What remains is what Lethem calls the “long slow departure of faith.” Faith in activism, faith in religion, faith in ethnic roots, and faith in the possibility for meaningful political change. Lethem evokes the wonderful metaphor of the “time pilot”, a video game where Sergius discovers a strategy for dealing with assaulting planes that pose ever increasing challenges by never rising to the level of the challenge. “The time pilot who never fires a shot remains stuck at level one until his enemies thicken to blot out the very air he requires to breathe.” In the end, Surgius comes to realize that movements are futile in this environment and he is “a cell of one.”
    • 4/5
      Funny and smart- all that you want from Lethem!