Jonathan Lethem

We'll list here those books we think most appealing to speculative fiction fans:

Gun, with Occasional Music — (1994) Publisher: The first novel by Jonathan Lethem is a hard-boiled, noir mystery, a dark and funny post-modern romp serving further evidence that Lethem is the distinctive voice of a new generation. Conrad Metcalf has problems. He has a monkey on his back, a rabbit in his waiting-room, and a trigger-happy kangaroo on his tail. (Maybe evolution therapy is not such a good idea). He's been shadowing Celeste, the wife of an Oakland urologist. Maybe falling in love with her a little at the same time. When the doctor turns up dead, Metcalf finds himself caught in a crossfire between the boys from the inquisitor's Office and gangsters who operate out of the back room of the Fickle Muse.

Amnesia Moon — (1995) Publisher: The much-anticipated second novel from the author of Gun, with Occasional Music. Since the war and the bombs, Hatfork, Wyoming, is a broken-down, mutant-ridden town. Young Chaos lives in a projection booth therem trying to blot out his present, unable to remember his past. Then the local tyrant, Kellog, reveals to him over a can of dog food that the bombs never fell. The truth is a little more complicated...

The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye — (1996) Story collection. Publisher: In a collection that places him in the same league as Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem, Lethem offers stories that move from insight to hip, satirical humor with fluid grace, and display a breadth of science fiction imagination that is rooted in the genre yet transcends its boundaries.

As She Climbed Across the Table — (1997) Publisher: Particle physicist Alice Coombs and her colleagues are on the cusp of a great discovery. They have created a void, a hole in the universe, a nothingness they have named "Lack". Philip Engstrand loves Alice Coombs. The trouble is that Lack is about to come between them.

Girl in Landscape — (1998) Publisher: The heroine is fourteen-year-old Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just as her family flees a postapocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to the virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community, as well as the odd and exotic natives. Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and a homage to the great American tradition of the western.

This Shape We're In — (2000) Publisher: Lethem, author of the bestselling Motherless Brooklyn, returns in concentrated form — packing twice the adventure into one-eighth the pages. This book could be some kind of allegory book, but it might not be an allegory book at all. It involves people and drinking and people looking for a giant eye. It is among the best things Mr. Lethem has written.

The Fortress of Solitude — (2003) Publisher: This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification." This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human decisions-what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money-are laden with potential political, social and racial disaster. This is the story of 1990s America, when no one cared anymore. This is the story of punk, that easy white rebellion, and crack, that monstrous plague. This is the story of the loneliness of the avant-garde artist and the exuberance of the graffiti artist. This is the story of what would happen if two teenaged boys obsessed with comic book heroes actually had superpowers: They would screw up their lives. This is the story of joyous afternoons of stickball and dreaded years of schoolyard extortion. This is the story of belonging to a society that doesn't accept you. This is the story of prison and of college, of Brooklyn and Berkeley, of soul and rap, of murder and redemption.

The Fortress of Solitude

There are some beautiful moments in The Fortress of Solitude — moments of crystalline description, of poetic evocation of time and place, moments of heartbreaking human interaction. But for me, these moments just didn't hold together long enough or happen often enough.

The Fortress of Solitude follows Dylan Ebdus, known as "whiteboy" to those around him on Dean Street due to the rarity of his skin color, as he grows up and out of the Brooklyn neighborhood. While we see Dylan from age five through middle-age, most of the book focuses on his young teen years and especially his friendship with Mingus Rude, a friendship which goes on and off through the years. Both boys are motherless. Dylan's liberal-minded mother has left him to his painter father who has given up a promising artist career to work obsessively on an abstract painting on film while Mingus lives with his father, Barret Junior — a once-famous singer who spirals into drugs and obscurity. Both fathers threaten to take their children down with them, both fathers try to rise out of their depths.

Other main characters include another young white boy even further down the junior and high school hierarchy than Dylan, and a street tough who is a constant physical and psychological threat to Dylan over the years.

Many have lauded the evocation of 1970's Brooklyn — the poetic recreation of that world of stickball and skully and comic books and stoopball and gentrification — and there is some truly amazing writing put to that purpose. But for all the loving detail, it never felt intimate enough to evoke much feeling. Some of the pop references felt like set pieces or throw-away time markers, some sections were overly long and others not long enough, some had powerful emotive effects (the section of skully for instance) and others seemed recitation of cold descriptive facts.

Part of the problem was that the characters never truly felt fully-formed or real, especially Mingus, so I cared even less about the setting. A lot of time is spent on early Dylan to good effect but he starts to pale as a character as the book goes on and is not particularly likable or interesting as an adult. Mingus is too often too removed (both literally and figuratively) and therefore too many of the character "tags" associated with him — graffiti, drug use, drug dealing — have the feel of cliche rather than character development. The other white boy, Arthur, I found too often simply unbelievable in his speech, which was too bad since it was a distraction from his actions, which could have had much more of an emotional impact had I accepted him as a person.

The magical-realism part involving a ring which can supposedly make the wearer fly or invisible (among other powers) feels a bit forced and uneven; it intervenes clumsily at times, more effectively at others. The same is true of the comic book motif which moves from painfully belabored to beautifully evocative of desire, loneliness, despair, and power.

Overall, The Fortress of Solitude just didn't hold together for me. It was too episodic in nature without adding up to a whole greater than its parts and the characters were just not fully formed enough for me to care despite the plot's weaknesses and uneven pace. The best section for me was the middle, past the first 100 pages or so. I was tempted several times in those first 100 to put it down, and even more so once Dylan moved into his older teens and on to college and adulthood, but the potential and the occasional gem of a sentence or paragraph or several pages would keep me going through the next rough patch. Ultimately though, the strengths of The Fortress of Solitude were overshadowed by its weaknesses and I finished unsure if I would have been better off giving into the temptation to quit earlier. —Bill Capossere

Chronic City — (2009) Publisher: The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies. 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.

Chronic City

Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City has lots to admire: great lines, witty jokes and good insights. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more to admire here than to enjoy. The sum ended up being less than its parts, to me. This may have been part of the point, and certainly the sense of disconnectedness is as well, but one of the dangers of a novel about disconnectedness is that it can feel, well, disconnected. The trick is to avoid this somehow, and I can’t say Lethem succeeds here.

Chronic City is set in an alternate Manhattan where a mysterious “Tiger” is wreaking infrastructural havoc from underground (what the Tiger really is remains a mystery for some time, or, depending on your reading, forever), a strange gray fog hovers over the financial district, and it snows in summer. Over the city, a sick female astronaut — Janice Trumbull — is orbiting, stuck on a space station that is slowly dying with its crew.

The story is told mostly through the eyes of Chase Insteadman, former child TV star and Janice’s fiancé. Early on, Chase is introduced to Perkus Tooth, a critic of many sorts, a conspiracy-believer, an obsessive referent (to movies, music, etc), and an indefatigable pot smoker. As the book progresses, a few other characters are added to the small circle of Chase’s life — a ghostwriter named Oona, an aide to the billionaire mayor of the city, and a handful of others — and we also get to read Janice’s letters to Chase.

Lethem is influenced by several authors here; you’ll get whiffs of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Paul Auster. And in some ways he nails those bits, but it’s kind of like a pitch-perfect mimic who doesn’t quite have the same presence as whatever he is imitating. That isn’t to say Chronic City is derivative — it has the feel of those three writers’ work but Lethem has definitely made these elements his own — but the end result and overall effect feel lacking. It’s kind of like the opposite of an Impressionist painting. It holds together in small pieces, but the more you step back the less it does so, until it just blurs away.

The plot, what there is, isn’t particularly compelling and the first 200 pages were a chore to get through. In fact, were it not for it being Lethem, I would have stopped after 100. Were it not a review book, I would have quit despite it being Lethem at 175-200. It does pick up past that point and become stronger, but not leaps and bounds better. Pacing remains an issue throughout. One major aspect of the plot, the quest for the chaldron (it’s a long story) just never felt real to me. Another aspect, which felt like it wanted to be a revelation, seemed a bit too obvious.

The drifting, aimless characters, like the plot, don’t hold a lot of interest as characters in their own right (as opposed to character types). I can’t say I truly cared what happened to any of them. Their search for truth never feels organic, as if it bubbles up from within the characters or drives them naturally. The onslaught of references — to movies, to music, to books and authors — offers up its moments of humor or self-satisfaction or preening superiority (“how many other readers will get that reference?”), but wears thin before long. Chronic City has a cooler, more crafted and detached sense than the warmer intimacy of Pynchon. Lethem’s references seem to exclude even when you get the reference, while Pynchon, for whatever reason, feels more inclusive, welcoming you into the club no matter how befuddled you might feel. Or even if it’s the wrong club. And the setting felt too claustrophobically centered on Manhattan, which is probably more my problem than Lethem’s.

My favorite parts, beyond the wonderfully written sentences, were the alternate reality segments: the Tiger, the fog, the dogs (another long story). They are handled with a nice light touch, and I could have done with more of the same.

In the end, Chronic City was a disappointment. It was a tough go for the first 200 pages and the characters and plot didn’t really hold interest. What redeemed it somewhat, though not enough to garner a recommendation, were its smaller points, the great lines scattered throughout the work and those wonderful off-center alternate-reality moments. Had Lethem brought this in at a Crying of Lot 49 or Paul Auster length, I think it could have really shone, but at nearly 500 pages it gets bogged down by its own size, obscuring the novel’s gems. —Bill Capossere