Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem

Published by Ecco on October 3, 2023

Every other Jonathan Lethem book I’ve read, I enjoyed. This one didn’t speak to me. The story, to the extent that one exists, is told in a series of vignettes that explore an significant number of mostly male characters of varying ages and races and their relationships in Brooklyn between the 1930s and the upcoming end of the Trump administration.

The first sentence of chapter 2 is “This is a story about what nobody knows.” Count me among those who don’t know. Lethem later confesses that he’s probably losing the reader. Count me among the lost. Confessing that you're turning off readers is a very postmodernist thing to do, but it makes the book unappealing for anyone but diehard students of postmodernism.

I don’t fault Lethem for lack of ambition. I imagine he was trying to create a micro-history of Brooklyn with an emphasis on its unsavory flavors, a chronicle of changes that replaced impoverished criminals with wealthy ones. I fault the meandering execution, the episodic storytelling that never quite coheres, the failure to encourage readers to invest in the characters. To me, the novel felt like scenes cut from a movie. I would rather have seen the movie.

Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood. Lethem’s attempts to create a level of intimacy with the reader that he fails to achieve. I generally enjoy Lethem's prose, as I did in this novel, but sharp sentences just aren't enough. Some street scenes are vivid; some characters have the feel of authenticity. But — perhaps because I’m getting old — I lost track the characters and then lost track of my attempts to keep track of them. Finally, I lost interest.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem

Published by HarperCollins/Ecco on November 10, 2020

Integral to the story Jonatham Lethem tells in The Arrest is a nuclear-powered supercar called Blue Streak, apparently inspired by nostalgia for a past that imagined the wondrous future of technology. Unlike Blue Streak, most technology in this near future novel has stopped working. Like the power failure in Don DeLillo’s The Silence, the source of this calamity is the subject of speculation rather than explanation. And like DeLillo, Lethem takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to how characters respond to the collapse of the familiar.

The Arrest started with the loss of television, which “contracted a hemorrhagic ailment” that led to the brief return of Family Ties and news of the Vietnam War before it died completely. Email and social media suffered “colony collapse disorder.” Guns worked for almost a year before gunpowder stopped igniting. In the absence of connectivity, the United States was replaced by wherever you happened to be. Technology gave way to solar dehydrators and rooftop rain collectors. Why the Blue Streak (which was assembled from a tunnel boring machine) still works is a mystery to everyone.

Journeyman (a/k/a Alexander Duplessis or Sandy) lives with his sister Madeleine on her farm that operates as a commune. Three towns near the farm occupy a peninsula in Maine. Journeyman’s role in this new world is to bring food and supplies to Jerome Kormetz, a child molester who has been exiled by agreement to a lakeside cabin. He also delivers food to the Cordon, whose members had probably fancied themselves to be a militia before their guns stopped working. The Cordon have formed a perimeter, supposedly to protect the peninsula from attack by New Hampshire. The Cordon are actually more interested in intimidating peninsula residents to assure that the Cordon are fed.

In his pre-collapse life, Journeyman pounded out screenplays for his friend Peter Todbaum, a Hollywood producer who has the ability to pitch but not to create. He made a good living pitching ideas that Journeyman turned into scripts and then pitching the scripts to studios. They were working on a movie about a dystopian future called Yet Another World before the Arrest. Todbaum wanted Journeyman to cobble it together from classic works of post-apocalyptic fiction. As it references those works, the novel takes a well-deserved shot at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, an example of the caveman version of the genre.

Todbaum visits Journeyman after the Arrest, driving the Blue Streak cross country from Malibu, intuiting that Journeyman would have gone to ground with Madeleine, with whom Todbaum once had an ambiguous relationship, or at least an ambiguous encounter, before Madeleine fell in love with a Somalian refugee named Astur. Todbaum apparently riled up a good many people during his trek, behavior that the commune members regard as unhealthy for the commune. Exactly what Todbaum saw during his journey is unclear. He tells a character named Gorse that America has been completely destroyed, then tells Gorse that their peninsula in Maine is actually part of an experimental biosphere that has been cut off from civilization. The truth is likely to be entirely different, but Gorse will never know.

The plot involves a conflict between Todbaum and the Cordon as well as a conflict between Todbaum and members of the commune who seek refuge from Todbaum and from the Cordon on “an island at the end of land and time.” A mysterious tower on the island becomes a focal point of those conflicts.

Readers might expect novels about the loss of technology to illustrate dependence on technology, but Lethem has traveled beyond allegorical expectations. The Arrest seems to suggest that it’s time to move past the apocalypse and to begin rebuilding on the assumption that it is already upon us. Todbaum discusses and Journeyman frequently ponders “the worth of ritual action”: pillaging, human sacrifice, “the destructive impulse.” Kormetz tells Journeyman he grasps too little of that human need. Perhaps Lethem wants us to understand that we ignore it at our peril.

The Arrest was so different from my expectations that I had to start it three times before I began to wrap my head around it. I kept coming back to it because Lethem wrote it and he’s never disappointed me. When I finally got into it I discovered that, for all its humor, it requires a close reading. Contrary to appearances, this isn’t a light novel. I’m certain it’s a novel I don’t entirely understand. I think Lethem is saying, as does a minor character, that the structure of society doesn’t matter much because “bullshit power games” will erupt in even the most egalitarian communities. The communal peninsula might be a citadel or it might be a prison. That same character tells Journeyman to “tell the truth in what you write,” advice that frightens Journeyman because he doesn’t want to arouse contempt. In the end, perhaps the truth, or a search for truth, is all we have. That, at least, is the message that I took from this puzzling but amusing novel.

RECOMMENDED

A Gambler's Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem

Published by Doubleday on October 18, 2016

A Gambler’s Anatomy might be read as a political novel in disguise, a story that pits capitalism against anarchy. Or it might be read as a more personal struggle against oppression, the story of a man who is oppressed, not by a political system, but by his own thoughts and behaviors.

Bruno is a gambler. He plays backgammon in private matches against wealthy opponents. In backgammon, a “blot” is an “unprotected checker, sitting singly on a point,” but Bruno has his own blot. It may just be an eye floater, but it has been growing, obscuring his ability to see directly, forcing him to cock his head and view the world peripherally. The blot may also be impairing Bruno’s ability to read minds (more precisely, to see the world through another person’s eyes), which is a useful trait for a gambler but an unpleasant way to live. On the other hand, another character tells him he might be “the least telepathic creature stalking the earth,” and the reader, like that character, might wonder whether Bruno’s belief in telepathy isn’t a symptom of a deeper emotional problem.

Bruno had a streak of bad luck in Singapore. He hopes to reverse his fortune in Berlin, but a nosebleed and more alarming symptoms send him to Germany’s health care system where Bruno learns that the “blot” is caused by a growth that can only be removed by opening his face, as if it were on a hinge.

A Gambler’s Anatomy is worth reading for the imagery alone. For example, the hospital in which Bruno is treated is located within a former plague asylum. The buildings and streets are named after former Nazi doctors. Red footprints, painted on the floors, show the seriously ill where they should go in the event of an unspecified catastrophe, yet the footprints lead to nowhere. With true German efficiency, yellow footprints lead to a different nowhere for those who suffer from minor conditions.

Some of Bruno’s ties to his past unravel after Singapore and Berlin, but his new circumstances ironically send him to San Francisco, where his past awaits him in Berkeley. After blot-removing surgery, Bruno begins a journey of self-discovery while living life behind a mask, repaying a debt to a childhood chum who is now his malicious benefactor, surrounded by engaging misfits. Those countercultural characters and the Machiavellian friend provide another reason to read A Gambler’s Anatomy.

A Gambler’s Anatomy works because for much of the novel, the reader is never quite sure whether Bruno really can see through the eyes of others. He might just be a little crazy. His attachment to the blot might be one of necessity or, as his doctor believes, he might be suffering from a marvelous delusion. The only thing that’s clear is that Bruno is a different person at the end of the novel than he was at the beginning.

Lively prose and an unpredictable plot add to the list of reasons that make A Gambler’s Anatomy a worthwhile read. I didn’t form a strong attachment to the characters, although as Bruno moves from one bizarre setting to another, it is at least easy to sympathize with him. The opening of Bruno’s face might be a metaphor for opening Bruno so the reader can see inside the man, but I’m not sure that Jonathan Lethem delivered much insight into what makes Bruno tick. I got the sense that Lethem was trying to make a larger point in A Gambler's Anatomy but I confess that it eluded me. Other readers might have better luck finding it. Those shortcomings are easy to set aside in the joy of exploring Bruno’s strange life and the strange people who occupy it, but in the end I was left scratching my head and wondering what I missed.

RECOMMENDED

Lucky Alan by Jonathan Lethem

Published by Doubleday on February 24, 2015

Jonathan Lethem pushes the boundaries of the short story in this innovative collection. Some stories take a conventional form, others are more experimental. Many are quite funny. Not all the stories are successful but I admire Lethem's vivid imagination and his willingness to take chances.

Two conventional stories are the least interesting in the collection. "Lucky Alan" is about the growth and decline of a New York friendship and its impact on a director's ability to stage manage his life. An empty room in his parents' house is the focal point of "The Empty Room" as a young man returns home with his girlfriend for a visit. While both stories are weaker than others in the collection, the characters are sharply drawn.

"Procedure in Plain Air" is a story only Lethem could write -- other than, maybe, Franz Kafka. Workers dig a hole, drop a bound man into it, cover the hole loosely with boards, and give an umbrella to the narrator with instructions to keep the man in the hole dry if it rains. This wonderfully absurd story suggests that people behave ridiculously because "someone has to step up" and, in stepping up, feel compelled to defend the indefensible.

"The King of Sentences" is an ode to books and the "astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences" they contain. Lethem write plenty of those, including "I saw him the other day in the pharmacy, buying one of those inflatable doughnuts for sitting on when you've got anal discomfort."

Two stories in particular made me smile. The narrator of "Pending Vegan" is "pending" because he fears his children will accuse him of "childlike moral absolutism" if he commits. That's part of the biting humor in this very funny story about a man bewildered by life and the dog he once abandoned. "The Porn Critic" is about a porn shop clerk whose apartment is cluttered with the movies he reviews for the shop's newsletter. The story's humor comes from the reaction that women have to his living environment and reputation, "his life a site where others came to test their readiness for what they feared were their disallowed yearnings."

The narrator of "The Salivating Ear" killed a man at the entrance to his blog. The story suggests that bloggers will take extreme measures to protect their blog and its one or two readers from haters. It is a charming look at lonely bloggers who dream of the day when busloads of tourists will visit their blogs.

Two other stories didn't quite work for me. "Traveler Home" is written as an internal monologue (despite its third person voice) in an abbreviated style, stripped of definite articles and other nonessential words. The story, of wolves that deliver a baby in a basket, is interesting although I'm not quite sure that I caught the point of it. Similarly, I don't know what to make of "The Back Pages," a tale of characters "who live on the margins of cartoon lore." Their plane has crashed on an island, stranding them. The story is told in panels, journal entries, notes to the artist, silly songs and poems, and traditional narrative. It's sort of Lost meets Lord of the Flies meets Pogo and Prince Valiant. I like the concept but I think it works better as a concept than it does as an actual story.

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