Our conversation about Jonathan Lethem’s “Dissident Gardens†begins at 6:30 tonight. Share your thoughts in the comments section below at any time.
Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times The first section of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, “Dissident Gardens,†is titled Boroughphobia, ironic if only because it is a condition from which Mr. Lethem does not suffer. One of contemporary literature’s best-known â€" and earliest â€" chroniclers of Brooklyn, Mr. Lethem has now applied his eye for urban sociology to Queens. His specific focus is Sunnyside Gardens, a neighborhood of row houses with shared gardens developed in a utopian vision in the 1920s as one of the country’s first places for low- and middle-income families to buy homes. It was a place so idyllic and progressive â€" “sanctified as a leftist social laboratory†as Mr. Lethem writes â€" Sunnyside drew the architecture critic Lewis Mumford away from the aristocratic splendors of Brooklyn Heights.
“Dissident Gardens†is an expansive family saga and history of the American left, from the communist passions of the ’30s to the Occupy Wall Street spirit of the current century. From the book’s initial pages we are instructed in the hypocrisies of movements and of perfect, inclusive communities, when Rose Zimmer, the family matriarch at the center of the novel’s emotions, is threatened with exile from her communist world in Sunnyside. Her crime â€" an affair with a black police officer. (“Here was the Communist habit, the Communist ritual: the living room trial, the respectable lynch mob that availed yourself of your hospitality … lifting a butter knife to slather a piece of toast and using it in passing to sever you from that to which you had given your life.â€)
Rose has ended up in Sunnyside in the first place because her German-Jewish husband is torn between the urban and the pastoral. Is it simply suburbia in an all too detectable disguise? Rigid and conformist?
The novel tracks the revolutionary spirit from one generation to the next, and in each instance the world becomes less and less receptive to what feeds that spirit. A book that begins with such a distinct sense of place â€" a neighborhood in New York City enlivened by fiercely held ideologies â€" ends in the vacant psychological space of an airport in a world fractured by fear. What do we make of that?
Have we romanticized what it was to be a radical in New York? Has the city become too inhospitable a place for real activism now? And what do we make of the book’s themes in light of the current moment? The end of the Bloomberg era and the beginning, ostensibly, of a new moment for the left?
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
