Dissident Gardens
A Novel
-
-
3.3 • 30 Ratings
-
-
- $10.99
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lethem's new novel, fast in pace and large in theme, takes place in the confines of the planned community of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, and follows the devolution of a family of female radicals. There is matriarch Rose, exiled from her communist party due to her associations with a black police officer, and daughter Miriam, who rebels against Rose's overbearing influence to partake in the counter-cultural movement in Greenwich Village. This audio edition is brilliantly performed by Mark Bramhall, who captures the sardonic defiance that permeates Lethem's narrative and, by extension, the mentalities of Rose and Miriam. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a sentimental book and Bramhall's tone perfectly captures the harsh environment in which these two women exist. Still, while Bramhall is equally adept at capturing the anxieties and angry sarcasm of both mother and daughter, one wonders why Random House didn't employ an actress. Despite the presence of numerous male characters, the women are the central and strongest figures in Lethem's book. A Doubleday hardcover.
Customer Reviews
Amator librorum
On the one hand this novel is an exploration of leftist NYC from the inside out. This satirical, stream-of-consciousness, novel depicts the complicated interiority of communist-tinged intellectuals of the last fifty years. On the other hand, it is a quirky, but poignant history of Rose Zimmer, the Red Queen of Sunnyside Queens. Rose is the unwitting progenitor of a dozen characters whose lives intersect at odd points and veer off into interesting directions and their individual sagas form a satisfying novel that chronicles with raucous irreverence a real, postmodern dilemma: how does one find meaning in the spiritual wreckage of a heartless capitalist economy?