Jonathan Lethem
A dazzling novel from one of our finest writersâ€”an epic yet intimate family saga about three generations of all-American radicals,At the center of Jonathan Lethemâ€™s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Roseâ€™s suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village.,Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives: Roseâ€™s aristocratic German Jewish husband, Albert; her nephew, the feckless chess hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of her black cop lover; Miriamâ€™s (slightly fraudulent) Irish folksinging husband, Tommy Gogan; their bewildered son, Sergius. These flawed, idealistic people all struggle to follow their own utopian dreams in an America where radicalism is viewed with bemusement, hostility, or indifference.,As the decades passâ€”from the parlor communism of the â€™30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged â€™70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up to the Occupy movement of the momentâ€”we come to understand through Lethemâ€™s extraordinarily vivid storytelling that the personal may be political, but the political, even more so, is personal.,Brilliantly constructed as it weaves across time and among characters, ,Dissident Gardens, is riotous and haunting, satiric and sympatheticâ€”and a joy to read.
Fiction,Novels,Literary Fiction,Historical,Historical Fiction,New York,Literature,Contemporary,Unfinished,Literature,Jewish,The United States Of America
Dissident Gardens