Turn Left, and Head for Queens ‘Dissident Gardens,’ Jonathan Lethem’s New Novel

In “Dissident Gardens,” a novel jampacked with the human energy of a crowded subway car, Jonathan Lethem attempts a daunting feat: turning three generations’ worth of American leftists into a tragicomic tale of devolution. He has couched this as a family story and written it so that someone’s hot breath is always in the reader’s face. One of the two main characters tries to stick the other’s head in a gas oven. And this is as tender a moment as Rose Angrush, gifted with a “hammer of personality,” and her daughter, Miriam, “the maven of Macdougal Street,” ever share.

Rose raises Miriam in Sunnyside Gardens, the Queens neighborhood that comes to represent World War II-era Communists “in pursuit of that chimera, the Dialectical Whosis,” as Mr. Lethem writes memorably in the book’s opening scene. Rose and her comrades are not an open-minded group: “You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma,” Rose knows.

In 1955, in her own kitchen, which is “full of moral bandits,” she is being booted out of the party by one of her lovers, who objects to another of them. That second one, Douglas Lookins, is a married black cop, and Rose’s crime is billed as “excess zeal in the cause of Negro equality.” Neither she nor any other participants in this showdown have any idea what Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin in 1956 will do to their idealism. The novel deals with that. But it doesn’t waste time on the excesses of McCarthyism. It’s a big book set in small spaces — kitchen, classroom, folky nightclub — that keep its battles personal at all times.

As for that showdown at Rose’s apartment: Ha! Nobody tells Rose Angrush what to do. And Angrush is a great name for this family, summoning anger and anguish and whatever else caused Rose’s parents to give her brother Lenin as a first name. (Rose is technically Rose Zimmer because, as she likes to tell Miriam, she made the mistake of getting pregnant by and married to a German — who returned to Germany to spy.) Angrush also captures some of the fury with which Rose tears through this wild, logorrheic, hilarious and diabolical novel. Those who reflexively compare Mr. Lethem to other Jonathans, like Jonathan Franzen, would be better off invoking Philip Roth to characterize this one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/books/dissident-gardens-jonathan-lethems-new-novel.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130912