Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Novels transport you into a world you’ve never experienced. This one takes us deep into the world of New York Jewish Communists. It’s colorful and interesting and well-written. Lethem knows what he’s doing.
One thing I don’t understand is all the flashbacks. He’s got a story that takes place over a very long period of time, and he wants to tell it in some other order than chronological. Fine, no problem. Tell it in whatever order you want; we’ll figure it out. But what he actually does for a given section is to start in a future time and have the POV character flash back to the time he wants to write about, then come back to the present, then the section ends. And these are very long flashbacks, so you do lose the original time, and it’s not any less disorienting than the regular time jumps.
You’re already telling the story out of chronological order. Why the flashbacks? I think he gets some benefit from telling those past events through the lens of another character’s flashback about them. And maybe that says something about how history is always history told by somebody. It gives the characters a little more power in telling each other’s stories. That’s all fine, I suppose. And I don’t know, who am I to judge? But I think it would have been better to just tell the story in the order he wanted to tell it.
Because he does have to cheat a little bit. Character A’s flashback to character B’s life does get some stuff bled into it that character A couldn’t have known, or wouldn’t have felt.
Well, anyway, it’s a good lesson in the pitfalls of extended flashbacks.
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