LITERARY FICTION
AT HEART, Dissident Gardens offers the reliable pleasures of a traditional American family saga, spanning three generations, and featuring a Jewish matriarch whose immigrant influence her younger relatives must learn to resist as they find their own way of being Americans.
Yet, what makes the novel stand out are not just the consistently fizzing sentences that manage to dazzle without ever (or only rarely) seeming over-flashy.
It’s also that we’re plunged thrillingly into a less familiar America — because this is a novel about three generations of communists: matriarch Rose, whose mistreatment by the Party never undermines her faith; daughter Miriam whose rebellion takes the more hedonistic form of hanging out in the bohemian New York of the 1960s; and assorted children, friends and spouses, who try in their different, but equally doomed ways to swim against the capitalist tide.
All of these characters are so memorably vivid that they perhaps undermine Lethem’s attempts to explore American communism more generally — remaining too overwhelmingly individual to represent anything but their cussed and entirely believable selves.
Nonetheless, the book’s combination of historical scale and an endless succession of perfect scenes will surely boost Lethem’s growing reputation as one of America’s leading novelists even further. TOWARDS the end of A Bit Of Difference, we’re told that the main character, Deola Bello, is ‘loath to idealise Nigerian culture’. By then, though, this tip- off is almost comically unnecessary, because Deola has already given a ruefully matter-of-fact kicking to all that’s wrong with her home country, including the relentless corruption, the irreducible tribal divisions, the fact that nothing works — and even the apparent tendency of Nigerians to have weak calves and be tone-deaf.
But, although the novel might not appeal to the Nigerian authorities, it’s far richer and more complicated than the mere displaying of dirty linen. For one thing, Deola, who starts the book working for an aid organisation in London, is just as unsparing about Western shortcomings. For another, her criticisms of Nigeria never seem remotely like expat sneering (Atta herself now lives in America).
Instead, they’re wounds that Deola deeply feels, as she struggles to work out where she belongs, now that she’s still single at 39 and beginning to wonder where independence ends and loneliness begins.
The result is a triumph — a shrewd, fearless and witty novel that is politically thoughtprovoking and emotionally engaging. ON THE face of it, a first novel that’s not only an unashamed feminist critique of young women’s lives today, but also a critique of that feminist critique, might not sound like a roaring page-turner. Yet Zoe Pilger (daughter of John) writes with such infectious rage that this is exactly what we get.
The narrator is 23-year-old Ann-Marie, a former Cambridge student now living in London, where she torments men, behaves flamboyantly badly at social gatherings and lashes out in all directions: with arty hipsters, older feminists, younger feminists and nonfeminists among her many targets — at some points, even her own book, apparently.
Fortunately the satire, while always ferociously dark, is usually funny, and the anger too controlled to be dismissed as a rant — except in the climactic scene where Pilger’s desire to shock perhaps gets the better of her. Foul-mouthed and wholly lacking in likeable characters, Eat My Heart Out definitely won’t be to everybody’s taste. Even so, not since Martin Amis’s early work can I remember a novel so exhilarated — and made so exhilarating — by its own sense of disgust.