SEPTEMBER 2013 - AudioFile
Jonathan Lethem is a literary chameleon, working here in something like a Philip Roth mode, unspooling a sometimes raunchy, often biting portrait of a New York counterculture family. Mark Bramhall is dazzling performing this mosaic of indelible oppositional characters. Rose Zimmer, Ashkenazy Communist from Queens and Jewish mother from hell? You’ll never forget her. Nor Rose’s German-Jewish husband, her black cop lover, daughter Miriam’s diatribe to the father who abandoned her, or Rose’s grandson, Sergius, who finds himself fecklessly enamored with (surprise) the Occupy movement. As Lethem moves back and forth in time, from pre-McCarthy proletarian dreams to ‘60s Greenwich Village (Dave Van Ronk makes an appearance) to Zuccotti Park, Bramhall delivers specific, convincing, vivid personalities and keeps Lethem’s intricate machinery running swiftly and irresistibly. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
SEPTEMBER 2013 - AudioFile
Jonathan Lethem is a literary chameleon, working here in something like a Philip Roth mode, unspooling a sometimes raunchy, often biting portrait of a New York counterculture family. Mark Bramhall is dazzling performing this mosaic of indelible oppositional characters. Rose Zimmer, Ashkenazy Communist from Queens and Jewish mother from hell? You’ll never forget her. Nor Rose’s German-Jewish husband, her black cop lover, daughter Miriam’s diatribe to the father who abandoned her, or Rose’s grandson, Sergius, who finds himself fecklessly enamored with (surprise) the Occupy movement. As Lethem moves back and forth in time, from pre-McCarthy proletarian dreams to ‘60s Greenwich Village (Dave Van Ronk makes an appearance) to Zuccotti Park, Bramhall delivers specific, convincing, vivid personalities and keeps Lethem’s intricate machinery running swiftly and irresistibly. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
A dysfunctional family embodies a dysfunctional epoch, as the novelist continues his ambitious journey through decades, generations and the boroughs of New York. Having scaled the literary peaks of Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and the Chronic City (2009) of Manhattan, one of America's premier novelists sets his sights on Queens, though the title of the opening section, "Boroughphobia," suggests that this is a place to escape--or at least for a daughter to escape from her mother. The mother is Jewish, strong-willed, contrarian Rose Zimmer, a Communist booted from the cell because of her relationship with a black policeman. ("Everyone thought it was an affair between Jew and black but it wasn't. It was between cop and Commie.") Her husband had returned to Germany as a suspected spy, leaving Rose to raise Miriam, a red-diaper baby transformed by the '60s, a "Bolshevik of the five senses" who became irresistibly sexy, "not for her bodily self but for her appetite: she devoured the ripe fruit of the world." The setup of this novel is so frequently funny that it reads like homage to classic Philip Roth, yet the book, like the end of the 20th century, takes a darker turn, as hippie naïveté leads to more dangerous activism, illusions shatter, and old age takes its toll. Following "the unashamed homosexual bacchanal that had become possible in the historical margin between Stonewall and disease," funerals would supplant parties as social gatherings. The novel's social realism finds '60s folk fixtures such as Dave Van Ronk and the Rev. Gary Davis mixing with Miriam and her eventual husband, Tommy Grogan, a musician who moves from a traditional Irish family trio to protest songs, a career eclipsed (like so many others) by the rise of Bob Dylan. But it also features Archie Bunker (if only in Rose's mind) and a devastating record review by P.K. Tooth (from Chronic City, in tribute here to the late Paul Nelson). In "a city gone berserk," pretty much every character struggles with identity, destiny and family. Not Lethem's tightest novel, but a depth of conviction underlies its narrative sprawl.
