Doubleday
September 2013
On Sale: September 10, 2013
384 pages ISBN: 0385534930 EAN: 9780385534932 Kindle: B00BVJG2LA Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
"A dazzling novel from one of our finest writers--an epic
yet intimate family saga about three generations of
all-American radicals At the center of Jonathan Lethem'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 Rose'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: Rose's aristocratic German
Jewish husband, Albert; her nephew, the feckless chess
hustler Lenny Angrush; Cicero Lookins, the brilliant son of
her black cop lover; Miriam'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 pass--from the parlor communism
of the '30s, McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, ragged
'70s communes, the romanticization of the Sandinistas, up
to the Occupy movement of the moment--we come to understand
through Lethem'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 sympathetic--and a joy to read"--
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