“Dissident Gardens”: Lethem’s latest recommended without dissent

Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, 'Dissident Gardens” (Vintage Contemporaries, 366 pages, $15.95), is exceptional.

The book, which is newly out in paperback, features interconnected sections, each of which highlights an individual character while adding to our understanding of the novel's entire cast.

The sections are not presented chronologically, so the larger story unfolds in ways both surprising and textured.

Rose Zimmer, a steadfast Communist living in Queens, is the novel's gravitational center.

Other characters - her daughter Miriam, her son-in-law Tommy, the son of her lover, more - all struggle with their inescapable tendency to measure themselves against Rose's standards, real and imagined.

Importantly, Lethem brings Rose herself fully to life, ensuring that she isn't merely a straw man against which the other characters rail and react.

Early in the book, Rose finds herself ostracized by her fellow Communists because her lover is black.

We know immediately that this is not a woman who can be easily cowed or dismissed: 'For these occupiers of her kitchen, even in their executioner's errand, were pathetically deferential: to Rose's force, to her history, to her chest twice the circumference of theirs … She who'd marched for blacks practically before they marched for themselves. Bringing revolution to Negroes, fine. To have one particular black cop in her sheets, not so fine. Oh hypocrites!”

Lethem's prose is writerly, but winkingly so. He builds some of the sections around gimmicks - Miriam competes on a game show, and ongoing score updates mirror her interior struggle; Tommy's often bitingly inappropriate ideas for song titles are struck through on the page - but employs them with perfect timing and wit.

'Dissident Gardens” is populated with memorable characters struggling against histories both personal and political. I recommend it wholeheartedly, brooking no dissent.

READING

'What: Jonathan Lethem reads from 'Dissident Gardens” FYI body with bullets_44: l Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

'When: 5 p.m. Saturday

'Cost: Free