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| Books of The Times: Gratitude’s Grace Can Be Itself a Gift A scholarly, many-angled examination of what gratitude is and how it functions in our lives. feeds.nytimes.com |
Feminist books for five-year-olds Can you radicalise young children in a few easy reads? Viv Groskop gives it her best shotIt all started with my son, Will, stamping his feet and saying he didn't want any girls invited to his sixth birthday party. Girls, he declared, are boring. At the same time I noticed my daughter, Vera, who is three, carrying a handbag and lip gloss. Will was demanding his first football kit, Vera was swooning over princess paraphernalia, and I suddenly realised that it was time for a gender stereotyping intervention.Children know what they are supposed to like from an early age. For girls, it's princesses, ballet, fairies, parties. For boys, it's adventure, space travel, fire engines, pirates. Until now, my two have been young enough to do their own thing – Will has enjoyed baking cakes, Vera has pretended to be Luke Skywalker. But the older they get, the harder it is to resist the pink-and-blue divide.Can books redress the balance? We often read Captain Pugwash and Asterix – but there are no girls in those stories. I was happy with Babar until Celeste became pregnant with triplets and never came out of the nursery again. In Peepo the mother is always ironing. Of course, there are some successes for both boys and girls. Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline is a wonderful tale of convent girl derring-do, with lots of boy characters, too. Julia Donaldson's books (The Gruffalo, The Smartest Giant in Town) are great fun, but not exactly politically inspiring. I wanted to find something feminist, subversive. The Female Eunuch for five-year-olds.Bring on Jacinta Bunnell's colouring book Girls Are Not Chicks, published in the UK this week. The New York-based author first had the idea for feminist books for children when reading bedtime stories as a nanny. "I found myself editing the words so as not to pass on a sexist message," she says. "In most children's books the girls have pretty frocks and bows in their hair, so I would turn it around – call the boys by girls' names and vice versa."In the US "anti-princess reading lists" have appeared, pioneered by the websites Mommytracked.com and Bitchmagazine.org. There are now books for three- to eight-year-olds with a specifically feminist agenda: Call me Madame President, Girls Think of Everything, Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls.Feminist author Natasha Walter is intrigued but cautious. "My mother wouldn't buy me Enid Blyton because she said her books were too racist and sexist," she says. "But I don't think you need to read in a feminist way to become a feminist." With her own daughter she reads Catherine Storr's Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf and Roald Dahl's Matilda. Both Walter and fellow feminist writer Susie Orbach pick Pippi Longstocking as one of the best reads for children.So Pippi seems a good place to start. But can a three-year-old girl who wants to marry her daddy, and a six-year-old boy who hates pink, really be radicalised in just five easy reads? Time to find out . . .Pippi Longstocking By Astrid Lindgren, illustrated by Lauren Child (£14.99, OUP)Pippi's mother dies on the first page and her father is lost at sea. Oh dear. But left to her own devices Pippi goes on adventures, tells tall stories and is superhumanly strong. Utterly magical – but a bit too sophisticated for my two. The story is long and there are very few pictures, although the children loved the Lauren Child illustrations.Will: "It was rubbish. It's stupid. I like Mr Nilsson [Pippi's pet monkey] and the father who was washed overboard and the mother who is up in heaven. Actually, no, it's not rubbish. It's really funny."Vera: "I think I loved it. It was beautiful. Pippi is beautiful."Girls Are Not Chicks By Jacinta Bunnell and Julie Novak (£7.99, PM Press)Some of the pictures and captions in this colouring book are funny. A woman riding a tractor: "Who says girls don't like to play in the dirt?" Two ballerinas dancing: "No one wants to fight the patriarchy alone. Make friends." But I'm not sure whether the messages are really for the amusement of children, or adults. One caption reads: "When she stopped chasing the dangling carrot of conventional femininity, she was finally able to savour being a woman." Try explaining that to a three-year-old.Will: "This book is for girls."Vera: (scribbles intently)Princess Smartypants By Babette Cole (Puffin, £5.99)A riotously subversive read. "Princess Smartypants did not want to get married. She enjoyed being a Ms." Princess Smartypants keeps giant slugs as pets and challenges her geeky prince suitors to roller-disco marathons. When one of them finally wins her over, she kisses him, intentionally turning him into a toad. "When the other princes heard what had happened to Prince Swashbuckle, none of them wanted to marry Smartypants. So she lived happily ever after." Excellent. Although, interestingly, the children seriously struggled with the idea that anyone might not want to get married.Will: "I liked it when the prince turned into a toad. It will be my most favourite story ever."Vera: "I want Smartypants! I want Smartypants!"The Pirate Girl By Cornelia Funke (Chicken House, £5.99)Molly is in her boat, sailing off on holiday to her granny's, when she is kidnapped by Captain Firebeard and his vicious band of pirates. But they chose the wrong girl. Molly's mother is Barbarous Bertha and when she comes to rescue her daughter she brings her own ferocious crew. Brilliant – although I worried slightly about the male pirates. At the end they are forced to polish Barbarous Bertha's boots 14 times a week. Punishing the oppressor is not true feminism, it's just role reversal. Still, this was the most successful read and I would recommend it to anyone.Will: "This was even better than Princess Smartypants. It's the best story in the whole world. Write this: I really like boats."Vera: "My favourite [character] is Molly. And her mum."Adventure Annie Goes to Work By Toni Buzzeo (Dial Books, £10.31 from Amazon)Adventure Annie dresses up every Saturday in her superhero costume and has adventures with her mother. But this Saturday her mother is called into work because an important document has gone missing. It's up to Adventure Annie to save the day and locate the folder under a pot plant. Yep, that really is the entire plot. The children were confused by the strange dearth of incident.Will: "I hate it. I hate curly hair and Adventure Annie has curly hair. And I don't like her cape and her shoes because it's pink."Vera: "I'll have the pink cape and the pink shoes. [Pause] I like Molly the pirate."Verdict: You can't teach gender studies to small children in a day, but you can make a start. They have already demanded Pippi Longstocking and Pirate Girl again – and again. Lessons that they have learned? The existence of the term "Ms", which prompted a heated discussion. The idea that marriage is not everyone's idea of a fairytale ending. And that women wielding cutlasses are just as menacing as men – possibly more so. Overall, I think, Professor Greer would be proud.Do you think feminist books for children are a good idea - and, if so, are there any that you would recommend?WomenFamilyChildren and teenagersFeminismViv Groskopguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Essay collections by Zadie Smith and Frank Kermode | Book reviews Hermione Lee admires the empathetic strain in two discussions of the novelOne of Zadie Smith's heroines – and this is a generous writer who values her heroes and heroines – is Katharine Hepburn. She adores the actress because she is intelligent, passionate, natural, courageous, proud, funny and independent. Modestly, Smith says that is the kind of woman she would like to be; I suspect that is the kind of woman she is. One line of Hepburn's, from The Philadelphia Story (Smith's favourite movie), is, she says, a "lodestar" to her when writing anything: "The time to make your mind up about people is never!" That paradox – a very firm-minded character speaking a line, with fierceness and conviction, about not making your mind up – is at the heart of this flexible, complicated, attractively impassioned collection of essays.Though they range widely through literary appreciation, film reviews, traveller's observations and family memoir (the book is dedicated to her late father, and he is its humane, thwarted and melancholy hero), their preoccupations are constant. Serious, thoughtful, sometimes confused, always truthful, Smith is arguing with herself, and others, about the future of the novel, how to take art seriously, whether more than one view or one voice can be held in play, why we change our minds and what changes them, what matters in writing and in life. As she has noted, writing in this newspaper about the essay form, she likes the idea of "essay" as a draft, a testing out, an experiment in ideas, not a set piece. That commitment to uncertainty, revision and ambivalence is one of her certainties. She goes back to the family history she has already turned into fictions, and to the painful scenes of her father's dying, and looks again at what she felt then and feels now. She argues on behalf of novelists – such as herself – who cross between different views and approaches and let in a multiplicity of voices. She changes her views about what kind of novel she prefers and about her own writing. There is a nice, funny moment when she describes how often she has been backstage at a literary festival, with a whole lot of other novelists, all of them changing their minds, all of them "with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go onstage and read from them".Keats was one of her early heroes, partly because "he offers his readers the possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked 'Apprentices Welcome Here'", but also because, as Keats famously says of Shakespeare, he possesses "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts . . ." The writers she is most eloquent about are those who are sympathetic, empathetic, connecting to others. One of the best essays here is on Middlemarch, which Smith admires because it describes how we are changed by experience, it is sympathetic to "the stumbling errors of human beings", it understands the commonplace and the ordinary, and because its morality is not a "fixed point, no specific moral system, not, properly speaking, a morality at all".But she doesn't want the 21st century novel to go on behaving like Middlemarch. Much of the writing about fiction in this collection argues over different concepts of the novel and what its future should be. Sometimes she labels this argument as "lyrical realism" versus self-conscious, allusive gamesmanship, and then worries away at the problem that the first may now be too conventional, nostalgic and comforting, the second too inauthentic and ironised. (In one long, rather wobbly essay, "Two Directions for the Novel", Joseph O'Neill's Netherland is made to stand as a recent example of the first, Tom McCarthy's Remainder of the second.) Should the novelist continue to pursue the humanist direction of fullness, empathy, rich selfhood, thick description, or should novels follow the postmodernist, flat, surface path of metafiction? Smith is clearly worried about the perils of inauthenticity, dislikes all "that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff", and resists what she calls "a cultural climate that ridicules and is repulsed by intellectual and moral commitment". But she doesn't want the novel form to stultify, and she likes experimentation (in film as well as fiction).In a parallel argument, she describes a change of mind over Barthes and Nabokov. Once upon a time, as a literary student, she fell for the Barthesian concept of the text as a free zone to be recreated and remastered by the reader; now, as a practising novelist, she inclines to a more Nabokovian regime of total authorial control, where the ideal reader is not the one who is allowed to read aggressively against the grain, but the one who notes that "the text is a highly particular thing, and the job is to appreciate and note its particularities". All the same, she thinks Nabokov is a bully. What she likes most are the writers who move between different kinds of language and possibilities – like another of her heroes, David Foster Wallace, whom she writes about at passionate and precise length.She always writes with serious feeling, even when she is trying to be light. Her accounts of her father's characteristic love of gloomy, desperate comedy (Tony Hancock, above all), or her brother's surprising, perilous success as a stand-up comic, or of her dazed and estranged visit to Hollywood at Oscar season, with its "melancholy victories", or of her horrified and helpless experience of children's schools in Liberia are, in their very different ways, eloquent examples of what she thinks writing should do: "make a leap into otherness", move outside one's solipsistic view of life, make connections. She is suspicious of a critical language of universalising neutrality (and has some firm things to say about that in her essay on Zora Neale Hurston) and of academic critics, who get put down here as "a shuffling . . . army, moving in perfect phalanx, as they stalk a squirrel around the backyard". Flexibility, ambivalence and multiplicity attract her. For all his mildness, caution and "middleness", EM Forster is one of her "lodestars" (as in On Beauty), because he has strong opinions but doesn't claim superiority, and holds faith with the kind of liberal humanism she admires.Forster is also a kind of hero for Frank Kermode, a cooler and more cunning operator than Smith, who has put together an elegant short book on the novelist, made up of Kermode's Clark lectures and a long coda or "causerie", which goes over some of the same ground as the lectures but which, like them, is interesting on the mixed feelings Forster arouses, and on why he should still matter to us. Kermode is certainly not one of those driven, rigid academics conjured up by Smith; he is more like a brilliant old fox, quietly padding around his territory of ideas. Forster's own distrust of scholarship, critics and theorists gets a benign, humorous glance from Kermode, though he is quite up for a tussle here and there with narratologists. His own approach to Forster is a ruminative mixture of biography, contextualising and close reading.Forster did not get on with James's novels because he found them too rigidly patterned, and he was suspicious of Joyce's experiments because he felt them too intrusive and ostentatious. (It's a pity, as Kermode observes, that Forster had nothing to say about Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.) Poised between old and new styles in the novel, Forster wanted to create fiction that would "get away with it", "bounce" the reader without their noticing it into a sense of the importance and significance of what they were reading, under cover of lightness. So what Kermode describes is an evasive writer, in love with orderliness, believing in the profound importance of art, who opted for a kind of "inspired creative faking". By this Kermode means the planting of an "occult" meaning underneath the surface of the text. He is especially good on Forster's interest in and knowledge of music, his work with Britten and his feelings about Beethoven and Wagner. He shows, deftly, how Forster uses a kind of musical notation, a linking of themes, to give the reader a kind of "secret sense" that something profound and important is under way, that the characters are crossing some kind of "spiritual boundary". (Forster described A Passage to India, by a long way Kermode's favourite of his novels, as "a search of the human race for a more lasting home".) In Kermode's view, Forster is something of a mystic, though his mysticism can veer between a rather nagging evangelism (he is harsh about Forster's sermonising, especially in Howards End), beliefs in creative inspiration and in the supernormal, and a serious concern with the religions of Islam and Hinduism. However much we may be irritated by Forster's moralising authorial interventions, his ethical mottos, his over-fondness for cliques and coteries, or his snobbish failure in the characterisation of Leonard Bast, Kermode believes we should do him honour as a writer who "understood ecstasy and inspiration". There is some fellow-feeling in his dry parting tribute: "He lived to be old and still active, an achievement that almost always impresses the public."Hermione Lee's biography of Edith Wharton is published by Vintage.Zadie SmithHermione Leeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
On the streets of Brooklyn Cult writer Jonathan Lethem has called the Brooklyn he grew up in 'a geographical form of insanity'. He takes Gaby Wood on a tour of the neighbourhood he has put on the literary map and explains why his new novel is about… ManhattanJonathan Lethem walks as he writes. I don't mean that he takes a break from writing and goes for a stroll, or that he thinks about what he'll write when he's pounding the pavement – though I'm sure he does both of those things. I mean that he does them at the exact same time. He has installed a treadmill in his office, moved his wireless keyboard to rest on its reading stand, and bumped up the point size on his desktop computer so he can see it while he walks.His new working methods are the talk of the town – or at least the talk of Gowanus, the small, secretly hip enclave of Brooklyn where he shares an office with his former wife, the artist, writer and night owl Shelley Jackson. It's a little surreal to imagine him doing it – progress on the page matched by zero progress in space – but that only renders more graphic the extent to which an actual walking tour of Lethem's Brooklyn is a tour of his memory, and his mind.Brooklyn is riddled with writers – so much so that Lethem's friend, the novelist Colson Whitehead, once wrote an essay joking about it ("Google 'brooklyn writer' and you'll get: 'Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?'"). But few have documented the place itself in such Dickensian detail, or with such manic, quick-witted, genre-loving energy as Lethem has.Lethem, 46 next month, is one of America's best novelists, and indisputably its most skilled transubstantiator of urban pop culture into fictional worlds. He grew up not far from here, the child of idealistic bohemian social reformers (his father was a painter; his charismatic mother died when Lethem was 13). A youth steeped in comics, sci-fi and paperback noir made him the writer he is; in the same measure, perhaps, as these streets themselves. If his breakthrough novel, Motherless Brooklyn (1999) – a masterpiece of a mobster detective story whose hero has Tourette's syndrome – creatively mistook Brooklyn for a loud, involuntary, chaotic disorder, then his sweeping autobiographical novel, The Fortress of Solitude (2003), brought to life its intimate, mutable questions of race and class.I meet Lethem at his office on the corner of Union Street and Nevins. It falls between Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, and south of Boerum Hill, all now desirable upper-middle-class neighbourhoods full of beautiful 19th-century brownstone or brick houses; formerly – that is, when Lethem was a kid – frontier country. Right here, affluence still meets a refreshing whiff of resistance. The building overlooks the Gowanus Canal, known to locals as "Brooklyn's armpit". The canal is a fetid environmental disaster zone, so devoid of oxygen and so obstructing of sunlight that no plant or animal can exist in it. In Motherless Brooklyn Lethem described it as "the only body of water in the world that is 90 per cent guns"."We'll go this way," he says, and we brace ourselves against the bitter cold, walking up past the industrial buildings on Nevins Street and turning left into the quiet, remodelled brownstones on Dean. Lethem now lives, with his pregnant wife, Amy, and their two-year-old son Everett, in a one-bedroom walk-up rental six doors down from the enormous house people once thought his parents were utterly insane to buy. His father sold the house 20 years ago and retired to Maine. At that point Lethem was living in California and had no urge to return. "It had gone through too many changes and it had been a commune after all three of us kids were gone, and the house meant other things. It was just the house my dad owned, at that point. Now of course, just strictly in terms of real estate value, I can't help… they bought that house for 21 grand, in 1967. I mean, I could write that cheque right now."Lethem runs up his stoop to drop off his bag, then stands back on the sidewalk, scanning the street. "So this," he says, "is like the Fortress of Solitude block." We take a few steps toward his old house, and look at the trees his mother planted as saplings. "This is where I grew up, where my mother died, and the site of most of the memories I processed into that novel or into the essays in The Disappointment Artist."Lethem is not a novelist who doesn't know how his books come about, or who dislikes talking about the process. Indeed, he will graciously guide you through all of this in the kind of detail that would be called arcane if only it didn't refer to his own life – he behaves less like the author himself than the man auditioning to be Jonathan Lethem's literary executor. That posh paediatrician's office on the corner used to be the bodega where the children in his novel bought their Yoo-hoo [a chocolate drink]; this stretch of sidewalk is where his fictional alter-ego used to play the invented game of "scully". Before he earned a living from writing novels, Lethem worked in a series of second-hand bookshops. Now, if he weren't a fiction writer, he thinks he'd like to be a film historian or curator. And these two professions, the learned antiquarian and the nerdy precisionist, at all times haunt his speech.He now knows, for instance, that Malcolm X's family was hidden at number 259 Dean Street after Malcolm X was killed. And he discovered, years after his mother took a copy of I, Robot from the shelf and more or less changed his life, that Isaac Asimov had lived at number 213 in the 1940s. But as we walk westwards, it's the 1970s that come to life."This whole neighbourhood has become centred on the kind of middle-class families that were just one very small minority element then," Lethem tells me. "So many of these houses were – it wasn't just that there were families of different races in them; there were different uses for them. There were boarding houses and boarded-up houses – abandoned ones."And there were also communes. Not just my parents'," he says, and indicates two other houses. "These were very active, thriving communes well through the 70s and the 80s. I remember who had the best parties. The communes all had their own flavour – 222 Dean was hardcore Maoist. And then there was 166 that was much more, you know, quasi-Black Panther, druggy, a little more American indigenous terrorist feeling to it. That was my favorite place. It was where I first heard reggae, for one thing. And it was where I first snuck a pot brownie off the parents' table, pretending to think it was just a regular brownie, even sort of to myself."The dirty word hovering over all this is gentrification – "a Nixon word", as his parents saw it. The mother in Fortress of Solitude teaches her son to be proud of calling the neighbourhood Gowanus, rather than the nearby, more chi-chi Boerum Hill. But efforts to restore Gowanus to anything approaching glory were probably well-meant, since the place was elsewhere thought of as hell. As Lethem writes in a new introduction to his former neighbour LJ Davis's A Meaningful Life: "The dystopian reality of late-60s and -70s outerborough New York can be difficult to grant at this distance; these streets, though rich with human lives, were collectively damned by the city as subhuman."As a teenager, Lethem left. He went to Bennington College in Vermont, thinking he would become a painter, and his contemporaries there included Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt. He eventually wrote three novels before Brooklyn featured in any of them, and in the fourth, Girl in Landscape (1998), a child from Brooklyn Heights moves to the place where most of the book is set: Mars. Around the time Girl in Landscape was published, Lethem moved back to Brooklyn and Brooklyn moved into his work.Still on Dean Street, we pass the homes of two writers: LJ Davis, the earlier chronicler of brownstone Brooklyn whose son was a friend of Lethem's; and Lynn Nottage, Lethem's friend from high school, now a Pulitzer-winning playwright. Lethem recalls a conversation they had about people they grew up with, and Nottage's conclusion: "Basically, if you grew up in this neighborhood you became a cop or a criminal." "Of course," he adds, "she was overlooking the third outcome. There's something about being here: because identity was so unstable, there are a lot of writers. It was very conducive to thinking about selfhood, and self-invention."When I ask about his version of Brooklyn, Lethem replies: "I don't have a 'version of Brooklyn' – Brooklyn's too big. I didn't set out to write a great Brooklyn novel, or a Brooklyn novel at all. I set out to write the great novel of Dean Street between Bond and Nevins, on a certain summer's day in 1972. To think you're going to write Brooklyn is, for me, a pathetically hopeless position."I wonder how the physical streets changed for him once he'd transformed them into fiction. Lethem smiles. "The first day I walked on Dean Street after finishing writing Fortress of Solitude – where, at some level, I think I wanted to exhaust the subject, a kind of torrential outpouring that would discharge the legacy of those stones, and everything I knew about that block – I thought: 'Oh, I didn't even touch it. I haven't even started.' It had completely slipped out of my grasp. Which didn't mean I was unhappy with the book, but the relationship between text and the completely intangible essence of this place, which still hovers between my body and the buildings and the streets – there's still a gulf between those things."As we take a break from the cold, and wrap our hands around hot chocolates at Bar-Tabac, a popular restaurant on Smith Street, Lethem tells me about his latest novel, Chronic City. "It's a snow-globe version of Manhattan," he says. This shift across the river is such big news that his American publisher took out ads that read: "Lethem does Manhattan", as if that were all you needed to know. Of course, it's been received as an outsider's take, but Lethem says that's wrong. "To write about the place at all I had to be in a way very enraptured with it – and I am." The ferocious New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani dismissed certain surreal incursions of nature (a tiger on the loose, for instance) as whimsy, but Lethem says virtually all these stories were taken from real headlines.What Lethem captures everywhere are forms of alienation – whether it's the white kid in a black school or the black kid driven by Marvel comics to caped crusades or a person with Tourette's. He's interested in the naivety of New Yorkers, the fact that when they go elsewhere, "as I did when I went to California, they don't know how to drive, and they don't really understand anything about America or very much else. They only can tell you, you know, what is and isn't right about Spike Lee's movies. They can seem very helpless or exotic creatures."Back out in the cold, Lethem takes me down to IS 293, the middle school where he was treated so mercilessly that he devoted 250 pages of a novel to it. "This is a building of pure, cringing misery for me," he says as we edge into the empty, frozen playground. Around the side of the building is Court Street, the start of the Italian-American neighborhood he describes as "Motherless Brooklyn territory", now packed with pleasant coffee shops and expensive children's clothing. "It's so funny," Lethem says, "I feel these thresholds so strongly still in my body, although I don't think they mean very much anymore. But I mean, Smith Street was so Spanish, it was like going to another country. And then you cross this block and Court Street was so totally Italian-American. And just the distance of this one block is two worlds. So which end of this building you came out of was a difference of reality."When Fortress of Solitude was published journalists would ask him if he was frightened to go here or there. "The assumption of the question was that everyone now knows that everything is totally safe. And I would say: 'Of course. And you, too, have places you don't go.' But then I realised that they didn't know it. So I would walk with them into the projects and I would see their body tense up – a block away from Smith Street. We stop thinking or talking or going to the thing that troubles us."To illustrate the point he takes me back toward Nevins Street, to the Gowanus Houses, a set of 14 highrises built in the early 1950s. "So here we've just made a transition. We briefly touched the Italian Court Street and the yuppie Court Street and we've come just across the street here to where no one, over there, would ever go," Lethem says, and guides me to a particular doorway. "This is where the crack houses traditionally were, and a tremendous amount of dealing still happens right here." He laughs a little. "The cartoon people wanted to have, because it was a consoling one, was about how it used to be bad and now it's all good. But it's not changed – I wasn't writing about the past!" We walk through. "The cold is making this seem rather peaceful right now, and I don't ever encounter any difficulty walking through here in daylight, but I'll be the first to tell you I'm not going to walk through here at night. And this is where I live!"An interesting experiment, he says, is to ask people who live on lovely, leafy Bergen Street where their nearest supermarket is, and they always think of the other direction – Smith Street or somewhere that way. But here on Hoyt we go into a supermarket that seems oddly camouflaged – by its low storefront, by its windows papered by special offer signs, by its position on a stretch of warehouse wasteland. Inside, the shop expands: up and back – it's a full-sized supermarket, and it caters specifically to the community that does know it's there: vast bright blankets of hammered beef, Puerto Rican brands of soda I'd never seen, but whose bottle tops Lethem used to use as a kid for his sidewalk games. Everyone is speaking Spanish. "This is exactly what all supermarkets looked like in the 70s," Lethem says. "That's what the reality of New York City is – this overwhelming chaos of lives that are parallel but not touching." It puts me in mind of a question asked by the hero's father in The Fortress of Solitude: "Is Brooklyn itself a geographical form of insanity?"But Lethem is not a mourner for the past in the way that traditional Brooklyn nostalgists are – not wailing that people were friendlier back when things were cheaper and more dangerous, or that the Dodgers should never have moved to LA. He observes continuity as much as change. When I say, walking with him and thinking about what he's written, that it's interesting how the fabric of a city creates a kind of human fabric, he responds: "Yeah. I guess I'd call myself a kind of addict of that process. Because it's the unfinished quality that's surprising. Being able to come back here and feel like it was still alive came from realising that gentrification didn't mean that it was somehow sealed in amber now, but that frictions and juxtapositions are still being generated here." He coins a lovely phrase. The Brooklyn that he loves, Lethem says, is marked by "a definitive incompleteness".Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem is published by Faber and Faber. To order a copy at a special price with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847.Jonathan LethemGaby Woodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Lunch hour literature Here's another reason to hate winter – where are you supposed to go to get your lunchbreak reading in at this time of year?It's cold. It's damp. It's miserable. Journalists have been busy recycling that tired old chestnut about the grimmest day of the year (scientifically proven!), and everyone's finally back into the swing of working life after the snowy chaos. The mornings are dark, the afternoons drag – and in between, I'm struggling to get my hour of transcendence.One of the things I hate most about the British winter is never being able to sit down in my lunchbreak and just read. Anticipations of sprawling out with a good book and a sandwich in a nice local park are months off. Reading in pubs just isn't the same (the braying office workers; the hateful europop) and I never feel I can linger in a cafe after the food has gone. There's always the option of the office itself. A friend of mine used to read under his desk. And I confess I once had a job so boring I was reduced to photocopying pages of a novel and pretending to proofread them. I blush at the environmental implications (I was later sacked). But in an actual, well-earned break from work, who's got the mental strength to curl up next to the fax machine and photocopier and be transported to a different world? Perhaps you're lucky enough to work next to a wonderful public library. Or an art gallery with a reading room. Or from home. Or not at all. Perhaps the very concept of a lunch hour seems too wimpish, too continental (in which case, what does that say about your reading habits?).As for the question of what to read during the relief from drudgery ... I recently made the mistake of taking in Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End. Sure, I enjoyed it (in a noisy pub; rushed, in a cafe; hunched in the stationary cupboard). It's bright, witty, compulsive. But it's also set in an office, and going back to my swivel chair afterwards brought with it a horrible sense of deja vu. It was a bit like one of those nights when you dream of work and wake up thinking: "Do I really have to go in and do it all again?"Last year, Judith Flanders wondered why novels don't "do" work. Her reasons were persuasive (though she seemed to ignore a great amount of literature in which offices play a vital role, from Dickens to Gissing to Waugh); and I agree there's more room for incisive fiction dedicated to the intricacies of our daily toils. But reading about cubicle culture between emailing and collating just seems masochistic.Far preferable to take out a nice copy of Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness. Or Tom Hodgkinson's How To Be Free. Give me something to forget the clack of the keyboard and the whir of the machines. Not to mention a nice, dry patch of grass to, briefly, call my own. Give me escape, and summer. And all the extra reading it will bring.Five contemporary novels not to read on your lunchbreakThen We Came to an End by Joshua Ferris (starring a fractious bunch of advertising execs)Personal Days by Ed Park (banter and bickering in the office of an unnamed corporation)e by Matt Beaumont (consisting entirely of emails sent between the employees of an ad agency)Intuition by Allegra Goodman (quotidian tedium in a medical research lab)The Greatest Gift by Danny Leigh (set in a concierge agency dedicated to fulfilling the whims of the busy and rich)FictionToby Lichtigguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |