Dissident Gardens: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Jonathan Lethem

Author:Jonathan Lethem [Lethem, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780385534949
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

Yes, yes, it must be this. If it was to come to anything, this Chelsea night, “the Night of the Short Cigarettes,” as Tommy was inclined to dub it now, watching his last Marlboro dwindle, soon to join the butts raining ash on the cracked linoleum tile of this dire hotel’s floor. Tommy Gogan’s Second Album, if it be animated by wellsprings deep within him, as he knew it ought, must gather its force and substance from the Tommy Gogan that had sprung into being that day of the snowstorm, that found its beginning in the reverend’s parlor. He must regain that essence of selfish munificence, of benevolent egotism, in which his guitar had never left his grasp except to be replaced by Miriam—Picasso days, when guitar and woman’s body, waist and hips and neck, and the way he played on both, became mixed up and entirely one thing. Those days when for him song seemed to flow even from the speech of passersby—a black in argument with a shop owner, a Dominican cabdriver’s paean to the Statue of Liberty—or from the calamitous roar of an el plummeting below ground, from the barstool revolutionary’s rumor of a gunpoint eviction or a forced confession, from Cousin Lenny’s insane baseball scheme, practically from a dog’s waning bark on a distant fire escape. Tommy had briefly possessed this city and been vehicle for its secret song, and the city seemed to want him to sing of it, all proceeding from the certainty he was wanted by Miriam. In her eyes the city had stopped to behold him. For that same instant he’d been keen to behold himself. Himself, himself, it was in himself that he must quest for the songs that wouldn’t come, wouldn’t permit themselves to be made. His cold guitar pulsed guilt from the bedspread.

“Had She Ever Lain with Rye? (Wouldn’t Wish to Know)”

“My Mother-in-Law’s the Real Thing, Comrades”

“Call Me Not a Tourist’s Irishman”

He knotted his shoelaces and thrust himself from the room, leaving the guitar but taking the notebook and pen along just in case. The Chelsea’s corridors were as vast and wide as the rooms were cramped and oppressive, though no better appointed, the carpet oiled and ratty with a thousand years’ worth of footfalls. Still, the size of the corridor seemed to mock that of his room. The lobby even worse, absurd chandeliers and walls thick with paintings and the furniture bobbing everywhere as if at sea. New York hotels had a certain Potemkin village aspect, a false front meant to impress—whom?—with fulsome public space. Meanwhile, quarters narrow as a coffin. Tommy’s room was a place to die, not to compose an LP’s worth of confessional songs, as he’d been commanded by Warren Rokeach, who in desperation at his client’s blockage had booked him five nights in the hotel, drawing against Tommy’s advance from the record company to pay for it, Warren having bankrupted himself in the purchase of a mountain. Perhaps this was Warren’s disguised intent: Enter your room there and die.

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