Uninspired

Girl in Landscape by Jonathan Lethem

Based on some of the comparisons on the back of the book, you would think that Lethem's science fiction novel was some sort of masterpiece. One critic went so far as to compare the book to Nabokov's Lolita. I'm not sure I see the comparison other than a very subtle, as in so subtle you not only barely register, but truly do not care, current of sexual tension that reveals itself at the very end of the book. I still for the life of my cannot figure out how this was published to so much acclaim, other than the theory that the book picked up steam after he published Motherless Brooklyn (which actually was a magnificent book, one that deserves all of the acclaim it has received).

The novel is about Pella Marsh and her dysfunctional family living in some post-apocalyptic future. At some point, the Marsh's, following the death of Pella's mother, relocate to another world that was once inhabited with a super-evolved race that, other than a few stragglers, went off to colonize the rest of the universe. I think part of the disappointment is the lack of concrete description. So much is left unsaid, and although the writing school mantra "show don't tell" works with books dealing with things that are familiar to us, here, in a world where there is nothing to anchor us but the writer's descriptions, anything short of a full-blown explanation (peppered with descriptions and what not) of what it is we are supposed to be experiencing. Although some of the concepts are highly interesting, there is simply too much missing from this book for it to be nothing more than an early outing from a now celebrated and much improved writer. John Gardner said that your first novel is something that should be locked away in your desk, never to see the light of day, and I wonder if Lethem should have done that with this book.