Lemon [Hardcover]

Lawrence Krauser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2001

Lemon is the story of the passionate love between a man and a citrus fruit, told with a fluid mixture of prose, drama, and about twenty pages of rhymed couplets. Krauser's inimitable style is at once richly convoluted and light as air. Krauser has also written the plays Wall Street Made Simple and Horrible Child.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Armed with a sense of humor that could cut a tomato paper thin after hacking an aluminum can in half." -- Staff Recommendation, University Bookstore, Seattle

"Digressions, asides, and interruptions abound, with disquisitions on Handel's Messiah, Cameron's Titanic, and the lemon's history in still life painting." -- Seattle Weekly

"His prose is immaculate; his premise, patently ridiculous...like a drawing on a Ping-Pong ball." -- The New York Times Book Review

"His terse, economic prose is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's novels as well as Raymond Carver's short stories." -- Time Out New York, Dec. 14-28, 2000

"In the long term, Lemon could appeal (sorry) far beyond the confines of a cult audience." -- mindjack.com

"The perfect marriage of stunning intellect, a soaring sense of humor, and an intimate understanding of the absurd." -- greenapplebooks.com

From the Publisher

A strange and beautiful book.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 246 pages
• Publisher: McSweeney's; First Printing edition (January 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0970335512
• ISBN-13: 978-0970335517
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,020,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Love Story Like None Before, February 26, 2001

By 

Matt Herlihy (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lemon (Hardcover)

Lawrence Krauser's new novel Lemon moves through you like a dream. Its voice is a whisper one moment and a roar the next, its rhythms soothe you with an odd familiarity. And while you're in it, it makes perfect sense.

It's a love story like none before. Wendell is an unassuming but frantic-minded office drone who's just been left by his girlfriend. His life continues to swirl about him, and Marge's departure doesn't hit him as hard as it should. Enduring the consolation of well-meaning friends and hopeless parents, Wendell stumbles upon a discarded lemon in his apartment's hallway. And there he finds love.

The attraction begins as a low thrum, and even amidst absurdity Wendell finds the familiar in unfamiliar form. It's love, "an elusive jungle bird that because it is so durable has thousands of mimics and camouflaged neighbors." And when everything else begins to fall apart around him, from his roach-laden apartment to his health, only the lemon remains faithfully by his side.

The courtship begins as a tactile curiosity, as Wendell develops a slow fascination for the lemon's feel, its comforting consistency. Placed upon his desk, the fruit begins to get his attention as a welcome distraction from his mundane job, but it quickly becomes a singular source of solace. He protects it, admires it, and shortly sees in it what his life cannot provide- purity, light, simple beauty.

Krauser's dancing prose draws us in to Wendell's enchantment. As the man's fascination for the fruit grows to obsession, he finds its allure everywhere, from the colors of the city to the curves of architecture and the perfection of art. We're tempted at first to equate the scenario's absurdity to insanity, but Krauser weaves the narrative so closely with Wendell's perceptions that we actually feel him become saner as the relationship deepens. His hyperstructured observations of the world transform into poetic sweeps of epic scope. The music in his head seems to take shape as his object of desire becomes clearer, and his affection towards it becomes more fully expressed.

As Wendell's passions escalate, so do his troubles. His fixation becomes harder to hide, and he's reluctantly forced to admit to a baffled world that he has found in a fruit what no human could provide. His nurtured upbringing rejects everything about his new source of vitality, but his nature wins out. As the trappings of his existence drop away, life's pleasures take over. His days become playful and lyrical. Even his health improves.

Despite the rising arc of clarity, however, Wendell remains trapped in a world that can never appreciate his new intimacy. Those closest to him try to rationalize his behavior, but Wendell knows his situation is beyond the realm of reason. It's only a matter of time before the forces of nurture take over again in a Kafkaesque attempt to reclaim their turf.

Krauser's gift for language is exquisite. He's a playwright and a musician, and it shows in both the craft of the book's episodic plot and the rhythms of its prose. He does wonders here with the boy-meets-girl routine; in turning half the equation upside-down, he's left with an ever-familiar structure, but without the baggage of every love story inevitable when humans are involved. It's less a high-concept stunt than the embrace of a challenge, and he pulls it off with gusto.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars the most pretentious thing I've read in a while, February 17, 2004

By 

Jennifer Amey (the great white north) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lemon (Hardcover)

What can I say about this odd little tome?

It is "the story of one's possession." Wendell is a young gen x-er in love with a lemon. His life as memo writer for the payroll department of an obsessive corporation is transformed when his girlfriend, Marge, leaves him, and in that post-relationship state of angst he begins to carry around a lemon.

The conceit works best when his obsession is in the "I just like to carry it around" stage (his embarrassed refusal - his inability to explain it, his own over-reaction to the whole situation - to let a co-worker use it in her tea), and when Wendell encounters situations that would be plausible but for the fruit (bringing the lemon to meet his parents: "-- Does it talk to you? -- Mom, it's a lemon.").

After a while, though, it gets a bit silly, including stylistically. The changing point of view is fine, but Krauser's eschewal quotation marks in favour of dashes, was irritating when Joyce did it, and it's irritating here. It (along with Krauser's penchant for wordplay) also makes one wonder if the entire book isn't intended as Joycean parody: making an epic out of a fruit instead of a Dublin day? oh, please, spare us that.

What begins as a plausible (if off-beat) story suffers from an excess of flourishes. I will confess here a general fondness for the off-beat-but-everday stuff over the outright wacky. Just as in Perv: A Love Story I liked the first part, where nothing really happened (having been sent home from boarding school, disaffected teen skulks around his mother's apartment building). That I liked. But the second part, the sex drugs and rock'n'roll road trip part, that part bored me. But I digress.

Maybe it's just a matter of taste that I prefer the inter-office memos and disjointed limericks that Wendell trades with his co-worker Michelle, but the nine pages of verse stuck in the middle of the book just strikes my as try-hard. A paragraph opener like "Eye to eye in the morning sun. Cougar, doe, stone pharaoh" is pointless, unilluminating, and reeks of teen poetics. It stops being a book and turns into a creative-writing exercise.

I mean, he had me! Krauser had me believing in lemon-love, and then he went and ruined it by getting all arty.

It feels like Krauser lost his way, like he painted himself into a corner and his only escape was to jump out the window. I am reminded of an interview I saw with filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler; he tried to make a "serious" movie once, but got bored half way through and turned his two main characters into caped crusaders. That sort of device may work in the world of ultra-silly b-movies. In the arena of avant-garde lit, it strains the credulity even of someone as credulous as myself.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A lemon by any other name..., March 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Lemon (Hardcover)

Lemon is one of the best of the current crop of Nervous Breakdown Novels in its combination of humor, sadness, pathology, and verbal virtuosity. I don't know whether Krauser intended this, since he puts in a claim for a psychological exemption on grounds of Freud allergy, but to me Lemon is a faithful rendering of what can happen to a person who loses
a loved one: regression to earlier levels of relatedness, where the object becomes a teddy bear, blanket, or fetish. Krauser's montage of literary/poetic/musical styles is not only a tour de force in it's own right, it's also faithful to the intellectual fragmentation and obsessional focus on the object/fetish which can actually happen in such a collapse. At the same time it's a hilarious parody of all of the above. So I appreciated both the literary brilliance and intuitive emotional accuracy, the latter being so effective that I actually found myself anxious and worried about the lemon whenever it was threatened. Also the parental confrontations were amongst the funniest I've read. I would rank Lemon up there amongst the best of contemporary first
novels(cf Russian Debutante's Handbook) and would assume the reason why it hasn't had the same initial success is its difficulty, the demands it places on the reader. The shifting styles and modalities can be tough going (like shifting rhythms and keys in modern music) It's possible to get lost in the unscripted dialogue. There are some parts which just didn't work for me (e.g. the long mock-epic poem) but to criticize such parts makes as little sense as to say to a jazz musician to go back and replay a chorus or riff that may not have worked so well. Better to go on to the next chorus or in Krauser's case,
the next book.