Customer Reviews

Lemon

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book is not about a lemon at all. It's about being awake. I read it twice, the second time in one day, which I recommend: Turn off the phone and let it take over your brain. It's a fast read that expands into a gigantic mental meal that is so rich, insanely funny, unusual, and smart you could have trouble returning to other books. It will make you happy you HAVE a brain (and a soul). This book is not for everybody, it is definitely NOT for people looking for "answers." (See previous review. I saw that and had to correct it). It's for people starving for something new who are not afraid to actually get something new. Bravo to McSweeney's for continuing to have the guts to publish genius against the grain.

This book is totally original, brilliantly written. It's also playful and a joy to read. Totally unpredictable--for example, right in the middle of the story there's an entire chapter of lemon-inspired poetry. The writer (where'd he come from anyway?) takes enormous liberties with the English language, which can be confusing but is worth the trouble. The plot is quirky but somehow it grabs you immediately. Krauser did a great job of making his main character Wendell and Wendell's weird problem totally engrossing. I'll never look at a lemon again without smiling, remembering this book.

Krauser has a fun idea that worked well as a short story, but grows old as a novel. The prose includes some brilliant sections of great pathos and humor, but also becomes tedious at times--almost as if the author has become as fascinated with his own words as the protagonist has with his fruit. (This is a nice effect at first, but like a lot of experimental writing, it begins to wear thin before too long.) Still, before it tests the patience, the book is enjoyable. I look forward to Krauser's next work.

I ordered this book off here really wanting to like it. In today's "literature" there's almost never authors that are allowed to create completely original novels. Or books that adhere so completely to an author's personal vision. For that I admire and like 'Lemon' and hope more books like it are published for that reason alone. However, the actual story and the way it is written while fresh and different just didn't appeal to me at all. I had a hard time following what was actually going on for starters. There isn't all that much of a story line. Most of the book is just over-blown poetic rambling about the history of lemons and other citrus fruit in art history. Apparently Rembrandt got wet when he thought of fruit. As for Wendell I found him pretty pathetic and didn't really appreciate most of what was supposed to be funny about him. Thank God I don't know anyone like that. I'm on page 200 with say 40 more pages to go and there's been no character developement that I can tell. The conversation with his parents at the dinner table about the lemon was funny but besides that- gibberish. Is Lawrence Krauser on a pure ego trip? Does he wake up, sleep eat and poop with a Thesaurus on his lap? It seems like it. I love a good vocabulary and sharp dialogue- but this? Nah. I'd love to call him, "Eh, yeah man I get it. You are the wordiest tool in the shed..." Blah, blah, blah. Anyway to conclude. I admire the originality and artistic vision but the actual substance is severely lacking. So three stars and maybe his next book will be better. I'm about to start 'A Confederacy of Dunces' after I finish 'Lemon' so I'm really looking forward to that. Peace out.

What first intrigued me about this book is that the author actually drew by hand all 10,000 first-run covers. Mine has a doodle of a cityscape resting atop a face, with the title and author stamped on it. Then I read the synopsis and had to buy it. This book is about a man, Wendell, who falls in love with a lemon. I thought for a while that there would be deeper meaning-perhaps it's really about the nature of love, or the difficulty of loving in a lonely world. And although the book shows love as difficult and lonely, I think any inference that the book is "about" either of these things comes from the reader looking for meaning. It's simply a book about a man who falls in love with a lemon. And although there are some beautifully poetic chapters about lemons throughout, the best chapters are the ones that deal with the everyday difficulties of loving a lemon. When he tells his less-than-accepting parents. When the lemon begins to rot. When he's laid off and told that it's not discrimination, because discrimination requires the victim to belong to a group by which they are defined and then discriminated by, and that Wendell has no group-he is a lone, lemon-loving freak. Wonderful stuff. And it's fun to tell people, when they ask what your book's about, that it's about a guy who falls in love with a lemon.

This is a wonderful, inventive, unpretentious, and surprisingly affecting book. Krauser's unruly prose has a tendency to wander at times, but it will never stray so far as to lose your interest, and when it returns home to the central love story, you will be captivated. "Lemon" is both heartbreaking and hilarious. I enjoyed it immensely.

yellow like the dawn, cool as the wind, sweet as a citrus flake. this book burns like the lemon's acid, into your senses and leaves a brand. like nothing else between two covers. read this book and be blown skyward like a tower of water. sink deep into it and Krauser's brilliant writing, so brilliant that people were terrified to publish it. Truth in his words. this book is perfect like an afternoon nap.