Jonathan Lethem: The King of Sentences

There are stories that strike me as fluff on a first read. Nothing about them that would compel me to take a second look; and then, a day or so later--when stories I thought far better have vanished from memory, I find the one I'd so lightly dismissed is still there, nagging at me like The Little Drummer Boy a week after Christmas. Passages or incidents come back to me, pop into my head while standing on a corner waiting for the light to change. Jonathan Lethem's "The King of Sentences," was like that. (December 17, '07 New Yorker). HERE



The Little Drummer Boy reminds me that the Persistence of Memory is not always a sign of great merit, but it's something I do expect from the best writing, and even in the case of the Drummer Boy, it's a phenomenon that demands to be accounted for. What is it about this story--or about my neural circuitry--that keeps the tune going long after the music stops?


The narrator and his co-dependent sexual partner, Clea, both aspiring writers and clerks in a book store, are positively giddy about sentences: "good" sentences. They throw their own best efforts back and forth in lieu of conversation. Write them on the walls of the loft they share, print them out and cut them into strips to scatter through the city in hopes someone as appreciative of the craft of sentence writing as themselves will find and read them. They use them to goad one another to orgasm--and more than anything, they long to meet their hero, the "King of Sentences," the author of books of questionable character (this is true, it turns out, of the King himself), but no matter. It's only the sentences that count. "Sentences are content!" Clea exclaims to the cop, who wonders if they ever bothered themselves with the content of the King's books. No, to bask in the presence of their creator is a dream they cannot deny themselves.

What is going on here, and who is this King of Sentences? Wordsmith's Books tells us that Lethem "pin-points himself and the whole current literati crop of Chabonphiles and Eggersites on the head with this one. The Jewish Literary Review would have us see "an older Nathan Zuckerman in the King."

I'm not so sure. The way they call him The King in the last third of the story, and the final paragraph, where they understand, "abruptly and at last, just what it takes to be King. How much, in the end, it actually costs," brought to mind, incongruously, to be sure, the only popular figure I know of who, in the popular media is consistently called "The King ."

I'm more impressed by the relentlessly hypomanic, evanescent, monomaniacal idiocy of the two characters, their unblinking willingness to abase themselves in the presence of this sleazy author. This is what both troubles and fascinates me. You understand as you read, and this is more than a little disturbing, given the dubious character of their hero, that there is nothing they won't do to win his blessing--a premonition that comes close to realization in the final scene.


I couldn't help but think of those early letters of Raymond Carver to Gorden Lish--in the next week's issue of The New Yorker.