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Men and Cartoons : Stories
by Authors:
JONATHAN LETHEM
Hardcover
During the first story in this meager collection, someone assumes a "Lou Brock-style" stance and lifts "one Nimoyesque eyebrow", while another character tells a tale with a "Clint Eastwoodian climax". Even readers who feel at home with the references to baseball park, space opera and film back catalogue are likely to ponder some uneasy questions. Is this parasitic language really (as the publisher claims) "revelatory" writing? Does it define and consecrate an "ironic, heartbroken, eerie and absurd territory" or is it merely part of a checklist of mawkish adolescent allusions?
The answers aren't encouraging.
Sometimes these new stories seem like reheated portions from Jonathan Lethem's recent disappointing novel, The Fortress of Solitude. That book relied far too much on the presumed numinous associations of pop trivia. The title was taken from Superman comics; there were endless recitals of the names of trashy television shows and forgettable punk bands. There is much more of the same here. There is also another kitten killed accidentally by a child, and yet another cryptic postcard mailed from out West. Too many people are again involved in teaching at New York colleges or hanging around the Manhattan art world.
Lethem is plainly aware - as the title suggests - that bringing together childhood tastes and mature lives offers an opportunity for wry observation. He is, however, too lenient towards his principal characters. They are frequently verbose and solitary men, involved in slack scenarios where they re-encounter an old school friend, feel some kind of disturbing rivalry and find themselves psychologically defeated. But for all the knowing talk about these adults having once been "quarantined in their shared nerdiness" or about the inadequacies of "howling nostalgia" or "high-school-sensibility", the irony remains indulgent and self-servingly simplistic.
Universities and pop culture are present as the twin props of a milieu that is far less broad and sophisticated than it congratulates itself on being. Phrases such as "I was at Rutgers then, on a second postdoc" or "I was on the phone with my Hollywood agent" induce a feeling of all too predictable boredom rather than stimulation or deferential respect. The over academic approach easily becomes a bad habit. One narrator describes a prank he and a fellow student used to play in school (taping crude paper spectacles on a bronze bust of Toscanini) and then adds unnecessarily that "the glasses stood for our own paper-thin new sensibilities".
The disturbing possibilities present in strange narrative juxtapositions are dissolved by the warm flood of sentimentality washing over them. A science fiction writer, known as the Dystopianist, imagines a "Sylvia Plath Sheep" that can communicate its suicidal despair to other species, and then finds the creature knocking on his door and addressing him sarcastically. The uncanniness seems merely arbitrary; the sense of potential portent reduced to vulgar facetiousness, as conventional and unremarkable realism is willfully injected with a feebly transgressive dose of magic.
Although he has been widely praised for his fine style, Lethem's language is often clumsy. He uses clichés such as "shrouded visages" and "mortal pang", or allows himself redundancies such as "a queasy earth-shifty sensation" or "pure vertigo, cliff-side terror".
Favored metaphors are awkwardly repeated. There are rhetorical flourishes ludicrously inappropriate to their circumstances. Someone's soul "creaked in irrelevant despair"; someone else wonders "where to steer the speeding motorcycle of one's own innocence"; a school bus is like an orange juice carton "spilling out the human vitamin of youthful lunacy".
The apparent ethical concern in Lethem's stories can be perfunctory and insultingly frivolous. His characters are intrinsically too foolish and fragile for the moral weight they are supposed to bear. Big themes are referenced. But the loft), solemnity is unearned. The stories are trifling despite their obtrusive wish not to be. Although they gesture towards the realm of adult responsibility, they remain emotionally stuck in the seventh grade.
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