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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.
Average Customer Rating:
The Lethem Style at Work
With a Jonathan Lethem novel, you're never quite sure what genre you will be reading. Motherless Brooklyn is, on the surface at least, a mystery, with a PI as main character. The Fortress of Solitude is an epic that spans thirty years and encompasses all that described the 70's, 80's and 90's--drugs, war, racial relations.
Lethem's latest, Men and Cartoons, is a mixed bag of nine short stories. From fantasy ("Super Goat Man" and "The Spray") to futuristic ("Access Fantasy") and surrealistic ("The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door"), what you will find in this collection is Lethem's incredible style of writing, his imaginative and creative way of turning a phrase, and his realistic dialogue. Characters are vivid and memorable, and subject matter is often dark and disturbing, many times encompassing social satire and the human condition.
A well deserved break, but nothing like his last 2 books
If, like me, you thought Lethem's last 2 books were phenomenal, you can forgive him this somewhat uneven collection. He's clearly taking a break from writing original fiction and he deserves it.
A Heroic Introduction
This collection of short stories is one of those rare works whose contents actually do fall under the umbrella of the title. Usually, the title is simply the stand-out story of the collection (which would have delegated this book to "Super Goat Man") and doesn't actually indicate an overall theme. Men and cartoons are, however, very much the theme of the stories here, with a few arguable exceptions: the first being "Access Fantasy", in which only the central character's yearnings toward heroics links it to the comic book fantasies of the other stories. What we really have tying all these stories together is an overwhelming anger at the frivolities of youth. Lethem unconsciously recreates the narrator of Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground" as the sole primary character floating through these stories, albeit with name and history changes for each one. Two of the stories are virtually identical thematically; though lead the reader via different plotting devices. These plotting devices are good though, and spread amongst a collection of more dissimilar stories, could have given themselves more individuality; but as is, the overlying theme of self-destructive hero hating ties them to closely together to see the trees within the forest.
"The Vision" and "Super Goat Boy" both deal with a grown man faced with a `not' hero from his childhood. In "The Vision", a young boy pretends he is `the Vision' (from the Avengers), while in "Super Goat Man", a man-goat creature actually is a mediocre super hero: super goat man. Both stories narrators brush up against paltry existential philosophies as they retell their encounters with these pseudo heroes right up until they unconsciously lash out with malevolently barbed statements intended to bring the hero down a few notches. In both stories the opposite effect occurs, and the narrator is left in total isolation wondering at his own animosity.
"The Spray" and "Vivian Relf", both told from that same angry self-absorbed narrator, deal with relationship disconnects. In "The Spray", the fantasy element is a product that police use to determine what is missing in people's homes. The main character is burgled and the police show up with the spray to find out what was taken. When the police leave the spray behind, the disconnected couple sprays each other, revealing the ghostly images of relationships passed. In "Vivian Relf", a man and a woman meet and swear they've met before. They go through all the motions of banal party talk before giving up and deciding that indeed they have not met before. When this same type of chance encounter happens between the same two people over the course of many years, the narrator begins to create for himself a sense of loss, as if all along this Vivan Relf was the woman meant for him. Both stories intentionally stay well above the surface of these characters leaving them overwhelmingly alienated and isolated.
"The Glasses" stands out as the most unique of thsee stories, not because of its tricks (and these stories are packed with tricks: talking sheep, the aforementioned spray, a society forced to exist in a traffic jam) but because of its terrifically realized (through great dialogue) characters. In this one, a surly, reverse-discriminating black man returns to an optometry store where he feels he was taken advantage of because of his race. He purchased some new glasses which, the following day, were revealed to be scratched. The two optometrists in the store insist the glasses are fine, that the man is simply smudging them with his fingers. The entire story is the argument the three have about how this is happening. Three people literally stop everything, indefinitely, just to get to the bottom of this small mystery.
The other stories in the collection melt away. Some are good: "Access Fantasy" and "The Dystopianist", others are just bad: "Planet Big Zero"; but ultimately they are all punishingly alike. Lethem is good with words though, and these stories slip by with little to no effort in the reading. Despite its flaws, "Men and Cartoons" has introduced me to an author I will continue to read.
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A well deserved break, but nothing like his last 2 books 
