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The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/all/20061110035127/http://www.whatbooks.com/fiction/men_cartoons.php
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:
Some brilliant work....
but not all the stories are fantastic. By my count, 3 of these were amazing, 3 of them bland and the last one I'd read before so it doesn't count. My personal favorite is Super Goat Man, which was magnificent. Jonathan Lethem is a very expressive writer, and I can see a bit of noir in his writing. I have to read Fortress of Solitude now.
Repetitive, but rewarding
I took a long time to finally open this after getting the paperback, and finally read the first two stories on the beach at Sandy Hook, New Jersey -- occasionally glancing up to reflect on the skyline of the author's own Brooklyn. Obviously these stories are not intended to be beach material. Lethem tackles the same themes of loss, misplaced self-absorption, petty jealousy, and very occasionally, redemption. In many ways, "Men and Cartoons" tackles the same basic story in nine different styles and genres -- eleven, if you read the paperback with two extra stories. This can get a bit tiresome if you read all the stories consecutively, but spread out over several days, and best read one at a time, almost all of these stories are inventive, lively, and downbeat.
"The Vision" and "Super Goat Man" are both entrenched in the Marvel Comics universe, as told in the first person by a Brooklyn-born adult who's somehow failed to cash in on the promise of adulthood. Both stories climax at an awkward dinner party, and each end on a slightly different note of wistfulness. The last line to "Super Goat Man" is perhaps one of my favorite short story punchlines.
Similar to "Super Goat Man" is "Vivian Relf", although the title subject here is an alluring young woman (rather than a retired superhero) whom the narrator may or may not know from somewhere else in his past. The story again ends at a dinner party, with words that would have been best left unsaid. Lethem is in full-on fantasy mode in this story, with places names like Vagary and characters called Vander Polymus.
The sci-fi stories are "Access Fantasy" and, in the paperback, "This Shape We're In". The first features an unreliable main character stuck in the perpetual traffic jam that seems to take place in a bloated futuristic Brooklyn. As in the other stories, the narrator almost manages to get the girl, but not quite. "Shape", new to the paperback, is the Trojan Horse of this collection, springing a surprise literary revelation about its main character in the final pages.
Neither "The Glasses" and "The Dystopianist" make any sense. They're both very short and end on off-beat "what the heck?" moments. I suppose if I read each of these multiple times, I might grasp the theme, but I'm not going back. Also short, but slightly more to the point, is "The Spray", which first appeared in a magazine called "Fetish" and it's easy to see why.
The paperback edition ends with "Interview With the Crab", which on the surface is a satire on the fate of sitcom stars in an "E! True Hollywood Stories" vein. Lethem writes himself as the main character here, although the title subject keeps calling him "Lehman". Picture a drunken ALF interviewed by "Playboy" and you'll know exactly whether or not you'll want to read this.
"Planet Big Zero" and "The National Anthem" both concern high school friends who don't quite connect years later. The narrator in "Planet" is a modestly successful cartoonist for an alternatively weekly, who tries to write his drifter friend into his strip, with unintended, slightly paranormal consequences. "Anthem" seems like a submission idea for Open Letters, a defunct web journal to which Lethem once contributed. You'll have to accept the premise that people actually write this way to each other in this age of e-mail -- pouring personal history and emotions out onto the page, breaking down the song "Dark End of the Street", and ending with a prescient comment about the fate of the 2003 New York Mets.
In a collection full of genre stories, that makes this perhaps the most fantastic tale of them all.
Beautiful and bizarre
All of these stories at least teeter on the edge of bizarre, and many have slipped over. I consider that a good thing. Even when the themes are old, Lethem's takes on them are fresh and surprising. Even the characters' names tend toward the unusual: Balkan, Top, Vera Relf and Vander Polymus, and so on. The stories are sometimes peppered with clever pop references, and are also often very funny.
I wouldn't say that these stories are exactly easy to read. The language itself is simple enough, and sometimes beautiful ("School buses lined his block every morning, like vast tipped orange-juice cartons spilling out the human vitamin of youthful lunacy"). But the stories veer in such unexpected directions that you have to pay careful attention to where they're going.
I didn't give this book 5 stars because I feel that as a whole, there's not as much thematic variation between the stories as I would have liked. Still, I enjoyed them very much, and I think most readers will, too. I will certainly think about the Plath Sheep for some time!
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