Men and Cartoons: Stories [Hardcover]

Lethem's latest collects nine short stories, eight of which appeared in various publications, and five of which were previously anthologized. Like all of his work, they often display breathtaking originality and vivid style in the service of narratives that sometimes work and sometimes don't. "The Vision" is the first story and probably the best, and will appeal to fans of Lethem's latest novel, The Fortress of Solitude. It starts in Brooklyn in 1974, with two fifth-grade boys, one of whom believes he is robot-superhero The Vision from the Avengers comic book series. The two bump into each other as adults and are involved in a strange party game called "Mafia." This later turns into a nasty adult version of truth-or-dare which gets very dark and ends on an unsettling note. "Planet Big Zero" is another strong story, also about boyhood friends who meet again as adults. As high-schoolers they were two outsiders smirking at the world, as adults, one is a cartoonist, the other a drifter. At thirty pages, "Super Goat Man" is the longest story, and again mixes Brooklyn, superheroes, and becoming an adult. As such, it also shares a lot with Fortress of Solitude, and works very well. One of the few out-and-out sci-fi stories is "Access Fantasy", which proposes a city where an underclass people live out their lives in traffic jams. Those who actually live in buildings are the privileged, and videos of their dwellings are pornography for the traffic jammers--a very sharp satirical premise, with a murder mystery to boot.

Less successful are the other five stories. "The Spray" is built around a special elixir that reveals things that are missing, but trails off into a rather banal statement about loss. Deja vu is the premise behind "Vivian Relf" (the only story that not to appear elsewhere), in which a man and woman keep encountering each other over their lives, but aren't quite able to determine where they first met. It's one of those Lethem works that starts strongly, is well-written, and degenerates with a weak ending (again, about loss). "The Glasses" is an empty Brooklyn-set vignette about a possibly deranged man and two opticians. "The Dystopianist" is a slight work about writing that feels rather dashed off and ends of a cutesy note. One feels like Lethem could crank out works like it over and over and over. The collection ends with "The National Anthem", in the form of a letter. Once again, it is from an adult to a friend from high school he hasn't seen in a long time, and is built around a theme of loss. Sometimes the repetition of a theme can be a powerful framework for a collection, but here the continual revisiting of the connections between youth and adulthood, and loss and loneliness feel like Lethem is stuck in a rut. All in all, worthwhile if you already know and like his work, but otherwise not vital reading.

Men and Cartoons, like almost all story collections, has its hits and misses. The fact that it's a relatively slim book unfortunately means that the misses weigh it down a bit more than they would have in a more full collection. I also found it true that even the better stories weren't fully successful, lacking a sense of true depth or simply petering out in the end.

The first story and second to last stories (The Vision and Super-Goat Man) are probably the strongest in the collection and both, as will seem familiar to Lethem fans, draw upon comics as some source material. Both have a sense of underlying menace and tension as well as sorrow, part of the reason why they stand out amongst the others. In the Vision, the main character reunites at a dinner party with a fifth-grade classmate who used to dress up as and claim to be the Marvel superhero android of the title. The party games turn ugly and the narrator tries to use his knowledge against his former classmate. I would have preferred a stronger sense of motivation for the main character's actions; it seems to come off as rushed, more contrived for narrative purpose than growing out of a sense of the character, but despite that this remained one of my favorites. Super Goat Man has a somewhat similar tone and even narrative, but is longer and thus allows for more development. The other strong story, Access Fantasy, is also the most science-fiction like, set in a world where the lower class literally live in long-standing traffic jams-sleeping, cooking, and watching "apartment porn", videos of the dwellings inhabited by the upper class. There are lots of nice touches in this one and a good sense of satire and humor, though the ending paled a bit in comparison to the rest of the story.

Luckily those three make up a large part of the whole work, since the rest of the stories seemed to drop down several levels in quality and thought. Many of them seemed more skeletons of stories than stories themselves, and several of them too cute and/or too predictable.

All in all, it was a relatively disappointing work saved by the fact that its best stories were also its longest ones and the two best pretty much bookended the collection, so one started off well and ended well, leaving the weaker stories in the middle somewhat forgotten (another indictment of their quality I suppose). Recommended for the three good ones with the usual short story caveat that you'll find some of lesser quality.

"Men and Cartoons" is an all too brief, return visit to the fictional worlds created by Jonathan Lethem in his memorable novels "Motherless Brooklyn" and "Fortress of Solitude", with more than a passing nod to such classic early work from him like his literary debut "Gun, With Occasional Music". Hence it is an interesting, often fascinating, blend of literary styles from quasi-cyberpunk science fiction to hard-boiled noirish detective stories reminiscent of the best from the likes of Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard. However, it is not Lethem's most impressive story collection when I can find only one truly memorable tale in this terse anthology; the emotionally captivating "Super Goat Man". And yet there is another tale which almost succeeds as a work of literary art, "The Glasses", which is a fascinating glimpse into racial relations and standards of normal, mentally stable, behavior. If there is one common underlying thread which links all of these stories, then it is Lethem's ongoing fascination with Brooklyn, growing up there as adolescents in the 1970s, and a devout, almost fanatical, love for comic books. Those who are truly interested in reading some brief examples of Lethem's intriguing, often elegant, literary style won't be disappointed with this story collection.