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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
1 star for each good story, August 6, 2007
This is my first read of Jonathan Lethem. I heard his story "The Spray" on the NPR show Selected Shorts, and I was rather impressed, so I tracked down this collection. I am not familiar with any of his novels.
What impressed me about "The Spray" when I heard it, and also when I read it, was its easy style--a couple find that their apartment has been robbed, but when the police come, the couple find that they are not sure about what has been taken, so the police spray the apartment with a substance that makes what's missing appear in a salmon-colored glow. When they leave, though, the police leave the spray cannister behind, and the couple are curious to see what happens when they spray each other. The story moves forward very easily and naturally, obeying its own logic, but by the end it becomes clear that everything has been turning on an idea about loss and the inability to truly let go of things. But Lethem doesn't strong-arm the metaphor on the story. Everything seems to move along quite naturally, while by the end the overriding purpose becomes clear, and this purpose remains even when looking back through the story.
The best works in this collection move with that same sense of authority and ease. "The Vision" is a tale about a man re-encountering someone he knew in his childhood who once thought we was a superhero, but now the narrator has to deal with the oddball as a neighbor, and even worse, as the guest of this man who is hosting a party to play a game called Mafia. Keeping with the comic book motif, "Super Goat Man" is about a man's encounters with a failed comic book hero from childhood through their like-minded academic careers. These are the strongest stories of this collection.
But others just fall flat and don't seem to sustain the kind of control and laxity that made the previously mentioned stories such winners. "Planet Big Zero" is a rather dully-conflicted tale about a man and his unlikable childhod friend, and "The Glasses" may be too dependent on social commentary (maybe) to see much drive through the piece. "The Dystopianist" is quite funny, but ultimately doesn't seem to pay off by the end. And the stories that were added to this printing after the hardcover offer little reason to seek out this particular edition. "Interview with the Crab" has some interesting tensions about reality versus actuality (odd to say, when the title is quite literal to the premise of the story), but a lot of these stories read a little too much like T.C. Boyle--a lot of imagnation, but little to hang it on.
Though the three excellent stories in here may be worth the purchase itself, as a whole this collection doesn't satisfy.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Genres in a Blender, September 4, 2007
MEN AND CARTOONS, an uneven but daring collection of eleven short stories by Jonathan Lethem, takes delight in juxtaposing mundane realities with absurd, surreal, or even supernatural particulars. "Super Goat Man," for instance, is concerned with a Jung-reading, jazz-loving resident at a Brooklyn commune who later goes on to teach at a liberal New Hampshire college -- and, oh, by the way, this professor just happens to be the eponymous character, a literal goat-slash-man -- previously a ho-hum comic book superhero whose unremarkable adventures never quite caught on with the masses. Lethem inserts his incredible characters and events into a quasi-real world where everything is taken at face value. It almost calls to mind magical-realism, but in the case of Lethem the extraordinary is more prosaic than poetic -- less magical than merely situational. Super Goat Man is, after all, like every man in many ways, except for his goatness.
Meanwhile, in "The Shape We're In," the longest story in the collection, a retired military "man" (who happens to be a relentless wisecracker and an alcoholic) asks the Big Questions in his own little world, which just happens to be the inside of a human body. Yes, Mr F is actually some kind of corpuscular element (blood cell perhaps?) racing from the cavernous temple-like lung to the upper nose in a quest to find his son Dennis, who has been spotted panhandling in the environs of one of the eyes. In "The Spray" a house burglary introduces a couple to the spray of the title, a mysterious aerosol chemical which, when applied to an area, reveals the image of what is lost or missing. And in "Access Fantasy" -- probably the most extreme, Phillip K. Dickian outing here -- the main character attempts to solve a suspected murder when he spots a suspicious shadow on an "apartment tape" while stuck in a month-long (or is it year-long?) traffic jam. To do so, he must become an advertising drone and venture across something called the "One-Way Permeable Barrier." (Don't ask. This is certainly one of Lethem's muddiest, least satisfying stories.)
Lethem's stories are most successful when he doesn't drift too far from the normal reaches of reality and when his stories remain firmly grounded in human relationships, as in "The Vision," "The Spray," "Vivian Reif," "The Glasses," and "Super Goat Man." Although the symbolism in the "The Glasses," for instance, seems very heavy-handed, the amusing, quirky dialogue keeps this story afloat.
For those who are familiar only with Lethem's more famous works FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE and MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, this short story collection may surprise (or disappoint). Although FORTRESS and BROOKLYN involved supernatural and offbeat elements, respectively, MEN AND CARTOONS is more overtly experimental in the strange new realities it imposes on our world. In other words, it may tax the literal-minded.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Cartoonish, September 14, 2009
The first story, Vision, gave me hope that this was going to be superior collection from a quirky writer, thinking another Steven Milhauser. But Alas, after the opening story, about the strange though emotionally bereft party games of the protagonist's flighty neighbors is upstaged by his own, the other stories left me, well, blah. Waiting for something. To write good fantasy, you have to be able to suspend disbelief on the part of the reader. Lethem fails to do that in most of these stories, or otherwise, the characters were simply too uninteresting to care about.
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