| Title | : | Men and Cartoons: Stories |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1400076803 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781400076802 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 229 |
| Publication | : | First published November 1, 2004 |
A visionary and creative collection that only Jonathan Lethem could have produced, the Vintage edition features two stories not published in the hardcover edition, "The Shape We're In" and "Interview with the Crab."
Men and Cartoons: Stories Reviews
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I've had really bad luck with short story collections this year, and Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem is no exception. I've read several of Lethem's full-length novels before and usually enjoy them, but his short stories are a mixed bag, and I don't like most of them. This is my second short story collection by Lethem, the first being Kafka Americana, which he wrote with another author and which I just read a few weeks ago. I liked that collection more than this one, despite this one having a higher rating from other reviews on Goodreads.
I'm not even sure how to really describe the stories in Men and Cartoons. I guess contemporary weird fiction? One story, Super Goat Man, is about a goat-man hybrid creature who retired from being a fringe superhero, and now teaches at different universities as a professor and is really washed up, to give an example. That story was really long, and felt to me like 100% filler; I didn't get the point of it. That seems to be a common theme with Lethem: he always seems to have some deeper meaning or underlying moral lesson in his stories, but I can never figure out what it is, and so I just read his stories for what they are at face value and don't end up enjoying them.
I did really like one story, The Glasses, which was a hilarious and endearing story about a man who gets his glasses replaced, only to find the new ones quickly scratched in the same place as his last pair. When he takes them back, the two optometrists insist the customer is to blame for the scratches, and refuse to let it go, essentially holding the man hostage while he tries on the glasses numerous times, determined to catch him in the act of scratching them. That story was so funny and I absolutely loved it.
Overall this is pretty disappointing collection of stories. I didn't see a point to most of these stories, and they felt like filler to me. Only one story in this collection warranted a four-star rating from me, and not a single one was better than that. The collection abounds with one-star entries, and honestly just isn't a lot of fun to read, with the exception of the excellent story The Glasses. Unless you're already a Lethem fan, I'd pass on this one. If you're looking to get into Lethem, this isn't the place to start.
My ratings for each story and for the book as a whole are below:
The Vision: 2.5/5
Access Fantasy: 3.5/5
The Spray: 3.5/5
Vivian Relf: 2.5/5
Planet Big Zero: 1/5
The Glasses: 4/5
The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door: 1/5
Super Goat Man: 1/5
The National Anthem: 1.5/5
= 20.5 / 45 = 45.5% = 2.27 stars -
CRITIQUE:
Trials and Appraisals
Often, novelists use the short story form to experiment with style. Here, while there is an element of stylistic innovation, Jonathan Lethem uses the form to test characters, concepts, settings and plots.
Loosely speaking, the "men" of the title are the characters (some of whom are based on comic book characters), while the "cartoons" are the settings and plots (some of which are analogous to comic strip action).
The Men
Some of the stories have been constructed around ideas for, and the conceptual implications of, particular characters:
* the Vision (who might be both a man and a cartoon character);
* the Dystopianist;
* Super Goat Man (which might be an experiment with both a man and a cartoon);
* the Crab (ditto, as per the Super Goat Man).
Super Goat Man
Source
"The Vision"
The narrator of this story first met the kid known as the Vision in primary school. The kid was named after "the brooding, superpowered android from Marvel Comics' 'Avengers'". He usually wore a costume and a cape.
The narrator meets the Vision again, when he is a grown man (a professor at Columbia) wearing a sweatshirt, in the process of moving into the brownstone next door with a carton of CD's (one of which is a Captain Beefheart album).
The Vision's paramour invites the narrator, now single, to a dinner party at which they plan to play a parlour game called "Mafia".
Eventually, the story focuses on the interactions between the guests, both during the game and afterwards.
The paramour tells the narrator that she had once had a relationship with a man who dressed up as a character from a comic book. Subsequently, she had discovered that the comic book character had gotten married to another comic book character called "the Scarlet Witch".
There's some uncertainty as to whether the man was the Vision, and the woman was the paramour.
In a way, the story reveals what behaviour is sometimes disguised by the apparent sobriety of academia and similar communities.
In a later story, one character says to another, "You need to get yourself a life that's free of this kind of academic horseshit."
"Access Fantasy"
"Access Fantasy" concerns a narrator who sits in his car while stuck in a "startup", watching and listening to "Apartments on Tape", a type of real estate advertising that sounds like it could have come out of a Philip K. Dick novel.
"The Dystopianist"
The Dystopianist meets a talking sheep in the corridor of his apartment building. Once again, it's not clear whether the sheep is an electric sheep (of the Dickian kind) or a fantasy sheep (of the Murakamic kind). Strangely, the sheep only visits the Dystopianist, because he wanted to take "a look at you".
"Interview with the Crab"
In this story, a narrator called Mr. Lethem interviews a crab that has acted in television programs called "Crab House Days" and "Crab Sex Dorm". Lethem proclaims that he is a fan of the crab's work. The crab responds:
"Don't confuse show business for real life, Lethem."
"Super Goat Man"
The Super Goat Man once lived in a single room in a dorm for college dropouts in Brooklyn near another narrator's family home. He didn't have any particular super-powers, and had been at best a minor star (published by Electric Comics rather than Marvel Comics). He was however interested in bebop jazz and modernist/post-modernist literature (Norman Mailer, Sergei Eisenstein, and Thomas Pynchon). Eventually, he becomes a professor at Corcoran College.
Yet again, universities, colleges and nearby burrows are homes to the eccentric, off-beat and unconventional (not to mention the bourgeois bohemians), and these stories tell their tales. It's almost as if you could walk around the corner of a building at Cornell, and find Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon deep in conversation.
I hope one day soon to work out whether these stories had any influence on Lethem's later political novel,
"Dissident Gardens".
SOUNDTRACK:
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An inferior collection to The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye (with one story repeated from that book), feat.ing mainly flippant semi-comic stories like ‘Super Goat Man’ about a retired superhero or ‘The Glasses’ about a mysterious scratch on an angry black man’s lens. The best stories here are ‘Vivian Relf’, a dreamy twist-of-fate tale and ‘Planet Big Zero’ where two old friends awkwardly unkindle their acquaintance.
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A collection that moves comfortably between different genres, often slipping in the crevices between them. Some stories are inevitably more satisfying than others; the one about that spray can and the one about the goatman are pretty unforgettable. Because of their insistence on specific themes or images - Brooklyn life, reconciling childhood experience with your adult self - several of these read like companion pieces to The Fortress of Solitude.
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Jonathan Lethem's Men and Cartoons is at once a really comic and wry read, full of witticisms and self-depricating humor that borders on Chekovian sadness. "The Vision" begins with all fun and games until a woman named Doe confesses to having killed a cat, an admission of animal cruelty; The Spray is an erotic and sexy tale of a couple who finds a mysterious spray after their house has been robbed. After literally spraying the air, the images of their respective former lovers appear in a salmon-colored cloud.
Planet Big Zero is reminiscent of Lethem's themes of coming of age, and of lives meeting and falling apart due to time and circumstance: The narrator and his friend Matthew reminisce of a comic they've both started, as they look back on their lives. They separate ways after college, and Matthew becomes a wayward drifter as the narrator is about to break into success as a screenwriter. It definitely reminded me of Mingus and Dylan from "The Fortress of Solitude".
I thought of Vivian Ref as a modern adaptation of Chekhov's "The Kiss" where Doran and Vivian meet at three different times: a party, at an airport, and a final dinner party years later. Doran collides in the final scene where he meets Vivan's arrogant and douche of a husband at a dinner party, and where he unexpectedly finds her married to him after his briefly considering making a move in telling her of his affection. -
Middling collection of magazine stories, collected into one volume. Some familiar Lethem themes, superheroes, baseball, relationships. Depending on your personal proclivity you may enjoy some stories more than others but that's to be expected in this type of collection. They all had their moments but nothing earth shattering.
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Seemingly out of nowhere, I've been on a big Jonathan Lethem kick the past week or two. I started with his novel Motherless Brooklyn, a overall good read with a few moments of excellence. Next I found an incredible essay he wrote on the subject of plagiarism entitled,
"The ecstasy of influence: a plagiarism." This I highly recommend. And so finally, my Lethem kick comes to a close with his collection of short stories: Men and Cartoons. I'm not normally a big fan of short stories; I believe the goal or intention of short stories is as unique as that of the novel, the poem, the play, etc. and typically short stories don't really speak to me. (Don't expect me to tell you what I think the "goal or intention of short stories" is - I don't want to be
wrong on the internet.) Really, before Men and Cartoons, the only short stories I'd profess to legitimately enjoying would probably be a few by Jorge Luis Borges (off the top of my head, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and "Funes the Memorious") and Flannery O'Connor ("Everything that Rises Must Converge"). But, to finally get to the point here - Lethem has some really great stories here! There's a big sense of nostalgia and let's say "unexpected uncertainty" throughout. The narrators seem to all be thinking, very geniunely and earnestly, "But, I thought..." - a feeling with which I most surely empathize. Maybe the narrators are overthinking; maybe they're overfeeling. Maybe they aren't over-anything (both in terms of "doing too much" and "being over someone/thing) but are simply living in this crazy world and trying to make a little bit of sense of it. Who could blame them for that? My favorites in the collection (nine total) were "The Vision," "Vivian Relf," and "The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door." -
The Vision - first read this in a magazine in 2002. Rick Moody channeling Cheever vibe. Timely now, what with the cultural cache, the zeitgest, catching up: WandaVision etc.
Access Fantasy - reads like the tentative babysteps into an abandoned Gun With Occasional Music sequel.
The Spray - Pure Lethem concept with some Cheever, Updikean adultery, sadness.
Vivian Relf - Cheever sadness
Planet Big Zero - a meditation on friendship, our responsibility to our fellow man, success in the city, dropping out of society, autobiographical art
Glasses - terrible. Will definitely be reading assignment numero uno at the reeducation camps on how to NOT write blacks or optometrists
The Dystopianist... - Ah. Here we go. The pure Lethem, the true Lethem. With echoes of Martin Amis' rival writers, Murakami (and PKD's) sentient sheep. Utopianist writers versus the lone Dystopianist. The writing process, the brainstorming, the discarded ideas. Yes.
Super Goat Man - interesting, but. Lethem doing a campus short story. They say write what you know, and J was much more interesting when all what he knew was limited to PKD and Talking Heads records.
National Anthem - an epistolary short story, a blank.
This Shape We're In - Circa 2001 Lethem weirness originally published as a McSweeney's standalone.
Interview with the Crab - The memories of a Married but with Children type sitcom star who just happens to also be... a crab?!
These last two stories were sweeteners (mcsweety's) to thicken the paperback, to encourage the hardbackers. Interesting to note that the library of congress publishing data lists the stories in order, except these last two. Ending with the crab story gives the reader the right amount of light absurd humor, having ended it with (as originally intended) the novella would have been exhausting, dark. -
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. -
This is the second book of Lethem's that I've read. I'm finding that he has an odd sensibility that I like. This is a collection of short stories that hover on the edge of science fiction and Twilight Zone.
From "Access Fantasy", where the have nots are stuck in a world of the perpetual traffic jam and one of the only ways to get out is to be advertising for the "haves", to "The Glasses", a customer comes to a standoff with his optician over his new glasses, to "Interview with the Crab", a send up of TV and fame culture where Lethem goes to interview a giant crab who was the star of a sitcom and reality tv show.
Out of the 11 stories, only a couple were a miss for me. Would recommend, if you enjoy odd, slightly bent tales.
S: 1/26/14 F: 2/13/14 (19 Days) -
Meh, Lethem has better books and better short stories.
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This book was okay. I’ll be honest, I was not able to completely recall everything from the book, as I would read massive amounts of pages in each sitting, but overall it was entertaining. There were some amusing situations and bits of the book that made it enjoyable. Whether it was a predicament dealing with smudging glasses or meeting someone that seems oddly familiar, the book always dealt a pleasant read. My only complaint is that the back covers tells that the book is funny and amusing, which forces me to subconsciously raise my standards. As such, bits and stories from this book that would have made me snicker or laugh bare no reaction. Good book overall.
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Super Goat Man was the standout story here.
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Lethem has described his older stories as a sort of condensed novel rather than proper story, trying to take on more story and content than properly fits into a short story-length work. Honestly, that feeling is what makes a lot of his older stories so exciting, and the culminations, the two best of that thread of Lethem's writing, are contained here: a "Access Fantasy", a noir set in a future New York where the underpriveledged live in their cars in a permanent traffic jam, dreaming and watching bootleg video tapes of actual apartments on in-dash TVs, and (if you have this, the paperback edition) "This Shape We're In" a surreal, context-deficient, novela-length odyssey through the Shape in search of the (fabled) Eye. Both of these are fantastic adventure stories of concentrated invention; I may prefer them to Lethem's novels, even. The rest of the stories, though less striking, are still clever, unique, and entertaining. It's probably one of my favorite short story collections overall.
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I struggled in deciding whether to give this two or three stars. On one hand, Lethem is a brilliant writer and there is much to learn from his technique. This book definitely deserves a much higher rating if based objectively. However, I decided to go for the subject rating. Yes, his writing is excellent. Yes, his stories are very well constructed. However, I just didn't enjoy them at all. That's a strictly preference-based review and probably of no help whatsoever if you're trying to decide whether or not to read it. In short, these stories are actively addressing and working with the absurd. They're bizarre stories and done quite well.
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I once tried to read "Fortress of Solitude" and could not get through it, mostly due to boredom. I thought maybe short stories would be a better way for me to get into Lethem. No. Just...awful. I understand lots of people like him, I just don't understand why. I liked the first story, so I was hopeful. Maybe I will try more of his work sometime, but for now I can only conclude that Lethem is boring. And whiny. With all his white man pain.
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A series of experimental short stories featuring a variety of writing styles, unreliable narrators, quirky characters, a mish-mash of bizarre sci-fi elements and an underlying theme regarding comic-book superheros. Some of these stories are better than others, but none is a masterpiece. A quick read and worthwhile for the experimentation alone; odds are there's something in there that'll give you an idea for your own writing.
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his style/sensibility doesn't quite sit right with me for some reason, but i did like a few stories more than the rest. and imagine my shock to open it and the first story takes place on the very block where i now live (and sat reading it)!
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A great compilation of short stories, all imaginative, whimsical, & creative. Each story has the reader thinking, "What If?", transporting one to childhood fantasies. All are tied loosely and/or directly to superpowers, cartoons, and/or comic book heroes. A brief, but fun read!
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SIX WORD REVIEW: Extra! Super Goat Man botches rescue...
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Two or three of these stories haunt me, all are memorable.
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Shortly after I started reading
Jonathan Lethem's 2004 collection
Men and Cartoons, I discovered that a previous owner of the particular second-hand copy I'd acquired had mutilated it, annotating page after page in bilious green highlighter and indelible black ink (rather than a more respectful pencil). They were uniformly obvious and banal marginalia to boot, where they were legible at all, and I did as well as I could to ignore them in favor of the stories themselves.
Fortunately,
Jonathan Lethem has a superpower, perhaps acquired through the nibbling of a radioactive
silverfish—the uncanny ability to weave a web of words that can enthrall to the exclusion of all else.
However, Lethem's power is not universally reliable. Even though its brevity is a recommendation—this volume clocks in at a mere 160 pages—I like Lethem more at novel length, and would not necessarily hand
Men and Cartoons to someone as an introduction to his work. The short stories collected here are brief, often inconclusive, and frequently surreal. They certainly fit in with Lethem's overall oeuvre, but their tone is uniformly nostalgic—wistful and backward-looking—even when their trappings are futuristic:
"The Vision"
Adam Cressner was an oddball who wore a red cape, like his comic-book hero The Vision, to his fifth-grade gym class at P.S. 29. But "The Vision" isn't really about Adam. It's about Joel Porush, an altogether more typical child, who was in Adam's gym class. And it's about how and when—or even if—one should let go of childish things.
"Access Fantasy"
The most overtly science-fictional tale in
Men and Cartoons, this one seems like a throwback to the "if this goes on—" mode of SF so common in the 1950s and 1960s. The freeway turned into a perpetual parking lot—that's an image we've seen before, more than once. But Lethem goes in a darker direction in "Access Fantasy," imagining a barrier that keeps cars and drivers alike entrapped, turned into squatters in their own vehicles, save for a lucky few...
"The Spray"
A vignette, sudden as a spritz from a spray can, whose science-fictional gimmick is hardly even the point—"The Spray" is another story about how people manage their pasts (or fail to do so), this time when they've been literally made visible.
"Vivian Relf"
Chance meetings are significant, the stuff of destiny... aren't they? "Vivian Relf" explores the difference between what matters and what we think matters—and how even the same encounters may not have identical impacts for everyone involved.
"Planet Big Zero"
People either grow and change, or they don't. What happens when one of the former encounters one of the latter, after years of separation?
"The Glasses"
Like "The Spray," this is another vignette with an unusual object as pretext for the scene. "The Glasses" would, it seems to me, be really good performed as a one-act play—with, unlike "The Spray," no special effects required.
"The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door"
The Dystopianist and his rival turn out to be not that different after all. A sheep is involved.
"Super Goat Man"
"Super Goat Man" is in some ways very similar to "The Vision"—it also involves a mundane narrator who encounters an extraordinary individual from his youth again after years of separation. This one ends with much more of a bang, though.
"The National Anthem"
A letter from E. to M., almost entirely about A.—although E. didn't want it to be so much about her. Again, a story focused on the past, on regret and loss. "The National Anthem" was an anticlimactic way to end
Men and Cartoons, too; I would have swapped this one with "Super Goat Man," had the choice been up to me.
That's it; that's all—nine stories, varying widely in detail but unified in tone. If you go looking for
Men and Cartoons, may you find a copy that's pristine... Lethem's words deserve no less. -
"They stood together contemplating the privileges of their special relationship, its utter and proven vacancy.
'It's like when you start a book and then you realize you read it before,' he said. 'You can't really remember anything ahead, only you know each line as it comes to you.'" (p. 65, "Vivian Relf")
"'We're not evidence of anything,' said Vivian Relf." (p. 66, "Vivian Relf")
"This was the Dire One's pitiless art: his utopias wrote reality itself into the most persuasive dystopia imaginable." (p. 110, "The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door")
"One day, when the Dystopianist and the Dire Utopianist had been in the sixth grade at Intermediate School 293, cowering together in a corner of the schoolyard to duck sports and fights and girls in one deft multipurpose cower, they had arrived at a safe island of mutual interest: comic books, Marvel brand, which anyone who read them understood weren't comic at all but deadly, breathtakingly serious. Marvel constructed worlds of splendid complexity, full of chilling, ancient villains and tormented heroes, in richly unfinished story lines. There in the schoolyard, wedged for cover behind the girls' lunch-hour game of hopscotch, the Dystopianist declared his favorite character: Doctor Doom, antagonist of the Fantastic Four. Doctor Doom wore a forest green cloak and hood over a metallic slitted mask and armor. He was a dark king who from his gnarled castle ruled a city of hapless serfs. An imperial, self-righteous monster. The Dire Utopianist murmured his consent. Indeed, Doctor Doom was awesome, an honorable choice. The Dystopianist waited for the Dire Utopianist to declare his favorite.
'Black Bolt,' said the Dire Utopianist.
The Dystopianist was confused. Black Bolt wasn't a villain or a hero. Black Bolt was part of an outcast band of mutant characters known as the Inhumans, the noblest among them. He was their leader, but he never spoke. His only demonstrated power was flight, but the whole point of Black Bolt was the power he restrained himself from using: speech. The sound of his voice was cataclysmic, an unusable weapon, like an atomic bomb. If Black Bolt ever uttered a syllable the world would crack in two. Black Bolt was leader in absentia much of the time -- he had a tendency to exile himself from the scene, to wander distant mountaintops contemplating... What? His curse? The thing he would say if he could safely speak?" (pp. 111-112, "The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door")
"'I once saw you rescue a paper clip.'" (p. 147, "Super Goat Man")
"'My material is entirely my own. I came to it the same way maybe your precious Keaton or Vigoda came by their own -- pure suffering, forged into something of value to others, like crushing a coal into a diamond, a process you wouldn't know too much about since everything to you is just a big pile of slippery post-modern allusions and references with no soul to speak of, not even any notion that it might be missing one, that there might be something to mourn the loss of -- a soul, I mean.'" (p. 216, "Interview with the Crab") -
I sought this out after
The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye, and looking back over
my review for that one it's easy to see that this volume had all the things I didn't like about that one, and none of the things I did.
It's very off-putting that virtually all of Lethem's protagonists are privileged, entitled, bitter assholes, and it definitely makes me suspect that Lethem is revealing more than he knows about himself in these pages. Maybe he intentionally made all of his protagonists that unlikable, but I've seen it done many times in far better ways, and I'm pretty much over it unless you're going to add some novelty (which Lethem doesn't). In this case it just makes me not want to either meet the author or read anymore of his work.
And where I called the stories from Wall of the Sky "inventive," here the bizarre premises just come off as random and sophomoric. I imagine Lethem had some higher artistic reason for inserting, alternately, a talking sheep, goat and crab into three different stories, but I can't be bothered to think too hard about why that might be, so the effect is that it just seems like he's trying too hard to be absurd.
I disliked all of these stories pretty intensely, which would normally amount to 1-star status. I'm giving a 2nd star just in acknowledgment that they were never boring... except for "This Shape We're In" which was not only the longest story but also incomprehensible. I'll not be reading more of Lethem.
Not Bad Reviews -
An uneven collection for the completionist. First half of stories are great, then the rest are bizarre and sprawling."The Spray" is a great example of "you get one lie" per story, start off with a bit of real magic and two very serious people and see where it goes. "Vivian Relf" might be my favorite, a straightforward very human tale of yearning could-bes and what-ifs. It's not very characteristic of Lethem, though, the closest it gets to anything I've read of his is As She Climbed Across the Table. "Planet Big Zero", again oddly straightforward and normal, and somehow sad, about how (if) historical friendships survive aging. There is a particular set of friends from elementary and middle school that this story makes me think about, and it makes me sad. "The Glasses" is great, it elicits that great uncomfortable emotion I can only describe by narrowing my eyebrows in concern and giggling awkwardly. Watching an embarrassing self-inflicted trainwreck? Dunno. "Super Goat Man" is probably intended to be the main dish, as it's set with
Coover'sLethem's favorite trope of superhero in a normal world. The rest lost me, although "Interview with the Crab" reminded me of one of the 'interviews' I just read in
More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers that fit in this sort of minigenre of 'uncomfortable, surreal, uncooperative interviews' Lethem seems to like. -
I have mad respect for Lethem as a writer. I loved reading Motherless Brooklyn almost 20 years ago. In that novel, Lethem seamlessly pulls off a main character with Tourette Syndrome. He has written sci-fi, literary drama, and historical fiction. He is witty in humor, clever in construction, and culturally edgy/relevant. What's not to love?!
....Well.... I did not enjoy reading this collection of short stories. While, again, the variety of genres and sheer imagination in unique premises are impressive (did I seriously just read an interview with a celebrity crab?!), I found the stories themselves to be morally unsettling. And trust me, I can get into dark and twisted literature.
I guess I have learned about myself that, while I don't mind a tragic ending, I really cannot stomach when evil truly wins. In "Access Fantasy," a young girl helps an unlucky main character catch a break only to become victimized by a serial killer while the hero can do nothing to save here. "Super Goat Man" ends with the main character cruelly embarrassing an elderly mid-level superhero. The main character in "The Vision" is ultimately a giant douche. And so on.
Not one story is uplifting, nor are any conventional - which I suppose is Lethem's unique genius - but is also why I found it difficult to enjoy reading this recreationally at all. -
A lively selection of short stories, Men and Cartoons delivers much enjoyment. Lethem, author of novels Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude among others, enjoys mixing up genres and is so good at it, he can force the reader to do some research to figure out just how much he's making up. This was the case with a story called "Six Black Men." It's a riff on the Dutch legends around Sinterklaas that reads like a piece of travel reportage. "Access Fantasy" is a sci-fi piece reminiscent of J.G. Ballard's novel Highrise, but loaded with social satire. It's particularly convincing these days: Americans are living out of their cars on a highway in permanent gridlock and can access real homes through a video on their dashboards. The narrator, who is starving, persuades a young woman in a nearby car to allow him to accompany her through the "One-way Permeable Barrier" to a place where people actually live in apartment buildings over malls. The price of admission is to become an advertisement. This narrator is a walking, talking promotion for a brand of beer. Characters include the “ugly, Nazi robots” whose brainpans are visible through their plexiglass skulls.
