Men and Cartoons: Stories Review

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(More customer reviews)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.

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