In Jonathan Lethem’s home of Brooklyn, New York, on 5th Avenue, there lives a reassuringly odd, tough-looking store called Brooklyn Superhero Supply. Set, when I first saw it, along a row of graying or graffitied businesses, Superhero Supply (”Ever vigilant, ever true”) features “fully serviced capery, workspace for research and development, and industrial-grade services for superpowers,” whatever those might be.Superhero Supply (actually a storefront for social work by the publisher/literary magazine McSweeney’s), like Lethem’s latest collection of short stories Men and Cartoons, evidences growing demand for the packaging, for adult comsumption, comics, cartoons, and superheroism. One hesitates to say these point toward growing popular acceptance–it’s hard to imagine one of these stores more than twenty miles from a college campus–but certainly a large and diverse enough population exists to support businesses more ambitious than the small, obstinate comicbook stores of old. In my New England, as well, Newbury Comics (”A wicked good time”) thrives at no fewer than 26 locations, in part because it knows how to exploit a market segment made up of college students, twixters, webcomic junkies, Simpsons fans, concert-goers, punks, ironists, and anyone else who would have $20 to drop on a particular object just to experience the thrill of being asked, “Mehe, funny. Where’d you get that?”Men and Cartoons is meant for this market slice. It reads as very experimental for a writer as trusted by publishers as Lethem–author of the exciting, discombobulating novel Motherless Brooklyn and of The Fortress of Solitude among others. The stories are very short, the writing and narratives hurried, and the packager’s proofreading light. In fact, it reads exactly as what it is: a slapped-together collection of stories already placed elsewhere in magazines and journals trying to keep their page-counts down, a book seemingly forced to publication by the contractual obligations of both parties. Just a guess. Nevertheless, the stories are engaging, sometimes illuminating, and ultimately valuable for anyone interested in the trade between the port cities of literary fiction, pop culture, and maturing comicdom.In Men and Cartoons’ first story, “The Vision,” the adult narrator finds a childhood classmate, who in youth had branded himself a superhero, cape and all, has moved in nextdoor. The girlfriend of Adam Cressner, nee The Vision, invites the narrator to a game of mafia (allowing Lethem to use many authors’ beloved crutch, the house-party-as-tension-builder). Mafia runs and sputters and finally drains the party-goers of their life, at which point the narrator suggests a favorite drinking game (of underage drinkers, at least) called I Never. To defend a flirting-partner after she was shamed by Cressners’ I-Neverism, the narrator determines to out The Vision’s childhood identity. A fine, clean, if predictable story but one exemplary of Lethem’s theme in this collection, “The Vision,” smashes together childhood and adulthood. In fact, it’s exemplary of a whole swath of contemporary fiction, one that writes the coming-of-age story backwards: characters, guided by other, less experienced characters, have epiphanies that hurl them with great suddenness backwards into their own childhoods.Another Lethem crutch, appearing in Motherless Brooklyn, in “The Vision,” in the second piece, “Access Fantasy,” and in “Vivian Relf,” is the introduction of a pixie. Lethem’s character’s love interests are always small, half reticent and half bold, and physically intriguing. For example, of Doe in “The Vision,” Lethem writes, “Her tiny mouth was perfect apart from one incisor that seemed to have been inserted sideways for variation, like a domino”. His women reflect the ideal that has weirdly taken hold of twixter boys’ minds, the girl with the pretty face but funky hair, or with immaculate thrift-store style, or with a playfulness at turns beguiling and controlling. They’re girls who remind boys of youth. Men and cartoons.In all, the stories bounce between a traditional realism and a comic-rhetoric-infused one. (The book’s dustjacket borrows the look of comics’ original brown-paper coverings.) The stories are episodic, like comics. Often you can just about see the bubble above a person’s head.The hardest, keenest story in Men and Cartoons then is “Super Goat Man.” Super Goat Man himself is the comic equivalent of the one-hit wonder–he had appeared very briefly in a very obscure comic but managed to parlay that into a professorship at a New England college. You heard me. “Super Goat Man” suspends, like a good comic or sci-fi piece does, the reader’s disbelief in ways the reader didn’t think were possible. The character, as a superhero, is called upon to save a life but fails in full view of the college’s student body. It’s a painful overlaying of human nature on superhero nature, rather than the more common other way around.Men and Cartoons isn’t without competition in its themes. The popularity of Hellboy and Spiderman in the theaters and the resiliency several years after its publication of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay shows that the infusion of childhood-conscious art into adult-market-conscious genres, businesses, and, well, adults has a ton of vitality. While Lethem will always be stronger in his longer writing, the short fiction in Men and Cartoons will stand on their own as fine examples of twixter literature’s exploration and growth.
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.
What do You think about Men And Cartoons (2005)?
So, there's a story about a retired superhero named Super Goat Man. Super Goat Man has round table, wine-and-pot-soaked communals with students at a small New England liberal arts college. Everyone digs the goat man. Our narrator knew him as a kid and then meets him again at the college. SGM is part creepy uncle, part cool older brother, but, mostly ... as someone up here mentioned, an icon for the failures of the boomer generation to (a) properly inspire their children, and (b) fulfill the promises of that postwar boon. Some stuff happens, and our narrator ends up being mean to Super Goat Man. The father's (or SGM's) failure is now his son's, and like almost all of Lethem's characters ... the inability to communicate internal rumblings, connect desire to action, recognize said desire, and half a dozen other wonderfully rich characterizations ... has doomed himself to the not-so-terrible (not-so-good, either) fate called the middle ground.So.There's this other story about a giant talking crab that used to be on a TV show that sounds familiarly like ALF, but with a crab. He's past his prime, reclusive and ornery in his latter days. Jonathan Lethem, in the story, goes to talk to this crab, and finds out that he's got lots of little crabbies in tanks, ready to take over the world when global warning, as is expected, properly destroys us all. To me, this story was nothing more than pretty quirky and pretty hilarious.So, I guess what I'm trying to say is... whether you're reading at face-value, deeply introspective, or anywhere in between, you can find something to love about any one of the eleven stories in this collection. "The Vision," "Vivian Relf," and "Access Fantasy" were my other favorites.Lethem's stories are clearly conceived and sharply written. I want to read one of his novels, and soon.
—Matt
I had heard lots of praise for Lethem, but was sorely disappointed with these short stories. Some of them showed promise early on, or at points throughout, but most were mildly intriguing at best, plodding at worst. Maybe it is simply because I don't 'get' what he was going for in most of them, but on the whole I felt like there wasn't a point, or that the point was too obscure, or that if there were a point it would be silly and annoying. I will say that I enjoyed "Access Fantasy" and "The National Anthem," the former for its intriguing dystopia and amusing plot twist at the end, and the latter for its clear soul-searching and scathing introspection (though whether or not either of those were of the author himself, I don't know). Maybe his full-length novels are better--more fully realized and fleshed out--since those are generally what I've heard people speaking highly of, but I wouldn't really recommend this collection of short stories.
—Ben
Pretty damn fantastic. This is the first of Lethem's works that I have read, and now I can't wait to sit down with some more. As is inherent with any collection of short stories, there are a few standouts and a few misses, but all in all, I really enjoyed the collection as a whole. It's funny; I don't even remember how it is that I happened to purchase this particular book, and it has sat on my shelf for some months, but now I feel like I should thank whomever it was that brought this collection to my attention. More than anything, I am impressed with Lethem's abilities to craft small microcosms in each story. Some are clearly set in a completely reality-based present day. Others are set in dystopian futures. More are set in a world where just one or two small differences separate it from the world we live in. In part, that is what makes reading some of these stories so compelling - you need to figure out gradually what the "rules" of the society are as you go along. Oh, and there's a story about a retired superhero named Super Goat Man. It's so random that it's absolutely fantastic.
—Bill
