Review: Lethem | Men and Cartoons
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 consumption, 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.
176 pages | $19.95 | Doubleday | November, 2004
