Jonathan Lethem found more readers – and prizes – when he left behind early adventures in science fiction to set up as a neo-Dickensian chronicler of his native New York, albeit one inclined to forage outre plot points from his unsnobby reading habits (noir, Marvel comics). Motherless Brooklyn in 1999 followed an orphaned private eye with Tourette syndrome; 2003’s The Fortress of Solitude spun a coming-of-age tale from Lethem’s hippy childhood and added a magic flying ring. Short stories tend to be where he fools around most: among the oddest items in his third collection of reality-bending fables is “Traveler Home”, which narrates a man’s care for a foundling in Yoda-like syntax and originally accompanied a set of ominous snowglobe scenes by the sculptors Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz.
In the meatiest tale, “Procedure in Plain Air”, jobless Stevick is in search of his morning fix at a Manhattan coffee shop when two jumpsuited workmen arrive to dig up the pavement and bury alive a dark-skinned captive. The other customers, “obliviously earbudded” at first, simply pack away their laptops once the jackhammers get going. Stevick alone protests, but the operatives are only following orders (“We’re on installation and delivery … Pickup’s another department”). When he points out that the plank they’re nailing down won’t keep the captive dry, he’s handed an umbrella: “This is why we’re grateful you came along when you did … Don’t be afraid to stand on top – it’ll easily support your weight.”
The story first appeared in the New Yorker in 2009, the year Obama ordered the closure of Guantánamo, between an article on drones and one on Hamid Karzai. The captive remains silent throughout; instead the focus falls on Stevick’s helpless complicity as he guards this shady undertaking. His neediness allows the story to function beyond satire: he knows that what’s happening is wrong, yet still tries to use his new job to impress a passing ex-girlfriend (“Do you want to see him?”).
The hint of vanity in Stevick’s initial objection to the “procedure” (he feels it “could be seen as crucial … in some later accounting of [his] comportment”) finds an echo in “Pending Vegan”, about a depressive father who, haunted by visions of an insurgent animal kingdom, privately vows to give up eating meat – just not yet, in a delay “comparable to the period when the Allies had learned of the existence of the death camps yet checked their moral outrage against military-tactical considerations”.
We’re meant to see the analogy as an effect of the protagonist’s oscillating mood, yet manic over-elaboration is a favourite technique throughout this book. One story follows a pair of loved-up booksellers who chase their literary idol out of Pynchonian seclusion only for him to leave them naked and ashamed in a motel room, aware for the first time “how much, in the end, it actually costs” to be the so-called “King of Sentences”. This crowning insight is not actually shared with the reader – a tantalising payoff to a tale told in ironic retrospect.
Another of Lethem’s devices is to keep us in the dark about his purpose by rejecting the short-story orthodoxy that every word has to count. In the title piece, the focus drifts from the narrator (a washed-up actor) to his older acquaintance (a fringe director known for staging Beckett in a lift) who relates a meandering anecdote about a surly and jealous neighbour – “Lucky Alan” – before introducing the character who speaks least but has most significance: the Vietnamese wife Alan suddenly acquires after a trip abroad.
Now and then you feel Lethem writes mainly to see how far he can stretch a conceit. “The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear” recasts online life as medieval bloodshed, with a blogger brooding on the deadly cudgel blow delivered to an anonymous commenter who invaded their “solitary majestic kingdom”. Elsewhere, a band of comic-strip characters crash-land on an island and subsist on their own thought balloons, building a tower from “woven-together heat and stink and motion lines”.
Weird, charming, playful, Lucky Alan is great fun, though buyer beware. This is a collection that has been harvested rather than crafted: every story has already appeared elsewhere and nearly all are available online for nothing. Lethem himself advocates “free culture”, so the choice is yours. For completists, altruists and readers in the clutches of their conscience, this sort-of‑new book offers a one-stop sampler of his flexible and restless talent.
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