Product Description

Jonathan Lethem’s new collection of stories is a feast for his fans and the perfect introduction for new readers—nine fantastic, amusing, poignant tales written in a dizzying variety of styles, as Lethem samples high and low culture to create fictional worlds that are utterly original. Longtime readers will recognize echoes of Lethem’s novels in all these pieces—narrators who can’t stop babbling, hapless would-be detectives, people with unusual powers that do them no good, hot-blooded academics, and characters whose clever repartee masks lovelorn desperation as they negotiate both the stumbling path of romance and the bittersweet obligations of friendship.

Among them:
“The Vision” is a story about drunken neighborhood parlor games, boys who dress up as superheroes, and the perils of snide curiosity.
“Access Fantasy” is part social satire, part weird detective story. Evoking Lethem’s earliest work, it conjures up a world divided between people who have apartments and people trapped in an endless traffic jam behind The One-Way Permeable Barrier.
“The Spray” is a simple story about how people in love deal with their past. A magical spray is involved.
“Vivian Relf” is a tour de force about loss. A man meets a woman at a party; they’re sure they’ve met before, but they haven’t. As the years progress this strangely haunting encounter comes to define the narrator’s life.
“The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door” is a Borgesian tale that features suicidal sheep. (This story won a Pushcart Prize when first published in Conjunctions.)
“Super Goat Man” is a savagely funny exposé of the failures of the sixties baby boomers, and of their children.

Sparkling with the off-beat humor and subtle insights, Men and Cartoons is a welcome addition to the shelf of the writer “whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among his country’s foremost novelists.”
—Salon

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #787502 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-08
• Released on: 2005-11-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
"A strikingly original collection . . . imaginative, insightful, witty and sad." --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"An already dazzling writer shows us a new card. . . . Men and Cartoons ends on a note that portends Lethem's most experimental turn yet: toward human love as [a transporting] alternate universe. . . . Lethem in a new, more nakedly personal key." --San Francisco Chronicle

"Lethem is the man to beat in fiction these days. . . . Every tale of ennui, cosmic regret and petty yearning is perfectly realized. The brevity of the book and perfection of the stories puts every other member of his generation to shame." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Ineffably poignant." --Time

"His sheer inventiveness is a treat. . . . Affecting and clever, these tales are standouts." --People

"Terrific. . . . Lethem captures the world we know and the one hovering just beyond our periphery." --The Baltimore Sun

"A pleasure. . . . These stories offer potent little distillations of Lethem's considerable imagination." --Entertainment Weekly

"Compelling. . . . Effective. . . . Intelligent and poignant. . . . Strange, amusing, haunting. . . . Lethem has what musicians call 'chops,' or technical mastery. He can mix and match prose styles and literary genres to create glittering fictional artifacts. . . . Each of these nine tales rewards the reader in some way--through an insight, a scene or simply the force of the author's imagination." --St. Petersburg Times

"Bristling with familiarity. . . . Theme[s] that resonate. . . . [Lethem is] adept at letting palpable human experiences emerge from absurd, fantastical situations." --The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Nuanced. . . . Resonates with intense force." --Newsday

"Laugh-out-loud funny tales of love, flamboyance, and childhood memories." --Elle

"Smart. . . . Original. . . . Memorable. . . . Lethem is . . . [like] the Coen Brothers of fiction." --The Seattle Times

"Men and Cartoons will open up a vast new world to readers unfamiliar with Lethem's oeuvre. . . . The entries are uniformly fine--each in its own way representative of Lethem's mastery of whatever style he attempts." --Rocky Mountain News

"Fantastic." --Vanity Fair

"Engaging. . . . A Lethem primer. . . . The characters of Men and Cartoons need their stories to be told." --The Village Voice

"Jonathan Lethem spits out genres like curse words--from sci-fi to pseudo-erotica to the
epistolary. His narrative psychosis is our disturbed enjoyment." --Genre Magazine

"Wonderful. . . . A collection of tales based in Brooklyn but permeated with fantasy [from] the very talented Mr. Lethem." --The Hartford Courant

"Lethem at his best. . . . [An] appealing array of stories [that] exemplify Lethem's talents as a profoundly imaginative writer." --Chattanooga Times Free Press

About the Author
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Award. He is the author of two short story collections and the editor of The Vintage Book of Amnesia. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Granta and Harper’s. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and in Maine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Vision



I first met the kid known as the Vision at second base, during a kickball game in the P.S. 29 gymnasium, fifth grade. That's what passed for physical education in 1974: a giant rubbery ball, faded red and pebbled like a bath mat, more bowled than pitched in the direction of home plate. A better kick got the ball aloft, and a fly was nearly uncatchable--after the outfielder stepped aside, as he or she invariably did, nearly anything in the air was a home run. Everyone fell down, there'd be a kid on his ass at each base as you went past. Alternately, a mistimed kick scudded back idiotically to the pitcher, and you were thrown out at first.

The Vision booted a double. His real name was Adam Cressner, but he believed himself or anyway claimed to be the Vision: the brooding, super powered android from Marvel Comics' Avengers. The comic-book Vision had the power to vary the density of his body, becoming a ghost if he wished to float through walls or doors, becoming diamond hard if he wished to stop bullets like Superman. Adam Cressner couldn't do any of this. This day he wasn't even wearing his cape or costume, but under black curls his broad face was smeared unevenly with red food dye, as it always was. I was fascinated. The Vision had come to be taken for granted at Public School 29, but I'd never seen him up close.

"Nice kick," I ventured, to Adam Cressner's back. The Vision had assumed a stance of readiness, one foot on the painted base, hands dangling between his knees Lou Brock-style. "Ultron-5 constructed me well," replied the Vision in the mournful monotone of a synthetic humanoid. Before I could speak again the ball was in the air, and Adam Cressner had scooted home to score, not pausing as he rounded third.

Now the Vision was a grown man in a sweatshirt moving an open Martini & Rossi carton-load of compact discs into the basement entrance of the next-door brownstone. I spotted Captain Beefheart, Sonny Sharrock, Eugene Chadbourne. I'd been returning from the corner bodega with a quart of milk when I recognized him instantly, even without his red face and green hood, or the yellow cape he'd worn in winter months. "Adam Cressner?" I asked. I made it a question to be polite: it was Adam Cressner.

"Do I know you?" Cressner's hair was still curly and loose, his eyes still wild blue.

"Not really. We went to school together."

"Purchase?"

"P.S. 29, fifth grade." I pointed thumbwise in the direction of Henry Street. I didn't want to say: You were the Vision, man! But I supposed in a way I'd just said it. "Joel Porush."

"Possibly I remember you." He said this with a weird premeditated hardness, as if not remembering but possibly remembering was a firm policy.

"Migrated back to the old neighborhood?"

Cressner placed the box at the slate lip of the basement stairwell and stepped around his gate to take my hand. "By the time we had a down payment we could barely afford this part of the city," he said. "But Roberta doesn't care that I grew up around here. She became entranced with the neighborhood reports in the City section."

"Wife?"

"Paramour."

"Ah." This left me with nothing to say except, "I should have you guys over for drinks."

The Vision lifted one Nimoy-esque eyebrow.

"When you get in and catch your breath, of course." You and the paramour.

I met Roberta at the border of our two backyards, the next Sunday. The rear gardens through the middle of the block were divided by rows of potted plants but no fence, allowing easy passage of cats and conversation. These communal yards were a legacy from the seventies that most new owners hadn't chosen to reverse. I had a basement renter's usual garden privileges, and was watering the plants which formed the border when Roberta Jar appeared at her back door. She introduced herself, and explained that she and Cressner had bought the house.

"Yes, I met Adam a few days ago," I said. "I know him, actually. From around here."

"Oh?"

I'd supposed he'd told of our encounter in front, mentioned being recognized by a schoolmate. Now I had to wonder whether to explain Cressner's childhood fame. "We were at grade school together, on Henry Street. Long before this was a fashionable address. Surely he's walked you past his alma mater."

"Adam doesn't reminisce," said Roberta Jar coolly and, I thought, strangely. The assertion which could have been fond or defiant had managed to be neither. I thought of how Adam had possibly remembered, the week before.

"Funny, I do nothing else," I said. I hoped it was a charming line. Roberta Jar didn't smile, but her eyes flashed a little encouragement.

"Does it pay well?" she asked.

"Only when something gets optioned for the movies."

"How often is that?"

"It's like the lottery," I said. "Ninety-nine percent of the time, nothing. But that one time and you're golden."

I'd been blunted from the fact of my instinctive attraction to Roberta Jar, in those first moments, by her towering height. Roberta was six two, or three, I calculated, and with none of that hunched manner with which women apologize for great height or sizable breasts. So I'd been awed before being struck. By this time, though, I was struck too. Paramour-pyramid-pylon, I fooled with in my head.

I mentioned again having the two of them over for a drink. My evenings were very free since parting from Gia Maucelli, and I was stuck on what I'd blurted to Adam Cressner and had visualized ever since--a grown-up encounter, involving wine and sophisticated talk. No longer a couple, I still socialized like one in my imagination. Cressner and his tall woman would visit my apartment for drinks. They'd see the couple I'd been by Gia's phantom-limb absence, and ratify the couple I'd likely be again by the fact of themselves. In other words, perhaps Roberta Jar had a friend she could set me up with.

"Maybe," she said, utterly disinterested. "Or you could come along tonight. We're having a few people in."

"A housewarming party?"

"Actually, we're playing a game. You'd like it."

"Truth-or-dare, spin-the-bottle sort of thing?"

"More interesting than that. It's called Mafia. You should come--I think we still need a fifteenth."

For bridge or a dinner party you might need a fourth or a sixth--Roberta Jar and Adam Cressner needed a fifteenth. That was how close to essential I'd been encouraged to feel myself to be.

"How do you play Mafia?"

"It's hard to explain, but not to play."

I turned up with wine, still imposing my paradigm, but it was a beer thing I'd turned up at. Adam Cressner ushered me into the parlor, which was restored--new white marble fireplace and mantel, freshly remodeled plaster-rosette ceiling, blond polished floor--but unfurnished, and full instead of gray metal folding chairs like those you'd find in a church basement. The chairs were packed with Adam and Roberta's friends, all drinking from bottles and laughing noisily, too caught up to bother with introductions--when I counted I found myself precisely fifteenth. Roberta Jar was part of the circle, tall in her chair. I wondered if she stood taller than Adam--this was the first time I'd seen them together.

Adam had just been explaining the game, and he started again for me. I was one of four or five in the group who'd never played. Others threw in comments and suggestions as Adam explained the rules. "I'll be the narrator," Adam told us. "That means I'm not playing the game, but leading you through it."

"We want you to play, Adam," someone shouted. "Someone else can narrate. We've played, we know how."

"No, you need a strong narrator," said Adam. "You're an unruly bunch." I imagined I heard in his tone a hint of the Vision's selfless patronage of humanity.

According to the rules of Mafia, the group of fourteen comprised a "village"--except that three of us were "mafia" instead: false villagers working to bring the village down. These identities were assigned by dealt cards, black for village, red for mafia. The game then unfolded in cycles of "night" and "day." Night was when we closed our eyes and lowered our heads--"The village is asleep," Adam explained--with the exception of the three mafiosi. They instead kept their eyes open, and by an exchange of glances silently conspired to select a villager to kill. The victim would be informed of his or her death by the narrator, when night was over, and then make an orderly exit from the game.

Day, by contrast, was chaos, a period of free talk and paranoia among the sincere and baffled villagers--who, of course, included three dissembling mafiosi. Each day closed with the village agreeing by democratic vote on a suspect to banish. This McCarthyesque ritual lynching brought about night, and another attack from the mafia. And so on. The mafia won if they winnowed the village down to two or three, a number they could dominate in any voting, before the village purged all mafiosi from its ranks. It seemed to me like relentless jargonish nonsense, but I worked on a beer (telling Roberta the wine was "for the cellar"), checked out the women, and allowed myself to be swept into the group's flow. We began our first day in the village, peppered by Adam-the-narrator's portentous reminders, such as "Dead, keep your silence." I'd drawn a black card: villager.

Our village was young and boisterous, full of hot, beer-bright faces whose attachments I couldn't judge. It was also splendidly bl...

Customer Reviews

Genres in a Blender
MEN AND CARTOONS, an uneven but daring collection of eleven short stories by Jonathan Lethem, takes delight in juxtaposing mundane realities with absurd, surreal, or even supernatural particulars. "Super Goat Man," for instance, is concerned with a Jung-reading, jazz-loving resident at a Brooklyn commune who later goes on to teach at a liberal New Hampshire college -- and, oh, by the way, this professor just happens to be the eponymous character, a literal goat-slash-man -- previously a ho-hum comic book superhero whose unremarkable adventures never quite caught on with the masses. Lethem inserts his incredible characters and events into a quasi-real world where everything is taken at face value. It almost calls to mind magical-realism, but in the case of Lethem the extraordinary is more prosaic than poetic -- less magical than merely situational. Super Goat Man is, after all, like every man in many ways, except for his goatness.

Meanwhile, in "The Shape We're In," the longest story in the collection, a retired military "man" (who happens to be a relentless wisecracker and an alcoholic) asks the Big Questions in his own little world, which just happens to be the inside of a human body. Yes, Mr F is actually some kind of corpuscular element (blood cell perhaps?) racing from the cavernous temple-like lung to the upper nose in a quest to find his son Dennis, who has been spotted panhandling in the environs of one of the eyes. In "The Spray" a house burglary introduces a couple to the spray of the title, a mysterious aerosol chemical which, when applied to an area, reveals the image of what is lost or missing. And in "Access Fantasy" -- probably the most extreme, Phillip K. Dickian outing here -- the main character attempts to solve a suspected murder when he spots a suspicious shadow on an "apartment tape" while stuck in a month-long (or is it year-long?) traffic jam. To do so, he must become an advertising drone and venture across something called the "One-Way Permeable Barrier." (Don't ask. This is certainly one of Lethem's muddiest, least satisfying stories.)

Lethem's stories are most successful when he doesn't drift too far from the normal reaches of reality and when his stories remain firmly grounded in human relationships, as in "The Vision," "The Spray," "Vivian Reif," "The Glasses," and "Super Goat Man." Although the symbolism in the "The Glasses," for instance, seems very heavy-handed, the amusing, quirky dialogue keeps this story afloat.

For those who are familiar only with Lethem's more famous works FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE and MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN, this short story collection may surprise (or disappoint). Although FORTRESS and BROOKLYN involved supernatural and offbeat elements, respectively, MEN AND CARTOONS is more overtly experimental in the strange new realities it imposes on our world. In other words, it may tax the literal-minded.

Super Reader
A story collection with not too much of interest, they are all pretty short. A woman that does the Scarlet Witch outfit to get her bloke's crank on, a couple of kids that grow up to be opposing science fiction stylists, as could be seen by their favorite Marvel characters. Those being Doctor Doom for the Dystopianist, and Black Bolt for the Utopianists.

Then there is Super-Goat Man, the superhero who lost his comic etc. because of lameness and outspoken political viewpoints, and ended up faculty at a small college after being a hippy.

1 star for each good story
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.