[REVIEW] Lucky Alan and Other Stories, by Jonathan Lethem

$24.95, 157 pgs

Reviewed by Jonathan Russell Clark

The short story form serves Jonathan Lethem well. An imagination and intellect as keen as fertile as Lethem’s can take any idea and run with it for as long as he likes, which can result in, for instance, his disastrous 2009 novel Chronic City. Or it can produce something wondrous like The Fortress of Solitude. But Lethem’s stories, like his essays, allow him to explore a conceit with the same brilliant mind while simultaneously preventing him from wearing out his literary welcome.

His third story collection Lucky Alan and Other Stories shows Lethem in total control of his prodigious skills and cultural insight. These nine stories cover many of the themes Lethem finds himself returning to again and again, but their economy ups the punch considerably. But perhaps most important to the success of these tales is Lethem’s acute understanding of the worlds over which he hovers.

Take, for instance, the story “Their Back Pages,” which features a group of long-forgotten comic book characters crash-landing on a tropical island. I couldn’t help but be reminded of George Saunders’s “In Persuasion Nation,” a similarly satirical romp featuring characters not from comics but from commercials. Saunders’s aim is very different, yes, but there’s also something else: Saunders necessarily remains at a distance in “In Persuasion Nation,” because the object of his story (commercials) is not a world of which he’s a part. Lethem, who has himself written comic books, clearly knows the realm of paneled storytelling intimately, so “Their Back Pages” wins as both a funny satire and a knowledgeable artifact of Lethem’s vast cultural reach.

And Lethem is undeniably funny. In “The Dreaming Jaw, the Salivating Ear,” Lethem imagines a man’s blog as if it were an actual piece of property, a home-like shelter one would want to protect from intruders. The narrator, the founder of the blog, carries around his “blunt editorial object” and speaks in indignant hyperbole, smacking of the pretentious self-obsession online. Responding to a piece of graffito (read: a comment) that has “violated the hallowed corridors of my sanctum,” he vows to:

content myself imagining such a soul writhing under its own torments, and not give the defamer even the honor of my rebuke. He’ll have moved on, I assure myself of this. Shambled off to pick on something his own low size. Still, I see his haiku as if neon-imprinted on my eyelids’ interior when I shut my eyes to sleep.

But underneath the humor, of course, lies some truth. If our homes were invaded as casually and as menacingly as our online avatars, how would we react?

Lethem is also a remarkable sentence writer, and here he shows just how good he can be with the use of a surprising word or phrase. In the title story, Lethem describes Alan as wearing a “sports coat pixied with dandruff.” In the final story “Pending Vegan,” a man takes his family to SeaWorld just after he stops taking Celexa. He’s been contemplating veganism but hasn’t had the courage to tell his wife and daughters. While looking for the orca show, he becomes hungry and searches for food, finding only “oddly primal” looking drumsticks. “See food, eat food,” he thinks. “Sea World, Eat World.” In the same story, the narrator characterizes his therapist with a hilariously adept simile:

Irving Renker was a Jewish New Yorker who’d crawled out of his archetype like a lobster from its shell, still conforming to that shell’s remorseless shape but wandering around fresh, tender, and amazed.

Or, finally, this description of the “furloughed military” also in attendance at SeaWorld:

They were knowable by their short haircuts and bicep tattoos, by the wary swivel of their thickened necks. In their upright stolidity it was as though various civilian bodies had all been poured into the same unforgiving mold.

It’s no surprise, then, to find a story like “The King of Sentences,” in which a pair of literary obsessives track down a reclusive Pynchon/Gaddis/Salinger-type in New York City. Lethem is a writer totally aware of his influences––who is, in fact, a celebrant of influences; see his incredible essay “The Ecstasy of Influence”––but whose work rarely feels derivative. Like “The Ecstasy of Influence,” which is a pastiche of plagiarized passages, Lethem’s art is enmeshed in the art that inspired it. Most of the stories in Lucky Alan revolve around some cultural reference point (SeaWorld, books, blogs, movies, comics, pornography), a choice that, in lesser hands, would risk losing itself in the referent. But Lethem always inserts his own unique spin. In other words, Lethem’s a man standing in the shadows of giants, but he’s not there to hide, but instead to pop out when you least expect it.

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Jonathan Russell Clark is a staff writer for Literary Hub. His work has appeared in Tin House, The Georgia Review, The Millions, and The Rumpus, among others. More at jonathanrussellclark.com.