Lucky Alan

November 3, 2014
In Lethem’s collection, following the novel Dissident Gardens, the stories use absurdity, satire, or incongruity to contrast the quotidian. A bookstore clerk and his girlfriend obsess over the cadence and precision of language, stalking the reclusive writer they’ve deemed “The King of Sentences” (in the story of that name). In “Procedure in Plain Air,” the main character, sitting outside his favorite cafe, watches a work crew dig a hole in the street, then lower a bound and gagged man into the chasm. In “Porn Critic,” the lonesome Kromer reflects on his titular vocation, realizing his “special literacy was... positively toxic.” Unfortunately, the characters, with exquisitely improbable names like Sigismund Blondy, C. Phelps Northrup, and Invisible Luna, seldom surpass the concepts that formed them, and the ideas of the stories are more promising than the stories themselves. Although nearly every sentence captures Lethem’s sharp wit and copious imagination, reminding us that Lethem himself is perhaps the king of sentences after all, the sum of the parts rarely adds up. The most rewarding exception is “Pending Vegan,” which begins, “Paul Espeseth, who was no longer taking the antidepressant Celexa, braced himself for a cataclysm at Sea World.” The story that follows fulfills this line’s prediction with all the intrigue, emotion, and blunt force of reality.

December 15, 2014
These nine stories by a leading American writer almost all bend away from realism, and one goes well into fantasy, while offering choice prose and insights. Lethem (Dissident Gardens, 2013, etc.) has a rubbery Gumby brain that bounces among genres, elements of pop culture and everyday abnormalities. "Their Back Pages" tells of a comic-book plane crash that maroons on an island 13 characters (such as the armless King Phnudge and the clown Large Silly). Their adventure fluidly, delightfully mixes human and cartoon elements, along with a hint of something malign. In "Procedure in Plain Air," which more than nods to Donald Barthelme, a bound man is casually and without explanation placed alive in a hole in a Manhattan street, and a passerby is enlisted to watch over him. The title character of "The Porn Critic" has a certain cachet among his peers, in part by managing a sex-toy shop and reviewing its adult films, but his simple romantic ambitions are foiled when the lady in question sees the piles of XXX DVDs in his flat. "Traveler Home" starts as fragments, like aides-memoire for a larger work, then blossoms into a modern Grimm tale. "The King of Sentences" tells of two sentence-loving, unpublished writers hunting the reclusive man of the title when they aren't concocting lines like, "I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring." One story concerns the estrangement between the narrator and his blog, where "gulls have skeletonized the corpse in the entranceway," among other things. It's as far out there as jazz might be to a Beatles fan. At the other end of the scale is an almost conventional piece about a family outing to SeaWorld that is colored by the father's being weaned from the antidepressant Celexa. Lethem's humor ranges from rueful to sly to "big silly," and his careful, mostly unshowy writing has a gift for charming a reader into almost anything.

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December 15, 2014
Lethem's short stories are all over the map, psychically speakingthough the settings do range from New York and New England to Sea World and an atoll in a wide barren sea peppered with shark's fins. Readers looking for a comforting consistency of style won't find it here, as Lethem is intent on testing boundaries: even when his fiction is at its most realistic, there's an unreality that makes it almost dreamlike. Still, universal themespeople struggling to connect, to express themselves, and to find their places in an alienating worldemerge. Their Back Pages strands comic-strip characters on a desert island with surprisingly affecting results; Procedure in Plain Air, about random incarcerations in New York, invites an allegorical reading; Pending Vegan renders parental anxiety as Family life, a cataclysm of solitudes; Traveler Home is a haunting, modern fairy tale. With a few exceptions, these tend to be more intellectually involving than emotionally affecting. But readers willing to endure a little discomfort on the journey will find themselves in some fascinating new territory.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lethem stretching beyond his comfort zone will attract many readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2014

Since Lethem is so good at conjuring scenes and depicting characters that would seem, well, made up in other narratives, these nine short pieces should be as good as his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Motherless Brooklyn. The title story captures a legendary (but maybe washed-up) theater director in a classic New York setting while effectively portraying an achingly fraught friendship and asking how we measure what people say.

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