There is certainly a portion of readers who read and enjoy
short fiction, but equally certain is that novels get most of the love. Those readers’ loss. Writing a form of art that exists in
different shapes and sizes, short fiction presents its own challenges and
limitations, meaning that a truly good writer is master of all, and when the
reader finds one who is particularly good at short and novel-length, all the
better. Jonathan Lethem is one such
writer, and his latest collection Lucky
Alan and Other Stories (2015) is an example why.
‘Dynamic’ one word to describe the collection, Lucky Alan is one unpredictable story
after another. Differing in style,
prose, perspective, realism, setting, aim, etc., each story stands alone,
which, in my opinion, is a great selling point to any collection or
anthology. Diversity keeping content
fresh regardless of quality, the mystery of what comes next is often enough able
to keep pages turning.
Kicking things off with the title story, “Lucky Alan” is an
off-kilter character study of two men whose relationship is both amiable and
antagonistic. One an ordinary middle-aged
New Yorker and the other a minor film director, the two occasionally meet up
for wine and conversation, but are never fully open with one another given the
limitations of their personalities. It’s
the evolution of these meetings, however, where Lethem heightens the tension between
the two to display the subtle aspects of character that ultimately complete their
mini-portraits. For some the story may
be pretentious, but for readers who appreciate what certain writers are capable
of, “The King of Sentences” is a full-on display of precise, often subtly humorous
prose (with such a title, the author had better be prepared to deliver) that
highlights one aspect of the reader-writer relationshiup from the perspective
of two bookshop employees who are head-over-heels in love with a certain
writer’s oeuvre and want to meet him.
The meeting tells all.
Destroying the notion of fluid, graceful prose “Traveler
Home” tells of a man accustomed to urban life spending time at a lone,
countryside house, and the adventure he gets into taking his dog into the cold
and snow to use the bathroom. Perhaps
derived from Lethem’s experiences in rural Maine, it’s a skewed presentation of
atavism with strong fable-overtones, written in some of the most lean, clipped
prose the reader will ever have encountered.
Featuring random comic book characters, from the fantastical to the
real, who are torn from their pages and deposited on a deserted island, in
“Their Back Pages” Lethem plays with the conventions of comic books from a
real-world perspective, further fuzzying the divide between insular forms of
entertainment like comic books and real-world relevancy.
Almost Borgesian, in “Procedure in Plain Air”, Lethem opens
on an absurd scene wherein an ordinary man, Stevick, is having coffee one day
in a NYC café, only to have a group of men arrive, dig a hole in the sidewalk
beside him, deposit a live man inside, and board the hole over, giving the
bewildered Stevick an umbrella afterwards to protect the man from the rain. The absurdity achieving new heights as the
story progresses, in the final few paragraphs things click together in a manner
that would seem to highlight the dark undertones of being complicit with
government “secret” operations—Stevick’s ultimate fate the telling blow.
Lethem involved with all kinds of criticism, not just
literary, it was perhaps inevitable that he looked to apply film criticism to
the pornography industry. “The Porn
Critic” tells the tale of one such writer and his experience bringing a group
of women back to his apartment—an apartment packed to the gills with material
awaiting review. Interestingly a
comprehensive story, the women’s reaction is and isn’t what the reader could
expect. An abstract premise that slowly
takes on a life of its own, in “The Empty Room” a militant father decrees that
one room of their family’s house is to be kept empty at all times. It can be used after a child or parent has
signed on a form, but must be emptied of everything once the person is done
using it. Told through the eyes of the
son who grew up in this house, it’s only in coming into more mature contact
with the wider world that he realizes the complete implications of the room.
Funny metaphorical commentary on blogging and the egoism
that often goes hand in hand with said form of social media, “The Dreaming Jaw,
The Salivating Ear” is a day in the life of an internet blogger presented as a
king ruling his castle, interacting with his subjects (who are in fact commenters,
viewers, fellow bloggers, etc.). The
self-righteousness is at moments laugh out loud. Though seeming a commentary on carnivorism at
the outset, the last story in the collection “Finding Vegan” expands itself to
be wider commentary on the state of Western society. Akin to the film “Little Miss Sunshine” in
aim, it thankfully remains more stop-and-think fiction than message fiction in
telling of a trip a man takes with his family to Sea World and the animals—in all
forms—they encounter there.
In the end, Lucky Alan
and Other Stories is a versatile, absorbing, intelligent, and well written
collection of short stories. Lethem
changing up style, prose, theme, and premise, each story is clearly
distinguished from the next, with the added value there are no one-offs. Attention and purpose provided, even the ‘lighter’
stories have a layer or two beyond the surface.
It is a relatively short collection with only nine stories, but given
said diversity and depth, still feels substantial. In comparison to his early works, Lethem is proving
to be more consistent and accomplished in terms of lexical precision and prosaic
experimentation, meaning there is also a lot to be enjoyed in the collection from
strictly a technique point of view, as well.
The following are the nin stories collected in Lucky Alan and Other Stories:
Lucky Alan
The King of Sentences
Traveler Home
Procedure in Plain Air
Their Back Pages
The Porn Critic
The Empty Room
The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear
Pending Vegan
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