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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem

01:23 / 03.06.05

So who's read this? I'm just starting it, after my girlfriend finished with it, and I've read a few reviews too, but I'm only one story in so far. That story wasn't so great - had that problem of the unlikeable narrator making the story hard to like - but otherwise was kind of kooky, about meeting a guy from your old school who used to dress up as The Vision (the android superhero), all yellow cape and red facepaint every day, like it was his normal clothes, and now that he's an adult living in your apartment complex, trying to find out whether he grew up to be tweaked or not.

For mine there was too much obnoxious man wishing evil on his neighbour and not enough superhero hijinks. Ain't it always the way?

more as I get further through the book.

m .

06:00 / 03.06.05

I liked all of it, except the final piece, that letter. It says one really brilliant thing: "Love can't mend what love has wrecked," which is SO true (in my experience.) Then it says, "You don't fix a broken motorcycle with another motorcycle." Uhh...wha?

The way the stories end, shockingly incomplete, in a way I think that's marvelous. I've never seen a set of stories like that before, except Dubliners, but each of those stories IMHO ends with an answer, whereas Lethem's stories end with a social mystery.

I actually disliked one of his books, "Girl in Landscape," so much that I couldn't read past page 50 or so... but there's one story in "The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye," that I loved, called "The Happy Man."

-Delacroix

03:40 / 04.06.05

I'm sitting here burning DVDs in my old school computer lab, and I brought M&C along with me to read while the DVDs churn out and i finished it here and now and I gotta say, this collection really left me cold. Cruel and nihilistic and boring, is what I thought. I was expecting a bit more biff-bam-pow in a subtle postmodern way, but what I got was a heap of teenage 'the world is indifferent to your suffering' wank instead.

I've seen lots of stories end incompletely - it's kind of the thing to do these days, and in some ways it's those sort of stories that inspired the McSweeney's Terriffic Tales book. I've only read the intro by Michael Chabon so far, but he talks about stories that have beginnings, middles and ends and how there needs to be more of that kind of thing, and after reading M&C I'm tending to agree with monsieur Chabon.

no sir. don't think i'll be reading any more lethem. he annoys me.

m.

11:25 / 10.06.05

I'm quite surprised you disliked them so strongly -I really enjoyed this collection, thought that the occasional nastiness counterbalanced quite well what could have been purely whimsical stories. I liked the little details in his writing as well -one thing I remember enjoying in the 'Super Goat Man' story was the description of the kid's father buying him all those back issue comics, which the kid didn't really want but felt bad about not enjoying something his father had bought him. Found most of his stories quite sweet, anyway, and certainly didn't think of them as cruel or nihilistic at the time of reading -I might have to read some of them again actually, because thinking about it I can see how 'Vivian Relf' might fit that description.

06:48 / 14.06.05

Yeah, Vivian Relf is a definite aspect of my thoughts on this book, but I thought Super Goat Man had the same kind of thrust to it, and The Vision too - the narrator was a kind of mean-spirited person focussed on an individual they wanted to fail, or behave badly, or whatever.

I think the story I liked the most was the one about the guy with the smudge on his glasses, because it din't have as much a sense of the overriding narrative voice that's in most of the other stories - the spiteful one I'm talking about.

m.

11:34 / 15.06.05

The Vision too - the narrator was a kind of mean-spirited person focussed on an individual they wanted to fail, or behave badly, or whatever.

Yes, the narrator was certainly mean-spirited -and I'd forgotten to what extent, I just re-read the story last night. I did, however, read that spitefulness as coming more from a perspective of his being out of his depth -he brought wine to a party where everyone was drinking beer; he clearly found Adam's girlfriend ("paramour") wildly attractive yet he was left flirting with a girl whose name (Doe) kind of signals her as someone who won't be remembered; and when he tried to use the one thing he had over Adam it backfired and he (and everyone else) heard a painfully intimate story about Adam and Roberta's relationship. So if he was spiteful, it started with his being unable to read a situation properly, and this person who he remembers as a bit of a misfit now has the life the narrator wants, and he (the narrator) is now unable to fit into that world.

I suppose that none of this is inconsistent with what you said, it's just that where you read that voice as spiteful I read it as completely overwhelmed. In 'The Vision' and 'Super Goat Man', at least -in the latter the narrator could never really cope with the fact that his father wanted to be friends with Super Goat Man.

The glasses story was fun, too. What did you think of 'The Dystopianist'? That was another one that stood out for me.

06:13 / 16.06.05

But he responds to his being overwhelmed and out of his depth at Adam's party by trying to unmask/reveal/destroy him in a smug, knowing kind of way. Even though it backfires, he still did that petty, petty thing.

And in Super Goat Man, again, his response to his confusion at why his father would be friends with SGM is to humiliate and undermine SGM's character in his re-telling of the live of that superhero, and then to make fun of him at the dinner party.

I didn't get far into the Dystopianist - it was too pompously wordy in its sentence construction, and that far into the book I was starting to dislike the whole collection fairly strongly, so I skipped it. What did you think of it, Vincennes? Perhaps I'll go back and give it another shot.

m.

07:50 / 16.06.05

Oh, I thought The Dystopianist was great -I mentioned it because it was another one of the stories that struck me as funny, silly and a bit inconsequential. It's certainly wordy, but I think it develops quite nicely; I'd thought at the start, especially given the title, that it was just going to be a wee character sketch type piece, but it turned out to be a very pleasingly formed short story, or at least the sort of short story I enjoy. If you liked the glasses story it's certainly the other one I'd recommend. And as far as I remember delacroix is right, the the letter at the end isn't really worth the effort -it seems a bit tagged on, like they needed something with extra emotional content to make up for the rest of the book...

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

20:57 / 20.04.08

I'm on a Lethem kick, and it's all Vivian Relf's fault; I liked it for its uncanny, itchy feeling, and I like that it did end satisfactorily, even if it doesn't seem that way on first inspection. They're weirdly familiar non-familiarity ends when they establish an actual connection beyond their lack of connections. As soon as she is identified as the wife of a client, bang, their uncanny connection falls away.

Since then, I've been reading Motherless Brooklyn, and I like it immensely, because it doesn't feel as meanspirited as Men & Cartoons did, that time I read it. I like all the distortions of language, the faux-noirness of it. There's a lot of energy.

12:03 / 24.04.08

I like about half of Lethem a lot. Vivian Relf was a great short story. "Motherless Brooklyn" is very nice, as well. So is "As She Climbed Across the Table." And "Gun, With Occasional Music." I had a hard time finishing "Amnesia Moon," "Girl in Landscape," and "Fortress of Solitude." I haven't tried "You Don't Love Me" or whatever that latest one was called.

00:38 / 29.04.08

Now that you've finished Motherless Brooklyn, I thought I'd mention that I found the end a little less satisfying than the rest. It's a fine mystery resolution, but I wanted it to be something more.

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

15:48 / 29.04.08

I wasn't really surprised by it. But, at times, it felt like it wasn't actually a mystery so much as a novel about a guy who happens to be a detective, if you know what I mean...

Hallo, Paper Spaceboy

03:18 / 30.04.08

More thinking, thinking, thinking...

I really don't think, in the end, that it feels like it's a "proper" or even close to being a "proper" detective novel, whatever that means. It's about Lionel solving a personal mystery -- who killed Frank, and why -- but it's more about the big black hole that opens up without him, isn't it? The emphasis on Zen interests me because it feels, intrinsically, like the mystery should go unsolved. It can't be a weird enough solution for us, and once Lionel knows, everything falls too easily into place. L&L receives a personnel change and that feels like it's the only thing changed in the end.

But...part of me thinks that may not have been on purpose, but came quite naturally out of the character; Lionel's tics demand that he solve this case, solve his sadness and loss, they relentlessly break everything down and then there's just nothing, just pieces...I think if there was a satisfying conclusion it would almost invalidate the book, because it's all about discomfort and trying to deal with your inner drives and failing.

I like Julia. I like Julia and Kimmery, how they are very present in the novel even as it feels like women are always behind that big barrier -- the boys don't know how to relate to them, they never know their mothers, Frank couldn't relate to women. But by the end both characters feel real and independent, which is well done. Lionel tries to paint them into femme fatale and good girl roles, but neither of them respond in the end and can't be classified in that way.

Not enough is done with Ullman. He's the ghost, sure, and he's called such by Lionel, but I could have done with one or two bits about him, without seeing him.