Country: USA
Genre: Short Stories/Science-Fiction
Pages: 232
That Lethem guy has been around for a little while now. Close to twenty years. He's been making way in the world of American letters in the shadows of his contemporaries without getting the same kind of exposure, but getting amazing press nonetheless. When I researched him a little, it appeared to me that Lethem is kind of a crossover artist. He likes to mix-up genres. That is usually a big no-no for me, but having a curiosty that often challenges my narrow-minded set of values, I knew I had to give him a go. I was looking at a copy of Chronic City while I was at The Strand in New York, when Josie hit me upon the head with that little tome of short stories. The only one he has every produced. I went for The Wall Of The Sky, The Wall Of The Eye because it was incredibly cheap and that short stories are to literature what demos are to video games. A good way to try a writer without committing too much. The proverbial toe dip in the swimming pool. Unless you're reading Raymond Carver.
So yeah, Joanathan Lethem's short stories are an intense case of crossover, but they are very good. The Happy Man tells the story of a man, raised from the dead to help his family, migrating in between earth and hell all the time. Soon enough, he can't help bringing back his hell at home. It's kind of a knock out story to begin the collection with. It punches you right in the teeth. Despite what his main character says, hell is highly metaphorical and I kind of get it. That's a recurring theme in the structure of Lethem's short story. A striking, but very evident alien image that occupies the center of the narration like an elephant in the living room. It's not very subtle, but since his stories are technically science-fiction (so they are structured around that very image) it works out more often than not. In fact, only one story "Access Fantasy" that didn't quite work and it was the most difficult subject of them all.
The Happy Man, Light And The Sufferer, Five Fucks (I know heh?) and The Hardened Criminals are the most solid stories in the collection. They are all a spin on themes of alienation and loneliness. It's refreshing to see a writer ready to crossover to other genres in order to carry his point with originality. The Hardened Criminals is about a prison where life sentenced criminals are molded into bricks and made a part of the prison back wall. It's a terrifying image sure, but it's also a very accurate representation of what prison does to a man's soul and to a certain extent, of insitutionalization. The stories of Lethem might appear blunt, but they are a well studied puppet show. I'm sometimes not too crazy of stories where the narration is controlled tightly by what themes the writer is trying to use, but here it works. Lethem build crazy, haunting stories, about subjects that matter to him.
The problem with short stories when you like them, is that they are usually very different from what the writer usually does, unless that writer is Philip K. Dick. It's only one side of his writing that's represented. Now that I liked The Wall Of The Sky, The Wall Of The Eye (what a terrible title by the way), I'll have to try a novel and see how good can Jonathan Lethem be on a longer distance. Motherless Brooklyn seems to be a natural for me. I still don't like crossover fiction as a style, but Jonathan Lethem's short stories work because he's not animated by the sole desire of juxtaposing genres together. He's trying to say something with them and uses different genres to illustrate his thoughts. The Happy Man and The Hardened Criminals are both stunning reads that make the reading of Lethem's short story collection worthwile. The Wall of The Sky, The Wall Of The Eye is not the strongest short story collection I've ever read, but it's a nice window on Jonathan Lethem's universe.
