Expect the unexpected
Here’s a thing you never say in the midst of a Jonathan Lethem story: “Well, I can see exactly where this is all going.”
Who could ever predict, for example, how it might turn out for a group of airline passengers marooned on a desert island with Peter Rabbit and a theatre critic? Or how about the guy having his morning coffee and watching a road crew tear up a street to dig a hole that turns out to be a temporary prison for a bound and gagged prisoner? And will the man who renamed himself as “Pending Vegan” pull the plug on meat after a trip to SeaWorld?
Even if that last one sounds as if it has an easy answer, I can assure you it doesn’t. There are no predictable plot twists and easy answers in the alternate universes Lethem creates in his novels and short stories, which were recently released — Peter Rabbit, the theatre critic, the prisoner, the Pending Vegan and then some — in a new collection, Lucky Alan and Other Stories.
Lethem, a Brooklyn writer, is best known for his novels, notably Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, both bestselling and critically acclaimed books. His books are generally riffs on genre fiction — noir, westerns, science fiction — and he’s known for his nearly obsessive love for Star Wars and Philip K. Dick.
Not really a sci-fi fan? Don’t write Lethem off yet. His genre-bending style delights both pulp fiction junkies and literary fiction connoisseurs.
The stories in Lucky Alan are less about playing with genre than the novels I’m familiar with. They are, however, still just as full of thoughtful meditations, absurdist humour and the faithful rendering of New York City and its boroughs that are Lethem’s trademark. “Lucky Alan,” is about an eccentric Upper East Side theatre director who stages one-man plays in moving elevators to audiences of five or six and spends his days engaging strangers in activities such as locating the flock of feral parrots that roam New York City.
True story. Well, that last bit, at least, since wild parrots are one of New York’s quirky features. Details lifted from the real world help to ground Lethem’s fantasy worlds in something graspable and give his imaginary realm an urban texture. That is, perhaps, what allows him to seamlessly digress into some of the most thoughtful observations I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
Take the Pending Vegan’s trip to SeaWorld, for example. In it, the orca-loving family hesitantly visits the controversial marine animal park to eat turkey drumsticks and watch animal shows, an activity that sends the father into a meditation on cognitive dissonance and how the act of learning to reconcile paradoxes is a fundamental part of growing up:
“His daughters’ balancing of their desire both to cuddle and devour mammals was their ticket for entry to the human pageant. If Pending Vegan admitted to them that he now believed it wrong to eat animals — even while he still craved the tang of smoky steaks and salt-greasy bacon — he’d lower himself, in their eyes, to a state of childlike moral absolutism.”
Awesome. And there’s more, of course, because it’s Lethem, and he’s not done until the story has touched down on antidepressants, army life, the holocaust, race, interspecies intimacy and pet ownership.
So if you thought you knew where it was all going, you’re probably wrong.