MEN AND CARTOONS
Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday, $19.95)
(two and a half stars)
HAVING never understood the adult male’s obsession with Marvel Comics, the title of Jonathan Lethem’s short story collection gave pause. “The guy,” you think, “is a comic book geek.”
Luckily, readers besides Jerry Seinfeld will be coerced into Lethem’s X-ray vision world of very real, post-collegiate characters who are learning to stop looking through rose-tinted glasses and making heroes out of losers from their pasts. The book is like visiting a college reunion: You’re happy you went because everyone is now so pathetic.
In “The Vision,” a narrator runs into an old grade school curiosity who used to don face paint and a cape on the playground. Years later, the guy is now a snooty literary type with a hot babe and sophisticated friends who play fancy parlor games. Or is he really just the same dork in need of Ritalin and a life? Read.
“Super Goat Man” is about a beatnik neighborhood fixture who looks like a billy goat and is revered, vicariously, by the town’s parents. He transcends his oddball status to become a university professor. But when it really counts, his “powers” fail him, and he is unveiled as what he truly is: a ’60s relic with a shtick. The kicker to the story is a killer.
In “Planet Big Zero,” a successful comic book artist – about to sell out to the movies – is visited by his Zen-babbling old college friend, who now wastes his days swilling beer and taking pictures of “ruins,” which are essentially just junk. The cartoonist muses, “As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another.”
A line like that can only give readers a big chill, while basically getting it completely.
Steve Garbarino is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and TV Guide.