By Jim Feast
North of Oxford
Let’s begin looking at Jonathan Lethem’s wonderful new collection of short stories, A Different Kind of Tension, by quoting one of the blurbs, first a blurb and then a goat.
The Chicago Tribune copy on the book reads in part, “comparisons might be drawn to writers ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Haruki Murakami.” The Murakami parallel is interesting, especially in light of how the two authors use goats.
In Murakami, goats (as well as sheep) are sinister, even world threatening. In 1Q84, Aomame, one of the main characters, back when she was a child, accidentally kills the commune’s goat and has to spend a night alone locked up with it. That night she witnesses the first emergence into the world of The Little People, demon-like elves, coming out of the goat carcass. Another, more active, hoofed farm animal, a malevolent, shapeshifting sheep with plans for world domination, is a key figure in The Wild Sheep Chase.
Although, to be fair, in Lethem’s short stories, there are a few animals bent on world domination, such as a mind-reading octopus, his goat (the one appearing in “Super Goat Man”) is notably benign as is the larger-than-life crustacean in “Interview With the Crab.” These are not creatures of the shadows like Murakami’s animals but past-their-prime celebrities. The narrators of the stories have met them after they have peaked and are living in their declining years. The Goat Man, former comic book hero, at least maintains his dignity, but when called upon to display his superpower and rescue students on a roof, he inadvertently bungles his last chance to shine. More like a typical celebrity has-been, the crab, who was once the star of a sit-com whines, “Nobody has any idea how hard it was for me coming up … kids like you … [think] the crab must have been some kind of overnight success. Sure, right, but that overnight lasted ten years. … Ten year’s slugging it out on the circuit.“ (179)
These are humorous and touching tales, which lead to deeper currents. For one, there is a rethinking one of American short stories’ traditional themes, disillusionment, occurring when a young narrator, who has lofty ideas about an adult’s or more experienced person’s competence or intentions, find these ideals crushed. It’s the theme of Hemingway’s ‘My Old Man,” where the hero learns his father is not what he took him for or, in another key, it’s the theme of O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be your Own,” where the protagonist’s romanticized romantic interest not only jilts her but steals her wooden leg. Lethem revises this theme, bringing it into a mass-mediated world. His lead characters grow disillusioned, not with friends or family but with their celluloid or comic-book heroes, superheroes who have lost their pizzaz. (A variation on this theme appears in Chronic City where (by fictionalizing events) Lethem takes the real actor Marlon Brando and has people disillusioned by the actor’s starring in a Muppet movie!) Such a situation could have been played for laughs but the depth of Lethem’s approach appears in how these stories are infused with a real melancholy, traces of the bittersweet feeling one finds in the Hemingway and O’Connor pieces.
(Let me say here, rather than misleading the reader, that I am concentrating on one sheaf of stories in a collection that overall offers great variety. Other than the pieces I am a highlighting, the book has a number of frightening dystopias, such as “Access Fantasy” and “The Crooked House,” in which due to earthquakes and other disruptions, a large houses which people cannot leave, keeps altering its dimensions; as well as realistic stories (with a twist) about families or neighborhood characters as in “The Empty Room” and “Lucky Alan”; and an assortment of other pieces going in different directions.)
To return to the disillusioned protagonists, it might be said that at least on the human side of these relationships there is authentic feeling.
It’s interesting to contrast these leading characters to those who so often central in Murakami. The Japanese author’s protagonists tend to be naifs like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, average types who are accidentally drawn into a web of intrigue. In Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the hero is simply a numbers cruncher when he is brought by the professor, for whom he is freelancing, to the man’s lair where the hero must battle the INKlings, mysterious, insect-like creatures who live underground. In Killing Commendatore, the just divorced painter is looking for an isolated place to live, not knowing his new accommodation will be next to a boarded-over well, concealing to a malevolent spirit-filled underworld.
In contrast, Lethem’s central figures are already clued in about, almost glued to, the animal celebrities they approach, having studied their successful careers. Unlike the public, who seem to leapfrog from fad to fad, these characters have maintained their allegiance to their idols whose stars have set. A clue to the meaning of this can be gathered from the story “Pending Vegan,” which is not about disillusion but about a father who is getting off a prescribed drug and is told to be aware of the side effects. His doctor tells him “You may tend to notice scumbags to the detriment of those standing to the right or left of them …. In withdrawal from Celexa [the drug he had been taking] some patients have described a kind of atmosphere of rot or corruption or peril creeping around the edges of the everyday world.” (270-271).
In describing this drug, Lethem may be making a nod to Dick’s story “Faith of Our Fathers” in which the whole populace is drugged and if, through some happenstance, a person gets off the drug, the individual will see the hideous face of the Great Leader. Getting off Celexa has the opposite effect.
In the noted Lethem stories, the heroes do not look away as their idols deteriorate, willing to share their pain and humiliation. This can offer its own rewards. The locus classicus in Lethem for this is Fortress of Solitude. It occurs when the hero’s do-gooder father picks up a superhero who is down at heels, indeed, actually down lying in the gutter, and brings him to the hospital where he gifts the protagonist his enchanted ring. The protagonists in these stories are willing to bear with their idols’ infirmities. The stories conclude not only showing their disillusion but reveals these lead characters’ deepening humanity.
A second undercurrent in these stories is the question of why people become faddists – why do most people forget the Crab once he is off television? The affliction the father in “Pending Vegetarian” in which he only sees the seamy side of things is self-contained, that is, it stays in his skull. In other stories idiosyncratic individual perversities leak out. In “The Speckless Cathedral,” a couple who wants to end their relationship but can’t bring themselves to finally break up, hears about a potion “developed by the CIA as an anti-patriotism drug … For debunking allegiance in EEPOWs, enemy prisoners of war.” (18) It turns out the drug will also make couples become indifferent to each other. After they try it, the effects don’t wear off. he hero comments, “It was in me, still, the NtroP. It was there between me and my perceptions, and it was leaking out of me, too.” (23) He loses interest in life, in everything; and everyone he has lost interest in is also losing interest in all around them.
In this narrative, there is an epidemic of indifference. In ”The Dystopian, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock at the Door,” the problem is a penchant for self destruction started by a sheep. Again, the sheep. “A variant of sheep had been bred for the study of suicide” (139, itals in original). Once scientists have aa programmed a sheep, called Plath that wants to kill itself, then “The Plath Sheep evoked suicide in other creatures, all up and down the food chain.” (ibid.)
The suggestion, chilling enough, is the possibility of a deeply negative impulse spreading through a people, something like the mass illusion that had radio listeners believe Mars was invading when Welles did a War of the Worlds radio broadcast. In Lethem, the illusion is not spread by the media but comes from within.
Perhaps it’s already clear that the counterweight to the characters infecting society with their anti-social impulses are the types who remain faithful to their fallen icons. While the relationship is unrequited, on the human side, it shows a willingness to accept the inevitability of aging the and diminution of (super) powers, and to endure their partners’ losses along with them. This capacity does not spread. The one character who has a psychic condition that doesn’t create negative but (to some extent) positive feelings, the ability to see the rottenness in the world, that is, to see the world in all its dimensions, is the one that has a psychic capacity that cannot be transmitted. Such positive traits can only be picked up through long experience, like the compassion of the father in Fortress of Solitude, which the son only possesses after he can say, “ I’ve been hitting some hard traveling too.”
The last way to contrast Murakami and Lethem is in their implicit criticisms oof society. In Murakami, the dangers come from outside, from evil forces allied with supernatural energies. I don’t know if this has any relation to the 1995 poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway, which was carried out by a fringe religious group, and on which Murakami wrote a nonfiction book, but such malign spiritually led entities appear in many of his books. In 1Q84, there is a spiritual cult allied with the ghostly Little People, for instance. although occasionally in Lethem, evil does appear from the outside as in “In Mugwump Four, “ in which there is a computer game so addictive it seems to dissolve the personality; largely the dangers to society comes from inside, from a spread of creeping nihilism that overtakes everyone, moving person to person as in “The Speckless Cathedral.” As opposed to Murakami’s presentation, here, while evil consequences may be abetted by institutions, like the CIA, wickedness is propelled internally in acts of human communication as people lose connection and are able to pay no more than fleeting attention to their neighbors. This argument has been made by other social thinkers, but Lethem has crafted stories in gripping prose that bring out these points in startling and innovative ways. At the same time in other narratives when he describes those who doggedly show loyalty and keep offering respect to their fallen idols, he suggests an antidote to the American malaise of indifference. The ability to show compassion to the passed-by is something which can (in some moments) bring about earth-changing results as when someone picks a bum up from the gutter, the tramp who holds the magic ring.
You can find the book here: https://www.harpercollins.ca/9780063388840/a-different-kind-of-tension/
Jim Feast is the author of several collections of poetry and a founding member of the Unbearables, an action-oriented literary group based in New York City that has also produced several anthologies, including From Somewhere to Nowhere: The End of the American Dream (Autonomedia, 2017). Feast has edited seven books by Ralph Nader and worked with legendary publisher Barney Rosset on his autobiokkgraphy. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife Nhi Chung.
