Lost, But Gone Before

Castle

by J. Robert Lennon

2009, Graywolf Press

Men and Cartoons: Stories

by Jonathan Lethem

2004, Doubleday

Recently after a long camping trip (during which I devoured most of Reif Larson's Collected Works of T.S. Spivet, which was a cute little story about an adolescent genius cartographer that ultimately fell apart in Adaptation-like flights of narrative fancy at its climax) some friends and I were hanging around in Northampton, MA waiting for a Mexican restaurant to open its doors. While waiting, we passed by signs for at least four separate bookstores (!!) and I wound up frequenting two of them; the first was a used bookstore where I searched in vain for a copy of True Grit, the second a store called Broadside Bookshop where I found a discount copy of Jonathan Lethem's short story collection Men and Cartoons for $6.

I am well aware of Lethem's almost cult-like fanbase and have seen his reviews every so often in the Sunday Book Review in the NY Times, but I have very little personal experience with Lethem's fiction. Indeed, the only previous work of his I had read is a collection of essays called The Disappointment Artist, which I had taken out of the Lawrence Public Library on virtue of its cover alone.

In The Disappointment Artist, Lethem discussed at length and with enthusiasm topics both high brow and low (he writes on his infatuation with Star Wars as well as The Searchers). His interests and influences ranged from dear to my heart (the works of Philip K. Dick) to totally unfamiliar but nonetheless charming (Marvel Comics). What I found compelling about that work was the consistent thread of a tender, honest self-portrait underneath the pop-cultural flotsam.

Castle was a book I checked out from the library on the recommendation of the webpage staff of McSweeney's Internet Tendency, where it was described as a book that "creeps you out so badly you find it hard to sleep." I love those and hadn't read one probably since The Shining (in high school).

I might not have ultimately lost any sleep over Castle, but it certainly was one of the creepiest books I've read in a very long time. The action of the book (I used the word action very loosely) is based around a main character who purchases a large plot of land in his hometown consisting mostly of forest and one lonely cabin.

The main character begins to renovate the cabin as he lives alone in the woods, speaking rarely to the local townsfolk, some of whom remember a mysterious tragedy involving the main character's parents. His interactions with others are ungainly and uncomfortable to observe. For example, the following exchange occurs with a hardware store clerk regarding carrying bags to the main character's car:

"Oh, don't be stubborn, let me give you a hand. Pretty awkward, doing that all by yourself."

Finally I met his gaze with as much directness and authority as I could muster. "What is awkward," I told him, "is the need to deflect your attention away from my private business. I do not need help conveying these things to my car."

The character is self-conscious and slightly paranoid and begins to hear things in and around his property and so is compelled to begin investigating the land by hiking to a large, almost mountainous rock he can barely make out from the window of his cabin.

While the action is minimal, the repeated vague references to events in the main character's past both within his own narration and others' dialogue creates a slightly paranoid state in the reader's mind. Lennon pits the reader against his main character as he hints slowly at the character's instability and unreliability for information as a narrator while he simultaneously creates a dependence for the reader on the character for the information (motivation) that drives the action of the character (and in turn, the book). This complex relationship between reader and narrator becomes most forceful as the climax of the book occurs.

Towards the end of the book a series of events occur which shed direct and harrowing light upon the nature of the narrator's psyche. While the events that follow (which I would prefer not to spoil, naturally) have a ring of contrivance about them, they are upon closer inspection are exactly logical and inevitable. The events that seem convenient or too easy are in fact essential to the psychological complexity of the book.

Most of the psychological complexity stems from the notion of the lingering effects of the past, a concept that closely links it to Men and Cartoons despite their obvious tonal and structural differences.

Lennon's protagonist struggles to bear the weight of his past, struggles to form a coherent sense of self in the present in a way that would be utterly familiar to the characters in Lethem's short stories. The enduring influence of the past, both real and imagined (i.e. false nostalgia), is the uniting theme in Lethem's collection.

Lethem's plots are given to rather robust exercises testing how far the material of 'literary fiction' can stretch to encompass ghettoized genres. Many of his stories read like Philip K. Dick re-written by Barthelme (with his strange narrative aloofness and his somewhat disingenuous lack of self-seriousness). For example, one of the best pieces in the collection, "Access Fantasy" imagines a dystopian future so complete that it could have easily stretched to novel length. "Access Fantasy" involves a one-way permeable barrier and a satirical metaphor for class involving scores of invisible people who live in abandoned cars plugging up the streets of Manhattan who rent "apartment tapes," a kind of pornographic tour of the apartment dwellings they are not permitted to visit, never mind own.

Another story concerns a writer of dystopian stories in battle with a writer of utopian stories. The dystopian writer imagines a story in which there exists a species of sheep biologically predisposed to suicidal tendencies and spreading such tendencies among animalife through its pure despair.

The story provides an appropriate link to this theme of the past I mentioned above. "The Dystopianist", as he's called, was a grade school pal of his nemesis, the utopianist ("The Dire One"). Despite their childhood friendship, they enter into an unspoken rivalry together, revising each other's views of the world.

Rivalries with formative members of one's past recur throughout the collection: a super heroic goat man influences a young man from throughout his life (despite his gradual decline into a doddering fool through age); a gradeschool idol reappears next door to a character, allowing him the opportunity to test the extent of his former idol's cool, composed persona; and a former fellow prankster show up in "Planet Big Zero" only to move into his friend's garage consuming his beer supply.

There are endless other examples of the past loitering about in men's adult lives as the men attempt to shrug off old definitions of self and outgrown worldviews. But the past is also acknowledged, as in Castle, as something so intrinsically formative as to be immovable. The past in Lethem's work is given some amount of distant respect and his characters are repeatedly drawn to their pasts and as they are repulsed by them.

Both Men and Cartoons and Castle remind me of the works of filmmaker Ross McElwee, who explores the nature of his past through confessional documentaries. McElwee avoids use of archival footage (other than photographs) and even as time elapses over the course of his films, life is defined as what McElwee fails to capture on film instead of what he has. The film itself is an attempt to reconstruct some sense of how the past managed to construct what he films. The past then is a powerful, lingering force in men's lives but is difficult to capture; it is elusive but inevitable.

Despite Lennon's significantly more disturbing tone and Lethem's more postmodern hijinks (he writes one story as one paragraph, e.g.), I feel both books feature characters attempting to reconcile the past with the present. The authors, however, leave their characters, unable to sever ties to pasts that haunt them, languishing in an ever-more alienating present.