Men and Cartoons
Jonathan Lethem Faber & Faber, 160pp, £10.99
ISBN 0571224504
The Final Solution
Michael Chabon Fourth Estate, 128pp, £10
The first novels from Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon could hardly have been more different from each other. Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh was an elegiac coming-of-age tale: Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music a dystopian fantasy featuring a gun-toting kangaroo. Since then, however, both writers have travelled in opposite directions to get to the same place: the tricky territory where literary and genre fiction meet.
The title of Lethem's new short-story collection, Men and Cartoons, is both an accurate description of its subject matter and a challenge to those who deride genre fiction as childish. In the two strongest stories, "The Vision" and "Super Goat Man", the most immature characters are those who resist the appeal of superheroes. In "The Vision", the narrator meets Adam, a former classmate of his who, as a boy, was famous for dressing up as the Marvel superhero of the same name. Envious of Adam's adult sophistication (he teaches art history at Columbia and refers to his lover as his "paramour"), the narrator exposes his old friend's superhero-worshipping past during a drinking game. But the awfulness of his silent pun to himself before he poses the decisive question to Adam - "Let him eat cape" - reveals the pettiness of his motives.
"Super Goat Man" is the story of a fictional comic-book hero who has been cast out of the superhero world for opposing the Vietnam war. He moves to a hippie commune in Brooklyn when the narrator, Everett, is ten. Like the other children in the area, Everett is unimpressed by Super Goat Man's past exploits, which include rescuing kittens from trees and "battling dull villains like Vest Man". At university, Everett again encounters Super Goat Man, who is now a professor. Everett's dis-dain for the gentle superhero mirrors his attitude towards his parents' ineffectual radicalism - a failure wittily captured by the title of the course that Super Goat Man teaches, "Marginal Heroics in American Life: 1955-75". Other stories in the collection are little more than clever conceits. In "The Spray", a couple whose apartment has been burgled call in the police, who use a magic spray that causes the outlines of missing objects to become temporarily visible to identify what has been stolen. When the couple (mis)use the spray on each other, they find the outlines of former lovers clinging to them.
Michael Chabon is known for his interest in cartoons. His Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, told the story of two comic-book writers. Chabon was also a screenwriter on Spider-Man 2. In his new book, he turns to a different genre. In The Final Problem, Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes to a temporary death in the Reichenbach Falls. In The Final Solution, Chabon imagines Holmes as a retired 89-year-old living in Sussex, investigating the mystery of a stolen parrot belonging to a nine-year-old Jewish refugee. (The year is 1944.) The parrot can recite Goethe and Schiller and, more mysteriously, strings of German numbers. Although Holmes succeeds in recovering the parrot, he is unable to fathom the greater riddle of what the numbers mean. He wonders if a career devoted to "the discovery of sense and causality amid . . . the trackless brambles of life" hasn't blinded him to the real mysteries of the world. The solution turns out to be a horror beyond his comprehension.
Chabon's approach to genre is not as slippery as Lethem's: he may write about cartoon characters and fictional detectives, but the barrier between fantasy and reality remains intact. Lethem's move from straightforward science fiction to a naturalistic style incorporating elements of fantasy represents an explicit challenge to the conventions of literary fiction. What both writers understand, however, is that realism is not the only - or even the best - means to convey complex emotional truths; a superhero goat teaching at a university can tell us just as much. This willingness to try new things makes them two of the most ambitious and interesting writers working today.
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