Little Toy Robot

I had been anticipating the release of Jonathan Lethem’s story collection, Men and Cartoons, and Michael Chabon’s novella, The Final Solution, for months. I diligently manipulated my reading schedule in order to be able to read them both, short volumes each, as soon as they came out. Even though neither book is its writer’s best, I wasn’t disappointed.

In general, I agree with this Times review of Lethem’s book, although I grant the leadoff story “Visions” a little more respect due to its effectiveness in setting the tone for the collection. “Super Goat Man” shows Lethem at his best: the author of The Fortress of Solitude (a difficult book worth reading!) who takes the best in realistic psychological writing and stirs it with an appreciation for the exaggerations of cartoons to show a hidden dimension in the world his characters populate.

In fact, “Men and Cartoons” is something of a companion piece to The Fortress of Solitude. The pseudo-autobiographical elements of growing up in Brooklyn with one foot in the real world are broken up into bite size pieces in these stories, generally well written and articulate, though without the humor that endeared his breakthrough Motherless Brooklyn to many readers.

Chabon shows more ambition, in my opinion, by imagining a retired, bee-keeping detective who is unwittingly embroiled in one last mystery on the British homefront during the second World War. An 89-year old Sherlock Holmes (never named in the book or on the dust jacket, whether for rights considerations or cheekiness) is no less astute than he was in his middle age, even if he has trouble rising from his chair and smells like old person (actually, like ogre). Chabon is a profoundly beautiful writer prone to flights of fancy in all his works, but here his style tends to be poetic and descriptive to an extreme, creating an odd aesthetic balance in a short, dense novella with an inordinate space devoted to practical matters of beekeeping. Such passages ooze and drip with metaphorical significance, but at the expense of the mystery itself.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 14th, 2004 at 11:14 pm and is filed under books.