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In The Fortress of Solitude, his great white whale of a novel, Jonathan Lethem chased after childhood, neighborhood, and the American leviathan of race relations. In Men and Cartoons, a grab bag of his stories, he paddles a kayak downstream over waters not exactly rapid. Old friends from elementary school reappear in order to deplore the compromises and corruptions of their former classmates. Bygone parents are revealed to have been capable of secret, sexual exultations. Young lovers in a burgled house go to bed with the ghosts of past relationships made visible by magic spray. Artists, agents, editors, opticians, and a talking sheep named Sylvia Plath negotiate dystopias of gridlock—a character in “Access Fantasy” lives in his car in a citywide traffic jam on the wrong side of a One-Way Permeable Barrier—and topographies of dork and cool.
But the joke’s on Hemingway. According to Lethem, men without women employ comic books to compensate. When his characters aren’t listening to Frank Zappa and Talking Heads, or dreaming up scenarios for interactive video games, or hiring out as “advertising robots” at the local Undermall, or destroying the world with air bags made out of cabbages, they are thinking about Stan Lee and R. Crumb, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Dr. Doom, and Captain America. If Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Walt Whitman, and Carl Jung show up in “Super Goat Man,” the most ambitious of these stories, they are really only red herrings or highbrow beards in an epic tale of an Electric Comics cartoon crusader from the 1970s who is reduced in the nineties to teaching a college seminar on “Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life, 1955–1975.”
Mostly, though, the comics mentioned in Men and Cartoons aren’t published by Electric. Or DC, Raw, or Fantagraphic. They are Marvel-branded, “which anyone who read them understood weren’t comic at all but deadly, breathtakingly serious. Marvel constructed worlds of splendid complexity, full of chilling, ancient villains and tormented heroes, in richly unfinished story lines.” Lethem’s nerds entered into those complex worlds back in grammar school and junior high, between the ritual humiliations of pubescence. In years to come of pink slips, eviction notices, and deleted icons, of fax machines and vibrators, these Marvel worlds are the vistas in their mediated heads. They see in panels, talk in balloons, and feel in lurid colors. But how can a Columbia professor who plays party games (in “The Vision”), a museum director for acquisitions of drawings and prints (in “Vivian Relf”), or a cartoonist for a free music magazine published by a record-store chain (in “Planet Big Zero”) ever be expected to compete with the likes of Vision, the android in the Avengers series who could vary the density of his body from bullet-stopping diamond-hard to blue-smoke phantom fuzzy? Or Black Bolt, the noblest member of a band of outcast mutants known as the Inhumans, whose superpower was speech itself:
The sound of his voice was cataclysmic, an unusable weapon, like an atomic bomb. If Black Bolt ever uttered a syllable the world would crack in two.
In other words: once there were giants, with magical powers, secret identities, Technicolored underwear, and swishy capes. Male adulthood proved to be much less fun than the masked dreams of pop culture had led little boys to believe. Growing up stunted us. The primary emotions and psychic wounds of the Marvel superhero are as drums and trumpets to the disappointed marimba tinkle and sneezy regrets of the fortysomething salaryman. Perhaps, says Lethem, “superheroism was a sort of toxin, like a steroid, one with a punitive cost to the body”—but we can’t help feeling that we traded in living large (James Dean, Godzilla) for the poignant (a wild pitch, a broken shoelace) and the ignoble (cowardice, envy: “Bite my crank, Super Goat Man!”—as two sozzled frat boys taunt the aging comic book hero, on a clock tower, waving a giant phallic paper clip).
Sad-making. Pop nostalgia clings like kudzu to everyone who ever grew up feeling alien-freaky… all of us who somehow knew we were born to die uncool. Having posted my sugar-bomb box top to Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1947, I was the first little boy on my block to own a Lone Ranger atomic bomb ring. I examined the color photo of a mushroom cloud while listening, on the radio, to “Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons.” Such a perfect dorky pathos… and this was long before marijuana made everything seem more interesting than it really is.
Even so, from a young writer as clever as they come and as crafty as they get, who skinwalked and shape-changed from Kurt Vonnegut into Saul Bellow before our starry eyes, whose Huckleberry Brooklyn novel brought municipal fiction back from the dead, the whimsies in Men and Cartoons look like arrested development. And The Disappointment Artist, a collection of Lethem’s journalism and reminiscence, seems at first to be more of the same. Whole chapters are devoted to John Ford’s westerns, Philip K. Dick’s science fiction, Star Wars, John Cassavetes and Stanley Kubrick. Page after page celebrates such recording artists as Chuck Berry, David Bowie, the Beatles, Elvis Costello, Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, and Cheap Trick, and such science-fiction writers as Frank Herbert and Jules Verne. And when the loftier likes of Kafka, Borges, and Lem, or Faulkner, Beckett, and Joyce, or Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, and William Gass are mentioned at all, they will be fingered in brusque passing as “professional Bartlebys.” It’s not as if he’s never met them; they show up in his novels, wearing turtlenecks and trench coats; they hang in his closet. Yet not one is worthy here even of a paragraph.
Do we care that Lethem saw John Ford’s The Searchers twelve times and Star Wars twenty-one, or that his “fever for authenticity” led him to Anthony Newley, or that he still believes the Fantastic Four superheroes were the Rubber Soul and the White Album of comics? (Do you care how many times I have seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, or what’s going on in my head while I watch Sara Evans sing “Suds in the Bucket” on the country music cable channel?) Is it so unreasonable to want to know more of what he thinks about Julio Cortázar and less of how he feels about Obi-Wan Kenobi? To wish for a few words explaining why he stopped reading Don DeLillo, rather than thousands more on Red Sonja, Howard the Duck, and Marvel’s “existential loners”? And then this, as if Jean Genet instead of Jonathan Lethem were Marveling in the seventies:
I’m breaking down here. The royal we and the presumptive you aren’t going to cut it. This is a closed circuit, me and the comics which I read and which read me, and the reading of which by one another, me and the comics, I am now attempting to read, or reread. The fact is I’m dealing with a realm of masturbation, of personal arcana. Stan Lee’s rhetoric of community was a weird vibrant lie: every single true believer, every single member of the Make Mine Marvel society or whatever the fuck we were meant to be called, received the comics as a private communion with our own obscure and shameful yearnings, and it was miraculous and pornographic to so much as breathe of it to another boy, let alone be initiated by one more knowing. We and you don’t know a thing about what I felt back then, anymore than I know a thing about what you felt.
The fact is that we do know what he felt back then, and he knows what we felt, and so do you. It’s obvious, blatant, standardized, like “the generic reality” of the futuristic Oakland detective in his first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music—which is what pop culture does to our obscure and shameful yearnings, which is why it’s helpful to feather your nest and prime your pump by branching out into Bible stories, Greek myths, Grimm fairy tales, Romantic poetry, grand opera, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and maybe even what Lethem calls “the violently solitary and elitist necessities of High Art.” But because he has been at it for a while, because The Disappointment Artist is already his tenth book, he has a surprise sleight-of-mind in store. In an essay on Edward Dahlberg, prince of churls, he tips this hand. Dahlberg’s memoir of his Kansas City childhood, Because I Was Flesh, is “a great book” in “the saddest and simplest way, for Dahlberg has arrayed an armor of rhetoric to fend off his pain, and everywhere the armor proves inadequate.”
And what, exactly, was Flesh saying? Flesh was saying, Lethem explains: “I want my mama.” So does Lethem want his mama, the one who called him “kiddo,” sent him to public school in Brooklyn, steered him toward Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, took him to Star Wars screenings, and worried maybe he was gay; the young woman who, before she gave birth to Jonathan, was a Queens College dropout, a barefoot Jewish folksinger, an ear-piercing Greenwich Village beatnik, a draft-counseling campus wife of an avant-garde artist/SDS professor, a pot-smoking hippie matron in favor of open marriage and day-care centers, opposed to war, grapes, nuclear power, and Robert Moses; the thirty-six-year-old mother who died from a brain tumor in 1978, after giving her son a typewriter for his fourteenth birthday, on which the next summer he wrote his first book. Confined by her countercultural parameters, “I both bloomed within, like the windows of a greenhouse, and rattled against, like the jaws of a trap.” Canvassing his pop culture enthusiasms and obsessions, his furious fandom, he finds evasions, surrogates, anodynes, screens, beards, and a parental figure in the carpet bombing. On the one hand, as a motherless boy,
Growing up in an artist’s family, I seized on comic books and science fiction as a solution to the need to disappoint my father’s expectation that I become an artist like himself. These tastes encompassed my real passions: for art that embraced the vernacular vibrancy of pop music and film, and for fusions of imaginative material with the mundane. But they also served as a beard on my own ambition, a cloak on my reverence for the esteemed artifacts of my parents’ universe.
On the other, he asked too much:
Attempting to burrow and disappear into the admiration of certain works of art. I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my integrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to the art.
Works of art can be better than the real world, and maybe even redeem it, but not even Marvel comics can be “both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That they couldn’t give.” According to Lethem, the first song John Lennon recorded after the Beatles’ breakup was called “My Mummy’s Dead.” Listening to his own past, he hears something that sounds similar: “Each of my novels, antic as they may sometimes be, is fueled by loss. I find myself speaking about my mother’s death everywhere I go.”
IF BLACK BOLT EVER UTTERED A SYLLABLE THE WORLD WOULD CRACK IN TWO.
Hardboiled bittersweet, that’s Conrad Metcalf, the private inquisitor in Gun, With Occasional Music (1994), a Philip Marlowe, a Lew Archer, but also a Primal Scream in a Brave New Noir: “The thing I wanted wasn’t lost in the past at all, and it never had been. It was lost in the future. A self I should have been, but wasn’t.” Never mind the Sam Spade case he thinks he’s working on, which involves the torture and murder of a sheep. Keep your eye on the kangaroo. (Or the sow, ape, and dachshund, all of whom are “evolved.”) We are living in a near future of animal hybrids and designer drugs (Acceptol, Regrettol, Forgettol, Believol, Avoidol); of cash registers that play orchestral music when the drawer’s open, trash cans that flourish trumpets, water fountains that spout pop tunes, parking meters that strum Hawaiian bottleneck guitar, and tape-deck cranial implants of your own memories edited so you can safely answer any question; where “spoken-word news” and the printed word are against the law, and psychology students go door-to-door ringing your bell to read out loud from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
Already you are smiling. What amazed about Lethem from the start was this amiability, this ramshackle styling, this loose-limbed ambling through the genres. To each pulpy occasion, instead of masks or capes, he wore sneakers, sweats, leather, shades. He licked the language as if it were a lollipop. “I’ll have my lips removed as soon as I learn a way to whistle out my asshole.” But also from the beginning he was bereft. In Gun, With Occasional Music, see the Babyheads. The near future has decided that it takes too long to grow a kid, during which they are too noisy and ask too many questions, anyway. So, using the same “evolution therapy” that got kangaroos up and talking, scientists fiddled with the human growth process and managed to speed it up so much that you now see toddlers at “babybars” with little yellow fish on their red jumpers and cigarettes tucked behind their ears.
In Amnesia Moon (1995), where Jack Kerouac and Philip K. Dick will meet Mel Gibson’s Road Warrior and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert after the bombs have fallen on America, the sky is purple with radiation poisoning, the mountains are full of biochemical amnesiac fog and mutants from the “rupture” think they can talk to dolphins, almost everybody is bereft: Chaos, for instance, personified here as if Lethem were Milton or Hobbes, who lives in the projection booth of a multiplex in Hatfork, Wyoming, and is forever dreaming someone else’s dreams. And Melinda, the fur-covered adolescent girlchild, some kind of selkie out of Celtic folklore, hitching a ride with Chaos to Emerald City and the Wizard of Oz. And Edie, who seeks to improve her Finite Subjective Reality but keeps on flunking her bad-luck test. Not to mention Case Hotchkiss, Everett Moon, Vance Escrow, and Dawn Crash in the Submission District of San Francisco, where, after the fragmentation, they long for “a sort of viral coherence”; they wait for Godot and gestalt.
If Amnesia Moon is Pynchon Lite, like Vineland, it is also the Philip K. Dickiest of Lethem’s novels. Except that Dick was a paranoid pillhead—genuinely convinced, according to his most recent biographer, that telepathic Soviet scientists tried to jam his neural frequencies by bombarding him with abstract splatters of Kandinsky and Picasso from the Hermitage—whereas Lethem is known to hang out at McSweeney’s, where the writers want to make a community; and the coherence he longs for throughout his books, the gestalt, is family.
Family, about which Girl in Landscape (1998) is especially eloquent, a prose riff on John Ford’s The Searchers but also Lethem’s Passage to India, as well as a wonderment in which a Catcher in the Rye reads the Martian Chronicies in a Little House on the Prairie. Pella is thirteen years old, living beneath a poisoned earth with her younger brothers, when their father, Clement, loses an election and their mother, Caitlin, dies of a brain tumor. So it’s off by freezer ship to the Planet of the Archbuilders and a frontier settlement on a “landscape of remembrance,” a dream terrain of eroded spires and ancient tombs, with black sand and mourning sculptures, fish potatoes and lynch mobs, indigenes with evocative names like Hiding Kneel and Truth Renowned and miniature deer so quicksilver swift they might very well be ghosts.
On this “Planet of Withheld Explanations,” the adolescent Pella experiences the terrors of adult sexuality (“The girl’s body was pretentious with womanhood”), Lethem finds his first fully fledged character, the reader emerges from a sci-fi western more complicated than when he was going in, and we glimpse the homesteading to come in Brooklyn of Rachel, Abraham, and Dylan. Once upon a time, the mother Caitlin told her strong, smart daughter Pella: “Don’t you think arms are brave? They just go on, they never get tired or give up or complain.” So when Pella, the pioneer woman, raises a new town on an old planet, she already has not only a name for it, Caitlin, of course, but also a motto worthy of a Vonnegut: “Be brave like an arm.”
Motherless Brooklyn (1999) is the novel favored by readers of Lethem who’d rather he hadn’t entered the mainstream, a peculiar resentment indeed on the part of people who otherwise complain that the mainstream unfairly disdains their populist subversions, their pulp-proud underground, their monastic cells and hermetic texts. About the mainstream: love it or leave it. To want to eat the flowers and sleep in the Hide-a-Bed of the very same rectal-thermometer establishment whose walls you have pledged to “tag” seems to me to be uncool. But Motherless, in which Lionel Essrog is only one of many orphans in the hired-muscle and private-eye service of a small-time hood, is way cool, as if Tony Shaloub’s Monk, the obsessive-compulsive TV detective, and Philip Roth’s Mickey Sabbath had teamed up to solve an Oedipal crime. Lionel, moreover, speaks in tongues. Like Mozart and Malraux, he is afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome. He can’t help turning everything he hears into a linguistic freak show, “spirit or animal possession, verbal; epileptic seizure, whatever,” with “a flapping, inane mouth that covered the world in names and descriptions,” and “no control in my personal experience of self.”
What happens as Lionel, determined to avenge the murder of the mafioso who got him out of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, follows a deadly trail from a Yorkville zendo with some very odd monks to a Sushi Oceanfood Emporium on the rocky coast of Maine, past Marlon Brando, Ross MacDonald, Daffy Duck, and the Green Hornet, is a brilliant game of verbal tags. (“Ducky fucking Bent!” should appeal to baseball fans who will never forgive the Yankee shortstop for his playoff home run against the Red Sox.) Not only is the narrator unreliable; he has run amok: “I’m a tightly wound loose cannon.” He could be Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, or Oskar in The Tin Drum, or the Hunchback of Notre Dame, a Greek who can only talk in vehement dithyrambs, an Elizabethan stuck in iambic pentameter, a waterbug in Kafka, an elephant in Aida, or Gogol’s nose. And, as usual with Lethem, he blames himself for what he’s lost:
Is guilt a species of Tourette’s? Maybe. It has a touchy quality, I think, a hint of sweaty fingers. Guilt wants to cover all the bases, be everywhere at once, reach into the past to tweak, neaten, and repair. Guilt like Tourettic utterance flows uselessly, inelegantly from one helpless human to another, contemptuous of perimeters, doomed to be mistaken or refused on delivery.
Nevertheless, remember what your mother told you. BE BRAVE LIKE AN ARM.
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So we arrive at last at The Fortress of Solitude (2003), and the 1970s Brooklyn boyhood of Dylan and Mingus—salt and pepper, race and music, yoking and graffiti, levitation and transparency. Just how resonant can a decade be? What if nothing else for the rest of your life will ever be as meaningful as how you felt in the seventh grade, being beaten up on your way home from school? Play That Funky Music, White Boy. Is it possible to grow up at all, much less up, up, and away, in a novel named for Superman’s polar hideout, a hope chest and a memory bank with its own lab and its own zoo, where the Man of Steel from Action Comics went whenever his nerves were frayed—a novel that is itself a nest of cellars and attics, of batcaves in which Dylan with his secret identities may be downstairs practicing sarcasm as if it were karate, while his artist-father Abraham is upstairs painting jackets for sci-fi paperbacks and killing time with blobs of light, even as Mingus’s singer-father, Barrett Rude, Jr., on the next block over, has drawn the shades to darken the room where he burns freebase cocaine in a glass pipe?
By now you have heard that nerdy Dylan’s bohemian parents, avant-garde Abraham and radical hippie Rachel, move to Boerum Hill in Brooklyn just when the neighborhood is deciding whether to decay some more or gentrify, because they believe in community. And send Dylan to public school, rather than St. Ann’s or Packer, because their liberal principles say they should. And Dylan, naturally, is victimized, headlocked every day by black boys from the projects, one of whom steals his bike, for which theft his sorry ass will then be kicked by earth-mother Rachel herself, earning Dylan an enemy for life. And he will be naked before this enemy when his feckless parent, the Red Queen, “Rachel, the Symbionese soccer mom,” suddenly deserts him, disappearing into the sexual and social revolutions with a grown man as serious about comics as Dylan himself. She will never see her son again, although, signing herself “Running Crab,” she does send back the occasional, cryptic postcard. (“Brooklyn was simple compared to his mother.”)
And then, miraculously, Dylan is befriended by supercool Mingus Rude, equally motherless but effortlessly gifted, the mulatto son of a celebrated soul singer: “an exploding bomb of possibilities.” As if they are characters in the comics they consume like oyxgen, Mingus and Dylan transcend their streets. Games of stickball and skully, movies starring the dead Bruce Lee, comics featuring a Human Torch, an Invisible Girl, and Mole Men, weed-smoking, break dancing, Motown, hip-hop, and funk, Yoo-hoo, Etch A Sketch, Spirograph, and Pixy Stix, all seem staged for these brave two, a private safari into the continent of being boys. They will fly high over stoops and bodegas, the public school, the House of Detention, and the Brooklyn Bridge. At first the purpose of their upward mobility is to tag walls that can’t contain them, paint their names on every page in Brooklyn’s book: “Under oblivious eyes, the invisible autographed the world.” Later, though, Dylan and Mingus turn into crime-stopping vigilantes. And we are asked to believe they actually fly. From a homeless superhero who fell off a roof, they inherit a ring that lets them drape a cape and levitate.
A magic ring conferring the ability to fly would seem to belong more to one of Lethem’s earlier novels than this masterly, lyrical scan of the warp and weft of childhood, the ligature of fellowship and blood ties. Before everything goes wrong about two-thirds of the way through, Solitude has been perfectly poised between sense and stress, aura and object, a man who remembers and the boy who was there. So saturated is its phrasing, so tactile with the first charged feeling of each sight, sound, smell, and sinew, that it seems popular culture might really be the solvent in which contradictions of class and race dissolve. Even after Dylan and Mingus are discovered in a homoerotic scrum—as if they had been choreographed by the Freudian critic Leslie Fiedler in a Huck and Jim, or Ishmael and Queequeg, or Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, pas de deux—when white Dylan goes off to Stuyvesant High School, Camden College, Berkeley, California, and a vile career in rock criticism, while black Mingus goes to crack cocaine and prison, both passages are, if perhaps perfunctory, nevertheless plausible. But then that magic ring shows up again, behind bars, where instead of letting anybody fly away, it renders them invisible.
Only in a comic book, and not very often there, will a magic trick harmonize the races or bring back your missing mother. Solitude, copping out, didn’t so much cheat the reader as it threw up its hands and shrugged us off. I give up. Irony hasn’t done the job, nor nostalgia, either, so why not try wishful thinking? In this, we seem not to have advanced an inch in at least four decades. Perhaps you recall the essay Norman Podhoretz wrote for Commentary in 1963, “My Negro Problem—And Ours.” As Dylan was “yoked” in Brooklyn in the 1970s, so Podhoretz, in his very own version of “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” reported “being repeatedly beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated” in Brooklyn in the 1930s. And as Podhoretz concluded that America’s race problem could only be solved by “miscegenation,” by making color “disappear,” so Lethem helpfully bequeathes Dylan an African American girlfriend in Third World Berkeley.
But Podhoretz is busy these days slandering ex-friends and invading Middle Eastern countries. And how come Berkeley in these pages seems so much more educational than Bennington College? Lethem, who went to Bennington for a bit, calls it Camden in The Fortress of Solitude. So did Bret Easton Ellis call it Camden in Rules of Attraction, and Jill Eisenstadt, too, in her novel Far Rockaway, where Ellis had a walk-on. But Donna Tartt called it Hampden, even though The Secret History was dedicated to Ellis and some of us wondered about Tartt’s student dope dealer with the Mob connections. A dope deal likewise figures in Dylan’s stay at Camden. But unlike either Ellis or Tartt, Lethem failed to notice any incest, gang rape, or murder. And Bennington probably wonders if any of these stoned, horny, ungrateful, and uncomprehending pimples ever went to class or read a book or had a thought or mustered a fierce feeling about anything other than Devo or Marvel.
Which brings us full circle back around to comic books and popular culture. I’m glad to learn from The Disappointment Artist that Lethem’s father is more interesting than Dylan’s was, that his mother, unlike Dylan’s, didn’t abandon her boy because of narcissism; that Jonathan, unlike Dylan, has siblings. And I am sorry that none of us can fly, besides which we’re opaque. But it is time this gifted writer closed his comic books for good. Superpowers are not what magic realism was about in Bulgakov, Kobo Abe, Salman Rushdie, or the Latin America flying carpets. That Michael Chabon and Paul Auster have gone graphic, that one Jonathan, Lethem, writes on and on about John Ford, while another Jonathan, Franzen, writes on and on about Peanuts, even as Rick Moody confides to the Times Book Review that “comics are currently better at the sociology of the intimate gesture than literary fiction is,” may just mean that the slick magazines with the scratch and sniff ads for vodka and opium are willing to pay a bundle for bombast about ephemera.
But all of it makes me itch. Welcome to New Dork! We have been airpopped and multimediated unto inanity and pastiche. Philip K. Dick and Stan Lee get Hollywood movies. Alienation and sexual terror have their own sitcoms, fashion statements, and marketing niches. The middle finger and the Bronx cheer are required courses in cultural studies. Boomers have made sure that their every febrile enthusiasm since Pampers will last longer than radioactive waste, on digital cable or DVD. Gen Xers are just as solipsistic; anything that ever mattered to them must have been profound, even, say, Debbie Harry of the punk group Blondie talking to MTV while a sirocco blows in one of her ears and out the other and neurons die like flies.
BITE MY CRANK, SUPER GOAT MAN!