Jonathan Lethem: Men and cartoons

This second instalment of a loosely-linked trilogy of books which New Yorker Jonathan Lethem began with last year's Superman-inspired novel The Fortress of Solitude and will conclude later this year with a collection of essays on the subject of grown up males rediscovering their childhood through their favourite old comic books.

But although The Fortress of Solitude was an impressive, giant, generation-spanning epic, which drew on the author's childhood growing up on a diet of Marvel comics, early hip-hop in 1970s Brooklyn and his love of Philip K. Dick's reality-shifting science-fiction, the short stories contained in this slim volume are like brief snapshots that provide some intriguing insights but are ultimately too fleeting.

Men and Cartoons opens with one of its better offerings, The Vision, which centres around a narrator discovering that he is living next door to an old school acquaintance, Adam Cressnerr.

Cressner used to paint his face red after the fashion of the second-string Marvel superhero of the story title, an android that belonged to super-team The Avengers who went on to marry superheroine, The Scarlet Witch. The narrator sets out to embarrass Cressner about his shady past as The Vision but instead ends up with egg, as opposed to red paint, on his face.

The narrator of Men and Cartoons' longest tale, Super Goat Man, also sets out to humiliate the cloven-hoofed, minor superhero of its title, who retires from an undistinguished career of vigilantism to take up an academic post at a university.

With Super Goat Man, Lethem explores the consequences of taking such a fantastical character out of its funny book element and placing it in ordinary surroundings.

However, the downbeat outcome is typical of Men and Cartoons as a whole, in that it is too detached and doesn't really come to any firm conclusions about the continuing relationship between adult men and the adolescent power fantasies they enjoyed in their youth.

The collection's best story, Access Fantasy, which dates back to Lethem's early science-fiction work in the early 1990s, has nothing to do with men and cartoons but instead portrays a bleak, Philip K. Dick style dystopian future, where otherwise invisible members of society become walking billboards, eerily echoing recent reports of women covering their pregnant bellies with advertising slogans.

Men and Cartoons is a patchy collection, which has some moments of brilliance but eventually leaves the reader longing for the technicolour vistas of The Fortress of Solitude.

* Stephen Jewell is an Auckland-based journalist.
* Faber & Faber, $27