Genre: Short
Stories/Science Fiction
Date of Publication:
March 5, 2007
Memorable Quotation:
“Hell doesn’t have a ‘before.’ Hell
is stuck in time, repeating endlessly. Hell doesn’t have a past. It just is.” (From Happy Man, pg. 19)
Lasting Impression: Lethem had some very creative ideas strung
throughout his stories but his decision to not give more attention to them made
his work suffer.
Overall, over the seven short stories:
Storyline: C
Pace: B-
Characters: B-
Ending: C-
Overall: C+
This was another piece of literature that was highly
recommended to me that I, honestly, could not appreciate as much as my friend
did. As I said earlier, the ‘gimmicks’
Lethem strung through the stories were extremely creative but he did not focus
on them like he should have, so his stories just came out being out of balance
and confusing, leaving holes for the reader to fill themselves.
There were seven short stories and only one of them I
thought was successful in executing a story that was cohesive, rich with
detail, and had an unusual circumstance that was consistent throughout the
story. The rest, unfortunately, each had
a fatal flaw that made it difficult to read.
Before I give the brief story descriptions, you may be
wondering why I read the entire collection when I said I did not enjoy most of them
in the first place. The reason is
because once I get halfway through a book, there is no turning back for me
(unless the story becomes excruciating).
Honestly, there was promise of real creativity in these stories, but I felt that
Lethem did not let the ideas mature so he only gave the reader the scraps of
what he had thought of, not giving any real dimension or originality to them.
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To start, the first short story is The Happy Man, my friend’s favorite out of the collection. The narrator is a man whose soul is torn
between his own personal Hell and Earth and when he is in Hell, his body on
Earth is a zombie; able to keep his job and bring in income for his wife but do
nothing else of interest. The man’s
Hell is very creative, the characters in it are unique but the details as to
how he died and why his soul is divided between the two worlds is never
told. The twist at the end is mediocre,
and only brings more questions than answers so overall, I liked the story but I
could not understand the hype about it.
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The next story is Vanilla
Dunk. The idea is that all of the
great basketball players skills, including Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain,
are passed down by imbuing them into exosuits, which are given to players in
the beginning of each season but each suit is only used once. A white player, who gives himself the
nickname Vanilla Dunk, gets the coveted Michael Jordan exosuit, which causes
racial tension among the players. If you are a fan of basketball, you will love
and appreciate the idea behind this story but I only know the basics of the
sport so I could only get into it so much as much. The pace is slow, the story is pretty good,
but the focus on the exosuits are only really discussed in the beginning and
end, leaving me to read about all of these games and strategies I could care
less about instead of the interesting twist that is left on the back burner.
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Light and the Sufferer
is the third story. Two brothers are
involved in a robbery over drugs, one an innocent bystander, Paul, the other a
drug dealer, Don. A Sufferer, a harmless
alien that reminded me of Toothless from How
to Train Your Dragon, has one purpose: to follow those that are troubled
and protect them, so one begins following Don after the robbery occurs. (That may not be right but that is what I
understand their purpose to be.) Everyone can see the Sufferer, but not much
more detail is given about them, for the story circles around Paul’s insistance
on leaving for California
before things get worse. Of course, they
do, and the story just becomes violent and pointless. Honestly, this really wasn’t much of a story,
and the only reason I finished it was because the Sufferer is rather amusing
and created light in this dark world.
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Next is Forever, Said
the Duck, the shortest and most confusing of the seven stories, also my
least favorite. From what I could understand, a couple invites their lovers
from their past to a huge party as means of saying goodbye to their past the
night before their wedding. The pace is
very fast and with so many characters, it is pointless to try and remember
anything about anyone. I have no idea
where they were or what happened in the story because of how strange everything
gets, so this is a story only those with an appreciation for the artistic and
abstract can handle.
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The fifth story is Five
Fucks, which I loved at first but towards the middle, everything twists into
a completely different story, throwing me for a loop. The first storyline, the one I loved and
understood, followed a girl who meets a guy at a bar and spends the night with
him. The next day, when she gets home,
she finds there is a Missing Persons report about her because she had allegedly
been gone for two weeks, when she had only thought was one night. After staying with him a second time and
losing more of her sense of time, she files a missing persons report on herself
and then things just get messy…a girl and guy wake up in dumpsters, then there
are monsters and a village and I can’t even tell you what happens because I
just don’t get it. This would have been
my favorite story, if it didn’t take a turn for the worst.
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Hardened Criminals
is the sixth story, and definitely my favorite one. The narrator, Nick, is sent to prison after being
an accomplice in a robbery but not any prison. What makes this prison different
is the prisoners that died there are put into cement and used as building
blocks for the prison. Only their backs,
feet, and back ends are seen on the outside but on the inside, their heads pop
out of the cement, and with chips in their brains, they can still speak. Nick is first sentenced to the hole, a dark
tower where all around are talking heads but after a week, he is taken into the
regular prison where only one wall has the heads, one of them being his
father’s. The pace was good, Lethem kept
with the concept of the heads, and the story was great; even the ending wrapped
up everything nicely; I definately give him kudos
for this one.
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The last story, Sleepy
People, had an interesting concept but Lethem, once again, barely touched upon
it. A woman comes home from work to find a man sleeping on her front porch to
find out from a coworker that he is a ‘sleepy person’ and they are very warm
individuals who help plants grow. (Yeah, that’s all of a description I got
about them.) There is a military and dinosaurs and once again, I have no idea
what is going on. The plot has no
direction, the characters are one dimensional, and the ending comes out of left
field so sadly, I was not a fan.
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As I said before in one of the mini summaries, this is a
collection for those of you who welcome a surreal landscape with the plot ready
to twist at any moment. I saw what Lethem was trying to do with his concepts,
and I can definitely appreciate his work, but his style and train of thought
are a little much for me to handle.
~Shelly-Beans
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