Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lethem (Brooklyn Crime Novel) offers a revelatory career-spanning collection of 30 fantastical and speculative stories, all but 11 of which have appeared in previous volumes. Among the often-melancholy characters are "Sleepy People" protagonist Judith Map, who finds a sleepwalking man on her doorstep and takes him into her apartment. She has sex with him while he sleeps, and afterward seeks answers about his provenance from a militia who hangs out at a nearby bar. Other characters endure alienation, such as those in "Program's Progress" who aspire to upward mobility in a weird world where cars are the highest order of being; or disembodiment, like the party guests in "Forever, Said the Duck" who arrive as virtual reality simulations of themselves. In the standout "Red Sun School of Thoughts," a 13-year-old boy visits a commune in 1976 San Francisco, and his desire for answers from the Founder leads to a strange and disenchanting encounter. The imagery is often suggestive, hovering in a genre-defying space between literal and metaphorical, as with the predatory teen gang members referred to as dinosaurs in "Sleepy People." In large doses, the effect can be exhausting, but the repeating motifs--claustrophobia, desire, malevolent chaos--provide keys to understanding Lethem's often elliptical tales. The author's fans will find much to love. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Sept.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Lethem's (Brooklyn Crime Novel) new collection blends sci-fi, humor, and social commentary. In "Program's Progress," humans have a choice of bionic vessel--a car body, a walker body, a stationary body, or a group body--and the divide among the categories reflects class differences in the United States. A walker character is aghast when he is demoted to a stationary body, whose many limitations he's not accustomed to. The only way to move up to a better body is to work harder, resist drugs, and limit media viewing; a desire for class revolution builds. In "The Speckless Cathedral," a new street drug helps partners break up, but it has far-reaching, unintended side effects for the character who takes it. "How We Got in Town and Out Again" showcases a competition among young people being "immersed in an ocean of data overwhelming to their undernourished sensibilities." Some of the stories, like "Sleepy People," raise more questions than they answer, but the writing is always crisp, clean, and lean, relying on short, direct sentences. VERDICT A winner for readers seeking a fast-moving romp through sci-fi premises and futuristic settings without a lot of violence.--Leah Shepherd
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A late-midcareer retrospective, 30 stories spanning 35 years of work by a talented and celebrated writer. New-and-selecteds tend to be miscellanies, and that canseem the case here: The stories vary widely by genre, tone, and length (and to some extent by quality). But "miscellany" implies a catch-as-catch-can looseness that's absent. These stories show off a versatility that rarely feels like randomness, because no matter where they go, they're tethered to Lethem's familiar nexus of themes (failure of connection, rivalry, the threats and depredations of technology, for a few examples) and techniques (mashup, flights of surrealism, talking animals, metafiction, humor, wordplay). As always, Lethem is broadly curious, genre-promiscuous, and genuinely unpredictable; he ranges, so his stories do, too. Highlights include "The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock at the Door," in which the title character conceives of a new peril, the Sylvia Plath Sheep, a despair-haunted creature that appears to be dangerous only to itself but is contagious, gradually "unwrapping its bleak gift ofglobal animal suicide"…and then he answers the door to find his ovine creation at the threshold; "Sleepy People," in which we start with a narcoleptic spy affiliated with a bar (named "Quick's Little Alaska" after its hyperactive AC) and proceed bewilderingly to a war involving marauding bands of talking dinosaurs…all within the frame of what feels like a psychological portrait of post-marriage loneliness; and "Access Fantasy," which starts with the Julio Cortazar premise of a permanent traffic jam and then keeps doubling down. The spectacular "Pending Vegan" tells the story of a father, trying to kick antidepressants, who's negotiating the moral and physical terrors of parenthood as exemplified by a trip with his wife and his fearful young daughters to SeaWorld: flamingos, overpriced food, shark tanks, gift shops, hypocrisy, orcas, dispiritedness. Inventive, unpredictable fun. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
