A DIFFERENT KIND OF TENSION: New and Selected Stories, by Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem doesn’t issue any grand claims for his new book, “A Different Kind of Tension,” a sampling of stories old and new. Though he specializes in surreal black comedy, and writes frequently about male unease and the horrors of the near future, he offers the collection not as a mosaic or cumulative statement — serial dispatches from Lethem-land — but simply as a record of his “persistence in making myself available to a form I’d never claim to have mastered.”
This is either feigned humility or a sanguine acceptance that some of his contemporaries — George Saunders or David Foster Wallace, say — have done more with the short story or given more of themselves to it, approaching similar terrain with greater gusto or a more potent vision. Whatever the case, Lethem’s claim is rather understated: For almost 40 years, he has made himself extremely available. The book draws from no fewer than five collections and reprints 11 stories that didn’t make it into any of them.
Some of the pieces are little more than exercises. “Proximity People” is a two-and-a-half-page list of annoying types. “Elevator Pitches” offers 17 ideas for bleak movies. The attendant dangers — whimsy, archness, obscurity — are not entirely averted. But others remind us how consistently ambitious Lethem has been in his practice of the short form.
He started off in science fiction, emerging from what he once called “the Galaxy-Frederik Pohl-C.M. Kornbluth-‘New Maps of Hell’ tradition.” (If you know, you know.) The second story here, “Program’s Progress,” is an entertaining satirical allegory about a world where computer chips are divided into itinerant “walkers” and immobile “stations.” A “bleeding-heart” walker tries to organize the stations to revolt but is soon rejected, accused of appropriating subversive rhetoric to assuage his own guilt. (For those unacquainted with Pohl or Kornbluth, it is likely to provoke memories of both “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”) Other conceits from Lethem’s 1990s stories include a spray that makes lost things visible and a street drug, NtroP, that gives a miserable couple a clean breakup.
As a short-fiction writer, Lethem was at his strongest — his most limber, lucid, inventive and wise — for around a decade starting in the early to mid-2000s, roughly his 40s. Moving away from straight science fiction, he placed fantastical logic against recognizable backdrops, and commanded a range of tonal effects.
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