Short story collections subtitled “New and Selected Stories” can read like a literary victory lap, an eminence grise summarizing a writer’s life’s work across a series of previously published stories and a smattering of new works.
Admitted, Jonathan Lethem’s “A Different Kind of Tension” is something of a greatest hits collection. But it’s also a compelling argument for the existence of collections like these.
The shape of Lethem’s career contributes to the book’s success. “A Different Kind of Tension” is one of a handful of books to feature stories that first appeared in magazines as dissimilar as The New Yorker and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. The 2002 story “The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock at the Door” features allusions to both Sylvia Plath and the Marvel Comics character Black Bolt. That’s Lethem in a nutshell: a willingness to throw seemingly disparate elements into a literary supercollider and see what emerges.
A strength of this collection is the way it lets readers get a better sense of Lethem’s preferred themes, and how early in his career he began reckoning with them. Stylistically, there’s a lot of space between Lethem’s 1996 collection “The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye” and “Lucky Alan,” published 19 years later. Positioning stories from both, as well as three other collections, side by side reveals how many of Lethem’s preoccupations have been there from the start.
The stories in “A Different Kind of Tension” are arranged chronologically, beginning in 1990 and ending in 2024. From the outset, the reader sees the different angles from which Lethem explored ideas of consciousness, technology and virtual worlds — all themes he would revisit in his novel “Chronic City.”
“Program’s Progress” is a story of a young man experimenting with drugs and grappling with his family’s storied history, but it’s set in a world in which all consciousness is embedded on chips following “the carbon/silicon switch.” “Forever, Said the Duck” is set at an increasingly decadent party in the future where most of the attendees are digital copies of the hosts’ real-life friends. Even as the sense of the real breaks down, Lethem remains attuned to the social dynamics at work in the room.
That 1993 story also anticipates 2007’s “Lucky Alan,” with which it shares a keen attention to interpersonal dynamics and a kind of comedy of manners. Here, the setting is contemporary New York City, and the milieu is a group of characters with a penchant for repertory films and discussions of the Swiss writer Max Frisch. “Lucky Alan” showcases Lethem’s prose at its most puckish, as in this description of the Alan Zweilish, the man who gives the story its title:
“Bearded when Blondy first noticed him, Zweilish shaved within a year or so, revealing features younger and grimmer than Blondy had guessed, a knuckly chin and somewhat sensuous lips. Tenured-professorial in the pretentious facial hair, without it Zweilish was revealed to be no more than thirty-five.”
Several stories evoke Lethem’s childhood and young adulthood, a period that he also drew upon for his 2003 novel “The Fortress of Solitude.” In the Author’s Note that opens this volume, Lethem refers to himself as “a young person from New York who became a person from California. Then moved back and back again, repeat unto confusion.” (Lethem also has long ties to Blue Hill, and set his 2020 novel “The Arrest” in Maine.) And it seems notable that the final story here, “The Red Sun School of Thoughts,” reads like a funhouse mirror of both Lethem’s actual life and its fictional counterparts, imagining a Lethem-esque young man who came of age in the Bay Area rather than in Brooklyn.
Besides fictional analogues of Lethem, Lethem himself turns up here; the 2005 story “Interview With the Crab” is narrated by, well, Jonathan Lethem, who spends the story interviewing a giant crab who was once the star of a beloved television show. It also contains one of the most eye-catching lines of dialogue in the book, as Lethem recalls a rivalry between his interview subject and one of his former castmates: “He flooded your room with sulfur oxide in an attempt to cause you to molt six months early.”
In “A Different Kind of Tension,” the reader gets to see some roads not necessarily taken. The very dense, technologically fixated “Access Fantasy,” from 1998, suggests a world in which Lethem evolved into a satirist in the mode of George Saunders. And the phantasmagorical “Five Fucks,” about an ill-starred couple whose assignations literally rewrite reality, is both deeply sad and existentially unsettling.
While some of these stories click into place on an intellectual level more than on an emotional one, the strongest works — of which there are many — memorably combine specificity and surrealism. “Super Goat Man,” in particular, comes to mind: It’s a campus novel in miniature, with the added presence of a second-tier superhero. The absurdism doesn’t distract from the story’s deeply felt emotions and meditation on failures small and large; rather, it magnifies them. Lethem has always been seeking big ideas, but it’s the pathos he finds along the way that’s made his work essential reading all these years.
New York City resident Tobias Carroll is the author of four books, most recently the novel “Ex-Members.” He has reviewed books for The New York Times, Bookforum, the Star Tribune and elsewhere.