In two of the stories in his superfluous new collection, Jonathan Lethem uses the snow globe as a symbol for isolation and removal from the hustle and bustle and Sturm und Drang of ordinary life. It’s a favorite image, which has popped up in earlier books like “Motherless Brooklyn” and “Chronic City,” and an apt metaphor for the separation that so many of his characters feel, whether it’s Dylan Ebdus in “The Fortress of Solitude,” who was bullied as a child, or Lionel Essrog, the detective with Tourette’s syndrome in “Motherless Brooklyn.”
The people in this collection, “Lucky Alan and Other Stories,” also tend to live in their own fortresses of solitude — cut off by fate, choice or temperament. A man in a snowed-in house in the country, who watches television alone with his dog (“Traveler Home”). A nerdy clerk in a sex boutique, who reviews porn films for its newsletter (“The Porn Critic”). A once venerated avant-garde theater director (known for miniaturist spectacles, like staging “Krapp’s Last Tape” in the elevator of a prewar office building) who sees a movie every afternoon alone; he is described by the narrator as “a skater up his own river, a frozen ribbon the rest of us might have glimpsed through trees, from within a rink where we circled to tinny music” (“Lucky Alan”).
Unlike the characters in Mr. Lethem’s recent novels, such protagonists are a sketchily defined lot — crudely carved chess pieces that he moves about mechanically to illustrate his plot points. These stories often feel like throwbacks to his early genre-inspired work, but they lack the energy and imitative verve that fueled the best of those endeavors. Instead, they feel more like hastily tossed off exercises in fantasy and whimsy, which lift from and allude to myriad earlier works of art without alchemizing them into something new.
“Their Back Pages” is a predictable Pirandello-esque fable about an assortment of characters from old comic strips — including members of a dysfunctional family; a rabbit named Peter; and a generic clown, villain and monster — whose plane crash-lands on an island, stranding them like the castaways on “Gilligan’s Island” and forcing them to construct survival strategies for themselves.
“The King of Sentences” is a clunky, contrived tale about two fans of a famous, reclusive author — depicted in terms reminiscent of both Philip Roth and the Lonoff character from Mr. Roth’s “The Ghost Writer” — who track him down to a small town outside New York City, where they proceed to accost him at the post office.
As in early Lethem work, there is a dreamlike quality to some of these stories. A man has an encounter — or dreams he’s had an encounter — in the snowy woods outside his house with a group of wolves who present him with a basket containing a human baby. In another tale, a man named Stevick watches workers use jackhammers to drill a hole in the street outside a Manhattan cafe, and then lower a human captive into the hole; instead of calling the police, Stevick ends up participating in what is either a deeply sinister undertaking or bizarre piece of performance art. Perhaps Mr. Lethem intends this story to be a sort of Kafkaesque parable — much the way that in another story, he seems to want an empty room (which, the narrator’s father says, can be used for anything they want) to be a metaphor for the imagination.
These stories are not without their pleasures: Mr. Lethem is a nimble and resourceful writer and knows how to use his prodigious knowledge of pop and classical culture to inject even banal incidents with memory-triggering echoes. But with the exception of the final entry in this volume — “Pending Vegan,” an evocative story about a panic attack a man experiences while taking his daughters to SeaWorld — there is something perfunctory and glancing about these tales. They have little of the social detail found in “The Fortress of Solitude” and “Dissident Gardens” and none of their emotional depth of field, and they feel like unnecessary pit stops in what is otherwise a bright, ascendant career.
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