Conventional writing wisdom says, "Learn the rules before you break them." That education takes some writers a lifetime. In Lucky Alan, New Yorker contributor Jonathan Lethem's third collection of stories, realistic worlds are touched by absurdity, comic-strip characters get stranded on an island, and rules are broken, artfully, like a painter running his brush over the canvas and onto the wall. These stories prove that it's possible to marvel at structure and lose oneself in a story, all at the same time.
Lucky Alan depicts a multitude of universes, real and invented. There's a cabin in the woods, surrounded by wolves and strange girls. There's a blog, peppered with all caps. There's New York City, neighborhood by neighborhood. In one instance, the reader follows a directionless Manhattanite as he perches outside a coffee shop, only to be implicated in an industry that involves prisoners dumped in holes and monitored by men in vans. Lethem doesn't bother to suss out the abstraction, opting instead to demonstrate the character's growing resolve, how he's galvanized by his newfound purpose. Still, under Lethem's capable pen, nothing seems farfetched. The traditional exposition, climax and denouement are absent, yet none of these stories lack a sense of direction. Characters undergo transformations; the reader must merely keep pace.
These stories read easily and embrace the absurd, but their outward simplicity belies a labyrinthine vision of the world, one in which lives and philosophies get inextricably scrambled. Come to Lucky Alan for the sharp prose, with words like "orangely"; stay for its ideas, its structural inventiveness and the rules broken like shackles. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer