A collection of lingering childhoods

When a literary novel wins commercial success, publishers often gather the author’s assorted short fiction between hard covers and tuck it into the slipstream behind the bestseller, hoping it gets tugged along for awhile. Sometimes this is a mistake, a resurrection of weary stories that should have been allowed to rest in peace.

Happily, Jonathan Lethem’s “Men and Cartoons,” which follows his bestsellers “Motherless Brooklyn” and “Fortress of Solitude,” is a different sort of collection. These nine stories, which first appeared in journals, must have spent their published lives itchy and uncomfortable, squashed on dusty library shelves, anxious to escape into the light. They constitute a Lethem FunPak, showcasing the author’s mastery of tone across a remarkable range of genres.

In “The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door,” which echoes some of Lethem’s earliest fiction, we find the title character scribbling away at a story about a geneticist who breeds for suicidal behavior in animals, creating a “Sylvia Plath Sheep” that communicates its despair to other creatures before leaping from a lofty promontory. At this point, a talking sheep shows up at the Dystopianist’s door, cracks bitter, hilarious jokes and asks for a drink of water. The host fills a bowl from the tap first, reconsiders, then pours mineral water.

Lethem is having a bit of fun at the expense of genre fiction in “The Dystopianist,” but he also gives the story an intense emotional core, built around the title character’s resentment of a fellow writer he knew as a schoolmate with whom he would slink into “a corner of the schoolyard to duck sports and fights and girls in one deft multipurpose cower.” They “arrived at a safe island of mutual interest: comic books, Marvel brand, which anyone who read them understood weren’t comic at all but deadly, breathtakingly serious.”

The stories deal not so much with childhood as with childhood’s uneasy legacy. Repeatedly we meet men struggling with loneliness as they grow distant from childhood friends and childhood passions. One character, looking through a Marvel compendium, feels “a howling nostalgia.” Howling is right: The memories here are not sentimental; they sear.

In “The Vision,” the narrator introduces us to Adam Kressler, a sixth-grader so obsessed with the Vision (a benchwarmer in the Marvel lineup) that he wears a homemade cape and has “his broad face ... smeared unevenly with red food dye.” Two decades later the narrator meets Adam again and attends a party at his house, where the adults play the teenage confessional drinking game “I Never.” The narrator tries to expose Adam’s embarrassing superhero past, but it backfires, revealing that age has brought neither understanding nor compassion but simply a more refined sense of cruelty.

In the most powerful story, “Super Goat Man,” a superhero steps off the pulp page and onto an otherwise normal Brooklyn street. The local kids are not impressed: “The two little fleshy horns on his forehead didn’t make him especially interesting,” narrator Everett says. In fact, Super Goat Man’s undistinguished career consisted mostly of “battling dull villains like Vest Man and False Dave.” Everett is disturbed by his father’s obsession with the superhero, who is now just “another of the men who sat on stoops in sleeveless undershirts on hot summer days.”

Robbing superheroes of glory, rendering them fat and slow, is a common gag, now on view in Pixar’s “The Incredibles.” Lethem prefers to dance into that burlesque characterization, collect the considerable humor to be found there, then put the comedy to work in his own more complex designs.

Everett runs across Super Goat Man years later and finds him palsied and pathetic. “Perhaps superheroism was a sort of toxin, like a steroid, one with a punitive cost to the body,” he speculates. Everett lashes out at the Goat Man, admitting that his “loathing had its origins in ... the mind of a child wondering at his father’s own susceptibility to the notion of a hero.”

We find little to admire in Everett’s clear-eyed anti-heroism, however. Our sympathies remain with the decrepit old superhero and his fans, Everett’s father among them. Because a susceptibility to superhero-worship -- to justice and loyalty, glory and wonder -- lies at the heart of Lethem’s fiction and is part of what makes these stories so hard to resist.

*

Mark Essig is the author of “Edison & the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death.”