Review: This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

Review: This Shape We're In, by Jonathan Lethem

by Rich Horton

A little while back John Kessel mentioned this slim book, which was published in 2001 by McSweeney's Books. I had completely missed the book when it appeared. I greatly enjoyed Lethem's early short fiction and his first few novels, which were science fiction but with a distinctly different voice, and different objectives than most genre SF writers. (Indeed, I wrote a review of his first novel, Gun With Occasional Music, and sent it to a free distribution newspaper sort of thing -- perhaps it was BookPage? I'm not sure anymore. They didn't take it though their response hinted that they came really close. That's the first attempt at (semi)professional reviewing/criticism I ever made.) It wasn't, then, precisely a surprise that he moved out of the genre pretty much at the turn of the millennium, and, not really for that reason, the last of his books that I read was his 1999 detective novel Motherless Brooklyn. His next novel, The Fortress of Solitude, was still ambiguously genre (and got savaged in the New Yorker by James Wood, who is an excellent critic when he is in sympathy with a book, but has a completely blind eye, it seems to me, for genre.) But that book was long and about Superman, and I didn't get around to it, after which I was actively reviewing for Locus and my time for novels was much diminished.

This Shape We're In is a very short book -- about 13,000 words long by my estimate. It's narrated by Henry F., a middle-aged man whom we meet at a backyard barbecue, when the neighbors' son Balkan tells Henry F. and his wife Marianne that he's been in the eye and seen their son Dennis, who has been away for a while. And soon we realize that this refers to a real eye -- maybe -- as it seems that everyone lives in what they call the Shape. The Shape seems to be an enormous body of some sort, with eyes and a neck and bowels and liver and so on. While Mr. F is skeptical about Balkan's testimony, his wife insists that he and Balkan try to find Dennis.

And so Henry and Balkan begin their journey, up the spine towards the eye. There are problems, of course -- which eye was it? Could it have been the theorized "third eye"? Or was it a fraudulent creation? Things get stranger and stranger, confrontations with paramilitary groups, and religious groups, along with a visit to a clearly false eye, and references to Central Command, which can be contacted by red phones except that those phones always seem connected to a phone sex channel. This is all transmitted through Henry's voice -- that of a disappointed, heavy drinking, middle aged man, who seems to have had a military past but now is merely a "garbage hider". The science fiction reader will come up with hypotheses -- at first this seems perhaps a generation starship, for example -- and other readers will probably take everything as satirical surrealism. I'll just say that Lethem doesn't really disappoint either reader -- the story is certainly satirical and much of it can be read as sort of surrealistic, but in the story world the "Shape" is real, and its nature is, to an extent, eventually revealed. In the end, I think, it is truly a case of using SFnal imagery and allusions (though there are allusions to many other fictions) in the service of a commentary on present day life

It's quite effective. Much of this is propelled by Lethem's writing, which is very clever, imaginative and quite funny. John Kessel compares it to Kafka, and I can see that, though Lethem's prose and tone are not precisely Kafkaesque. I wish I'd seen it back in 2001. I'm not saying it would have got a Hugo nomination (it wouldn't have, but not for any reason having to do with its worth) but I think it would have been on my list. (Though looking at that year I'm reminded that Ian MacLeod wrote arguably the two best stories at novella and novelette length, both pure SF, and neither nominated: "New Light on the Drake Equation" and "Isabel of the Fall", neither of which ended up on the Hugo ballot either!)