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- - - - Copyright Newcity Chicago
- - - - EYE SPY
Margaret Wappler With narrative aplomb reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson's verviest work, aided and abetted by a man's man, besotted narrator Jonathan Lethem gives us a barely-novella-sized work, "This Shape We're In." it's easy to view this self-assured mockup as only a midnight snack for those hungrily awaiting Lethem's next book, but within "Shape"'s brevity lies a big concept waiting to swallow you whole. It's the story of a man's adventures living in a human body, or at least its shape, a concept seemingly cribbed from a Kurt Vonnegut outtake, then spun with genre-bending enthusiasm, encompassing sci-fi, war stories and the search for enlightenment. From the start, we get no hand-holding as Lethem plunges us into the mind and collective shape of the narrator, an older man willingly fallen from grace, Henry Fauber. Fauber's naive son, Dennis, has disappeared, and is reported as living in the shape's eye, dabbling in Buddhism and begging for change. At his wife's demands, Fauber departs from his home in the "subburrows," or bowels, where he works as a "garbage hider," heading for the eye that he believes to be an imposter. "It wouldn't be the first time," Fauber tells us, "some priestly collective mounted a bogus eye and started preaching to deluded seekers and militia types." Working up the spine, Fauber eventually finds the eye, after stumbling on a fake one guarded by a pack of young, bubble-gum-chewing nuns. The real eye is a deliciously depthless chasm, rife with capital-S symbolism that Fauber rattles off like a laundry list, irreverent yet allowing us to indulge in all the possibilities too. "Black, absolute," he describes. "That's what I saw at first, and so I Ieaned in closer to the glass, expecting something more. There was nothing more... It might have been the bottom of the ocean floor... It might have been the vast pupil of God's or Big Brother's unblinking eye. It might have been a vidscreen turned off." Lethem doesn't discern what the eye might mean or be, and it's that lack of pandering that makes this small work a success. The author shows us a world of which we can barely conceive, yet when he hands us the scraps of similarities -- the disparate bars and cathedrals that dot the landscape of the shape -- Lethem still doesn't choose to conscript this world, or the characters of his tale, as simple allegory. "This Shape We're In"
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