Testing the Soundness

Justin St. Clair revisits some classics in Jonathan Lethem’s “A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories.”

By Justin St. ClairSeptember 24, 2025

• Fiction

IN THESE PROFOUNDLY unsettling times, literary criticism can seem a little frivolous. We’re no longer slouching toward some imagined autocratic future; we’re midway through the dissolution of the American experiment. We’ve got concentration camps and mass deportations, the senseless dismantlement of essential federal agencies, military personnel on foot patrol in our nation’s capital. There’s a relentless assault on public media, public education, public service, public health, and anything else that an earlier generation would have reasonably considered to be in the public’s interest. It’s dystopian and thoroughly demoralizing. And the most we can manage, it would seem, is to twiddle our thumbs like so many complicit functionaries, doomscrolling against the inevitable.

In this context, I don’t exactly know what to do with Jonathan Lethem’s latest. And I’m not entirely sure he did either. An anthology decades in the making, A Different Kind of Tension presents, in chronological order, 30 of Lethem’s best short stories, from “Walking the Moons” (1990) to “The Red Sun School of Thoughts” (2024). All, with the exception of the final piece, are available elsewhere, but the paucity of new material in no way diminishes the collection. The book is comprehensive and compelling, a career retrospective befitting one of our most perceptive and agile contemporary writers. It’s both an introduction, for those unfamiliar with Lethem’s work, and a summation, the kind of tome one could imagine being taught in a university classroom, decades hence, if there turn out to be parallel realities more fortuitous than our own.

What the collection isn’t is framed. There are no thematized sections; no organizing principles; no introduction, conclusion, or scholarly apparatus—nothing but a scant, two-paragraph author’s note, which fails to fill a single page. One must admire Lethem’s near-Pynchonian turn: recede, defer, and allow the work to speak for itself. It’s an odd tack for the author, though, as he’s built a career as a public intellectual, an incisive critic of both his own output and that of others. And even Thomas Pynchon, guarded as he may be, famously framed his own collection of short fiction with an essay more compelling than several of the stories themselves.

In the introduction to Slow Learner: Early Stories (1984), Pynchon dismisses his early work as “juvenile and delinquent,” and then proceeds, story by story, to enumerate the clinkers and the clunkers—flaws, imperfections, and missteps all brought to the fore before the reader can even begin. It’s a clever tack: self-deprecation that preemptively short-circuits the most obvious of objections and, for good measure, points out a few blunders that critics might otherwise have missed.

The author’s note that precedes A Different Kind of Tension is undoubtedly a nod to Slow Learner. With fewer words and less specificity, Lethem looks back on his oeuvre with similar ambivalence. He admits a few amendments (“some small corrections to the awkwardest flubs of syntax or taste, since, given the chance, why not?”), downplays his fiction’s prescience (“most of the predictions are pretty predictable”), and undersells his ample talents (the short story, he insists, is “a form I’d never claim to have mastered”). Note the phraseology: it only denies the declaration, not the actual accomplishment.

What Lethem is willing to trumpet is what he calls his “commitment to the practice.” Art really isn’t something to be mastered, of course, but Lethem’s dedication to the short story has paid dividends. “Look at how much I wrote about virtuality, drugs, talking animals, lurkers at thresholds,” he observes, “failed sex and romance, parented and feral children, writers, ranting, be careful what you wish for, narrators drowning without knowing it.” And, indeed, these are many of his central preoccupations. When it comes to talking animals, for example, Lethem is guilty—in this collection alone—of an unusually charismatic cephalopod; a shape-shifting cartoon duck named Douglas; a washed-up reality star in decidedly crustacean form; a tragic, jazz-loving ruminant; and a dystopian flock of talking sheep—Sylvia Plath Sheep, “bred for the study of suicide.”

The realm of the fantastic is never fully suppressed in Lethem’s fiction, but as his other obsessions certainly suggest, our reality is his raison d’être. And while he may occasionally get the “science fiction” tag hung on him, it’s no more appropriate a label than it would be if attached to the work of Pynchon or George Saunders. Like both those talents, Lethem is more than willing to ignore the conventional limitations of realism but equally adept at transcending the strictures of genre.

For my money, Lethem is at his most delightful when he’s vaguely hallucinatory, trafficking the displaced ghosts of Kafka or Calvino, redacting proper nouns like an erstwhile Victorian (“the great English poet T_____”), eluding, eliding, smudging the margins. The feeling of being unmoored is one of the cardinal pleasures of short fiction, and Lethem excels at leaving the reader wondering. At the same time, much of his best fiction holds up a dark mirror to the modern age. He manages, in other words, not only to create storyworlds that envelop the reader in blissful, dreamlike uncertainty but also to recreate the infuriating helplessness of real-world complicity in a system we seem powerless to resist. It’s mimetically unsettling: a set of captivating stories that reflect our late-capitalist captivity, where the irresolvable brings pleasure and despair in equal measure.

“Procedure in Plain Air,” one of 10 pieces in this collection that originally appeared in The New Yorker, is precisely such a tale. In it, Stevick, newly single and unemployed, takes his morning coffee on a street-side bench. Two men in jumpsuits roll up in a nondescript work truck and open a massive hole in the street before driving off. When they return, they unload “a human captive […] dressed in the same uniform, as though recently demoted from their company.” Bound and gagged, the prisoner is lowered into the hole, which the workmen subsequently plank over with sturdy boards.

The fable unfolding is no clearer to Stevick than to the reader, and as the workmen prepare to leave, he begins, somewhat hesitantly, to question them. They are merely assigned to “installation and delivery,” they tell him, and consequently have no information to provide. But they thank him for coming on the scene at such an opportune moment, for it has begun to rain, and good citizen Stevick is perfectly positioned to shield the prisoner from the elements. They hand him an umbrella and drive off. “Stevick could easily have gone home, but instead he stepped over, tested the soundness of the footing on top,” Lethem writes, “and sheltered both himself and the sturdy boards from the rain as well as he could beneath the feeble rigging of black cloth and wire.” And so begins Stevick’s conscription.

The ostensible act of kindness leads passersby to believe that Stevick is connected to the mysterious operation. His protestations to the contrary fall on deaf ears, and inevitably, he begins to defend his involvement. In time, a uniformed inspector turns up, offers him a sandwich, and, after checking the condition of the captive in the hole, deposits an olive green duffel bag at Stevick’s feet: “‘Standard issue,’ the inspector explain[s] obscurely. ‘It’ll be there when you need it.’”

As night falls, Stevick’s ex, Charlotte, happens along. Desperate for acknowledgment, he launches into an explanation. “I just hadn’t pictured you getting involved,” she replies. “But by your logic, I suppose, someone had to step forward.” Soon Charlotte, uninvited, begins rooting through the bag at his feet, and we discover that it contains not sandwiches, as Stevick earlier suspected, but a supply of shrink-wrapped jumpsuits, identical to those worn by the prisoner and workmen alike: “‘You’re hired!’ Charlotte exclaim[s]. ‘You’ve been promoted from a temp position to staff.’”

Maybe on its original publication in 2009, “Procedure in Plain Air” merely read as an allegory for our dedication to workaday labor, a parable about how we fritter away the little time we have in thrall to capital’s inhumane machinations. The story closes on such a note. “Stevick was certain he was going to do a good job,” the final sentence reads—never mind the fact that he knows nothing whatsoever about either the task he has undertaken or the ethics of the larger enterprise. In 2025, however, it’s nigh impossible to read the tale without returning to the real-world tragedy unfolding before our very eyes: shackled captives, spirited away in broad daylight by anonymous men driving unmarked vehicles, hustled into makeshift prisons, and then rendered, secretly, to oppressive nation-states half a world way. And we go about our daily lives unsure whether another angry Facebook post is an act of minor resistance or simply serves to normalize the regime’s totalitarian ambitions. Are words even helpful? Are we all complicit?

In his short fiction, Lethem tests not only the soundness of our civic participation but also the utility of narrative itself. A Different Kind of Tension is replete with writers and readers: we get a journalist (“Walking the Moons”) and a writer of science fiction (“The Dystopianist”); a blogger (“The Dreaming Jaw”) and a publicity-averse, Pynchonesque figure who, on finally being found, compels his adoring readers to strip, then tears their clothes to ribbons (“The King of Sentences”); absurd descriptions of never-to-be written films (“Elevator Pitches”) and an amusing list of irritating humans—with its closing indictment, “Above all, writers” (“Proximity People”).

At least half of the collection comfortably qualifies as metafiction, and while self-reflexive narrative styles have arguably fallen out of favor over the past several decades, Lethem deserves credit for persisting, for carrying the postmodern mantle into the digital age. He inserts himself into “Interview with the Crab” à la John Barth and self-consciously reimagines R. A. Lafferty’s 1966 story “Narrow Valley,” rendering it, perhaps inevitably, “Narrowing Valley.” As his metafictive forebears understood, self-reflexivity opens a second channel: it allows a writer to multiplex signals, to deliver—simultaneously—both the feature film and the director’s commentary.

In Lethem’s case, such metareflection often becomes a meditation on the efficacy of fiction itself, an opportunity to question the entire enterprise. Thus, we meet a series of failed fictioneers: the degenerate auteur, Sigismund Blondy, in “Lucky Alan” (“Want a job, Blondy?” his nemesis snarls. “You should write an opera about Donald Trump. He’s what passes for a hero these days!”); or the sex shop clerk, Kromer, in “The Porn Critic,” who has been tasked with churning out copy for the company newsletter (“All he had to offer them was his own notes, not the world itself”).

Fascism is on the rise because the generation that bore witness to its last global emergence is no longer alive to object. The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend toward justice: everything worth anything needs relitigation, reemphasis, reiteration. And while it is difficult to find, in this precise moment, much real-world solace in something as frivolous as fiction, Lethem’s collection suggests that a return to the metafictive strategies of an earlier generation can remind us of literature’s promise, critiquing dominant narratives even as it provides a space for our own self-doubt.