“The Afterlife”
by Jonathan Lethem
from the May 18, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
Later this year Lethem’s novel The Arrest will be published, but it appears “The Afterlife” is not an excerpt since Lethem says in his New Yorker interview that the idea for this story came in January. “The Afterlife” seems to be a story about just that:
R., a sculptor, rode a shuttle bus to the afterlife. He had no baggage. That the destination was the afterlife was understood, a given. This fact R. couldn’t have explained. He didn’t have to. None of the others on the bus—it was loosely packed, perhaps a third of the seats full—challenged R.’s certainty. They knew as well.
I’ve never read any of Lethem’s novels. My familiarity with his work is modest and based solely on what he’s published in The New Yorker over the years. Nothing has compelled me to pick up his books, but maybe this one will? What do you think?
I look forward to reading your thoughts below!
I read Lethem’s last novel, The Feral Detective. It was very good, imaginative, futuristic, psychological, political.
Crikey, another story with a protagonist whose name is a letter! This was not off to a good start. It initially felt like one of Lethem’s more “experimental” efforts. His short story collections almost always have at least one, and sometimes they bloom to novella-sized, as in This Shape We’re In. They are rarely where his best work resides.
Here you short of float through the early bits of the story looking for a landing place (like the story’s hero, R. the Sculptor) in a fine bit of form-follows-function. That said landing place is the utterly dispiriting feeling of thinking you’ve found one of “your people” but instead you’ve come across a cultured-looking grown-up obsessed with the infantile Marvel movies. This was an invigoratingly sharp turn for the story to take. “What he found sad was the drab common denominator, the franchise film.” Well said, Jonathan. Sad, drab, and common indeed.
The dutiful self-conscious altruist artiste (what worse fate could one imagine for such a male than offending a woman in a sari!!) trying earnestly to help the poor soul (and mispronouncing the Avengers movie time and again, quite hilariously) is a soothing bit of comic relief. Hell is other people who obsess over comic book movies!
More fragmented and attenuated than a traditional short story, but the languishing and eremitic souls who slide into the trenches (as we’re all destined to) evoked a real empathy from me as I reached the end of this piece. It read rather like an existentialist and postmodern update of Fitzgerald’s “The Long Way Out.”
The Afterlife reminds me of how it feels to spend 3 hours at the Metropolitan Museum on a Sunday afternoon looking at pictures painted by people who have actually been dead for many many years. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Lethem’s story deftly shows the modernist or postmodernist obsession with objects whose commoness often leads to a dead end in terms of any sort of significant meaning. Everyone has been reduced to a character with a period. All emotion, sensation and feeling reduced to bland bare barely aliveness. That sort of take on life is trendy and popular and marvel heros, common folk evolved into superheroes, are thought of as banal and full of all manner of despicableness. People have different perceptions and perceive the same thing as being intensely negative or more positive depending on how they view life generally.
The lady in the sari (who doesn’t get a letter presumably because she’s not Western enough to deserve one) is a little rude noting R.’s seeming intolerance for huge long passages of time that lack any sort of meaning. But I was happy she (representing Eastern sanskritic awareness) was even included in a very modern Westernized afterlife.
I like how Sean related it to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Long Way Out,” which you can read just as how it appeared in 1937 at the Esquire magazine website. That story offers a possible context for Lethem’s story which is experimental and is difficult like many sculptures to derive meaning and context although it is very shrewd and well constructed.
“The Long Way Out” is such a great short story in the old style. The Afterlife is a sly, clever update but difficult to access since mostly shorn of the particular detail and feeling that makes the earlier Fitzgerald piece so appealing.
This is embarrassing. I just read FitzGerald’s story. I liked it — thanks to Sean for mentioning it and to Larry for revealing that it can easily be accessed.
Now for the embarrassing part — I have no clue how FitzGerald’s story relates to Lethem’s. I believe I’ve just lost all literary credibility.
William,
It might be really difficult to quantify exactly how Fitzgerald’s story relates to Lethem’s but I think Sean can tell us more about how he sees they relate if he thinks that’s worth doing. I find it difficult except in the concept of the emptiness that follows after death. It seems Fitzgerald stays in the mental state of the living person whereas Lethem goes into whatever is left of a person’s awareness after they die. Not sure how Sean looks at it but Lethem’s story is difficult because it’s written in a deconstructionist mode as though in real life our identity and the details and emotions of our lives are decomposing into nothingness as sort of represented by the protagonist having only a letter and a period to define his boringness with his afterlife existence almost as though there is not much difference from one’s before death and his acceptance into the afterlife. That is sort of the opposite of Fitzgerald’s world except the emptiness of waiting for someone who will never show up is somehow somewhat similar because having died, they have lost all identity except for the one waiting for them. In Lethem’s story there is no one waiting to see him come back alive or even anyone to talk to in the afterlife. Lethem’s story seems sort of like a really trendy modernist cocktail party in NoHo NYC where everyone is there but nobody says anything to spoil the emptiness of the event or of its occurrence. Would be good to read Sean’s thoughts on how the two stories relate.
Larry B.
Regarding Lethem’s and Fitzgerald’s stories, there’s just a terseness in the existential banality of death that both authors confront and expose using their own philosophical tool sets. Both stories are affectless and aphoristic, even cold and abstract. The authors are smart men, established in their profession, well-respected in their own lifetimes with numerous successes behind them, fathers, in middle age (even though Fitz didn’t live much longer), and they are not about to be gulled by sentimentalism. The stories approach death implacably. There’s not the sturm und drang of the young man grappling with mortality, nor the resignation of the old man’s tangles with impending cessation. There’s just a “this is what it is” quality to both stories that acknowledges that the subject matter is somewhat ineffable, so they take a plangent, intellectualized, even deadpan stance. In mood, form, setting (both allude to subterranean and hellish places), and content, there’s a lot to work with here regarding how clear-eyed both these stories are in dealing with the fathomless horrors of untranquil death that no amount of prevarication can prevent or elide (to borrow some of the fantastic verbiage from both pieces).
Thanks guys. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
This story seemed all trajectory and no meat. I got no sense of the narrator, and my only whiff of location was slipping from one level of crowded emptiness to another. At least the woman in the sari had some claim to distinction – everything/everyone else was indistinguishable and, as the story insists, unfamiliar. If that’s the Afterlife, a sentence could have described it ” When R.went there, it was crowded and getting more so, and then R. fell into a ditch.” Solve for R.
Great summary, MWA. R = Everyman. Very Medieval. Very not-Postmodern.