"Portal," the first story in J. Robert Lennon's collection, "See You in Paradise," details a nuclear family's travails and frustrations with a small wrinkle in their lives: the portal into other worlds in their back yard. Over time, the story's narrator notes, the portal began to give them "things it thought we wanted," sending them to worlds where things seem, on some fundamental level, off. It sets the tone for the work to follow and points to an overall strength of Lennon's fiction: Few others write as well about people alienated from the world around them.
His novel "Castle" centered around a man's endeavors to keep his recent and distant pasts separate, while the protagonist of "Familiar" abruptly finds herself living in a world where a defining family tragedy never happened.
In the title story of "See You in Paradise," an enterprising collegiate journalist ends up falling into a relationship with a wealthy classmate (they grew up in "vastly different New Jerseys, sure, but they both used to drive an hour to visit the same mall"); he starts working for her father's business and ends up living on an island, subject to random directives.
Some of the stories here, such as "Hibachi," take familiar settings and situations — a suburban dinner party, say — and make them feel alien via offbeat actions and unexpected descriptions.
Other stories, such as the aforementioned "Portal," forgo any pretense of realism. The narrator of "Zombie Dan" is reunited with a childhood friend whose family's wealth allows him to be revived after death, albeit with altered speech patterns, an increased libido and what appears to be telepathy.
Sometimes, the question of just how surreal these worlds are is open for debate. The seemingly endless air travel encountered by the protagonist of "Flight" is surrealism in the most orderly terms possible, even as rumors of strange disasters circulate among his fellow passengers. In "Weber's Head," a man in denial about his own bad qualities takes on a roommate who makes dubious statements such as, "That's meat animals. This is wildlife." It's a comedy of manners with a vaporous aspect: the tenuous geography around the narrator's home; a mysterious sculpture he finds in Weber's room.
What makes Lennon's best stories so memorable is their ability to tie a magnificent sense of disorientation in with quotidian anxieties: fears around jobs, relationships and homes. Lennon is capable of making those anxieties tangible, even at times literal, but he can also let them hang overhead, their very presence enough to unsettle.
There's plenty of life and humor in here as well, whether it's from a character's haplessness, an unexpected comment blurted out or the sheer oddity of a situation. And it's another fine demonstration of Lennon's authorial range.
Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
