Lucky Alan by Jonathan Lethem

 

In this anthology, the reader gets a look into the mind of Jonathan Lethem.  There are nine stories.  The first is the title story and is about a theatre director living in Manhattan and a financial investor.  The two meet on the street as they live in the same neighborhood and strike up a friendship.  The director is older but the other man is young and seems wealthy.   After a visit abroad, he returns with an Asian wife who then becomes pregnant.  The man dies soon after his child is born and the director comes to question their friendship.

Some of the stories are obscure and others are very relatable.  My personal favorite was the last story which is titled Pending Vegan.  It is about a family man taking his wife and two daughters to Sea World, unfortunately after deciding to take himself off an antidepressant.  

Jonathan Lethem is considered one of our better novelists.  He was a MacArthur Fellow and has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.  Some of his better known novels include Dissident Gardens, Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress Of Solitude, The Feral Detective and A Gambler's Anatomy.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.