Let Me Think by J. Robert Lennon

reviewed by Sudarshan Ramani

J. Robert Lennon’s collection Let Me Think was published by Graywolf Press in 2021. It can be purchased here.

Over the last fifty years, the American literary short story has undergone significant transformations. Before, a short story could, at times, resemble a compressed novel with the detail, scenic description, and character development in the longform prose achieved at a miniature length. But under the influence of Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, and Lydia Davis in particular, the short story subsequently evolved to more closely resemble a poem expressed in prose rather than verse—at times eschewing narrative in favor of a loose essay, at other times aping the comic skit and sketch centered around a particular observation without any narrative framing or anchor. The short story now aspires to express in brevity what cannot be expressed in detail. 

The new aim of the short story is to subtract with style and to subtract with scope. Starting with Borges and continuing with Barthelme, the infinite variation of the shorter narrative becomes an exercise in exploration of new modes and forms of storytelling. This brevity allows for the quicker re-read and a more careful use of sentences. There is greater playfulness with the emphasis, tone, and point of view. A treasure-hunt engages the reader to decipher how known or how hidden the narrative perspective in a given story actually is. This approach—the short-story-as-science-project—is apparent in J. Robert Lennon’s latest collection of short stories, Let Me Think published by Graywolf Press in 2021. 

Let Me Think is divided into five sections. Each section features stories loosely connected around a theme, often part of a series with a shared title. For instance, each section has stories called “Marriage” with parentheses and numerical markers distinguishing it from the other stories called “Marriage.” The stories have a rough chronological flow where the first section deals with the perspective of early life. One story, told from the perspective of children, is “Blue Light, Red Light.” It’s one of the most evocative stories in the book. The second and third sections deal with middle and later life, and the final section appropriately has three stories titled “Death” with separate, numerically marked parentheses distinguishing them. Let Me Think is a sculpted collection of short fiction that is not intended to be read anthologically, i.e., in any order selected by the reader. The order of reading is carefully curated by the author, and it proceeds linearly from the start to the end. In doing so, Lennon directs the reader in several of his stories to recontextualize and rethink linearity. We become aware of the passing of time that takes place when we start a story, stop a story, read another, and then come back to the same (or similar) story after an interval. 

In “The Cottage on the Hill,” for example, Lennon tells a serialized narrative about a man named Richard as we follow him through different stages of his life, from his late 20s to an older age, and it is divided into four stories. Each story is titled “The Cottage of the Hill” with a roman numeral in parentheses. When read as intended, Lennon briefly conjures the reading experience of the 19th Century novel where chapters were printed serially month to month. The effect of reading the individual short-story chapters, over multiple sections, is greatly heightened by the intervals, in which we are occupied reading other stories. The stories we read between the different sections of “The Cottage of the Hill” allows one to share the sense of the passing of time that Richard experiences in the course of the series. 

The title story of the collection, “Let Me Think,” is a little more than two pages. It’s one of the many sketch-like stories that explores parent-child relationships and male anxiety. It deals with a professional writer whose work is constantly interrupted by his daughter who is visiting his home as part of the joint custody agreement with his ex-wife. This banal situation is infused with layers of history as we explore the consciousness of the unnamed man and the unnamed daughter—the father transferring his dynamic with his ex-wife to the daughter who takes after her mother, unleashing inside him the bitter resentment which led to their divorce. This leads him to lash out at the child in a classically ambiguous scene where the father appears to accidentally strike the child, and she falls away spinning. But the scene is interpreted (also ambiguously—because we do not know if we are in the perspective of the father or the daughter or the third-person narrator in this situation) as a theatrical feint on the part of the child. The story ends with a note of horror as we gain insight into the child’s first entrance into the world of dissembling and ambiguity that divides literal childlike thinking from the more subjective thought process of the adult world, which often demands interpretation and a sorting of reality from fantasy. The title comes from the main interaction between father and child that triggers this fracas:

The father says to the child, Let me think. Because the child is talking—she has been talking all morning—and he just wants to get this one tedious thing finished, and to do so he needs a few minutes of silence. That is all.

The child hesitates, because this is a new command: Let me think. The father is asking for permission, a position the child herself is often in. But the child is uncertain how to proceed. This power is new to her. She will have to gather more information.

Lennon infuses the commonplace phrase “let me think” with a series of meanings which echo across the collection. This is especially heightened when it is read linearly. Lennon’s theme, it seems to me, as illustrated in this familiar but somewhat foreboding story, is that daily life actively conspires to prevent us from thinking, and that thinking is an active choice that one has to make, that one needs to actively find time to think amid an everyday rhythm that hampers it. Many of his stories depict daily life as being filled with an absence of thought, but with plenty of distractions that substitute for thought and which are often mistaken for thinking. In the case of marriage, the back-and-forth conversations between husband and wife becomes a theater through which the doubts and hopes that govern a marriage are buried and reburied. 

The theme is also versatile enough to generate stories that occasionally touch on broader ideas, while also showing Lennon’s great skill for dialogue and humor. There are stories in this collection that are genuinely hilarious. It’s not too hard to laugh at this bit from the story “Marriage (Pie)” where a couple get into an argument after the husband fails to bake a proper pie as a surprise for his wife, and after his failure, his wife has to do it anyway:

Baking makes the husband happy, she says. I’m setting it down here in the hallway, and you better fucking eat it. I spent a fucking hour baking it for the sake of our marriage. You’re going to grow up and eat it and it’s going to make you happy. If I come up here in fifteen minutes and I don’t see an empty plate outside this door, I’m going to break in there and fucking force-feed you marriage therapy. Do you understand? 

Or this exchange from a story appropriately titled “Marriage (Marriage)” where a couple has a happy revelation about what makes them compatible as a couple: 

He said, We’re not supposed to be happy! She threw down her notebook and shouted, You’re such an asshole! 
That’s more like it, he said, smiling. So are you.
After a moment, she smiled as well. 

The most wonderful satire in this collection is perhaps “The Museum of Near Misses,” a surreal story that features a first-person narrator (Lennon himself) visiting a museum in the Midwest that covers exhibits of accidents which nearly happened and relics of disasters that almost did happen but were avoided. The punchline, which we get early, is that the story is set in an alternate reality where Hillary Clinton and not Donald Trump won in 2016, and that a portrait of Trump is in the museum, as an exhibit of a disaster that nearly didn’t happen. The story, which on the surface is the most “experimental” and standalone in the collection, is thematically linked to the other stories in its exploration of the inability to think. In the other, better 2016, Trump is a weird exhibit in an out-of-nowhere museum, highlighting that crises and events, when survived, are not open for reflection. We value the illusion of stability over dealing with the chaotic reality, where unfortunately Trump did win in 2016, that often ruptures the illusions of a modern, liberal society. 

Thinking as an active measure is, for Lennon, linked to a person’s relation to the environment. In “The Cottage on the Hill” series, for example, the four-part story centers on the titular location as a memory of family togetherness, which withers over time. The series reflects the sentiment of William Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage” with dashes of gothic horror: complete with doubling, visions of ghosts, and the insight of how memory defines and alters a landscape. The story deals with a person’s relation to the place breaking down their sense of thought, where a visit to a cottage briefly provides the scenery that prevents the thoughts that would rupture a family from taking shape. This theme, connecting thought to environment, is more subtly and poignantly explored in “Doors.” This story echoes the domestic comedy of the Marriage sketches, featuring a couple having a difficult time adjusting to their married home—namely the husband who likes the doors in a house to be open at all times. At the end of the story, Lennon breaks into a lyrical flight with an exploration of the perspective of a robin who flies over the roof of the building:

The robin, for whom there are no doors, whose mind cannot conceive of, nor would have any reason to conceive of, such a thing, perches high in a tree overlooking the house, wanting the egg: she wants to fly to it, settle on it, warm it. She wants to feel it beneath her. But there is a part of her that already knows it’s too late. The nesting spot was no good. She has been frightened away from it too many times; the chick inside the egg is dead. The robin experiences her separation from the dead egg as a hollowness, a pain, in her breast. But already that pain is fading, her desire to return to the nest is fading, her fear of the man pacing in circles in the yard and the woman who opens and closes doors is fading. Everything below her, in fact, is fading, everything that is not the sky and the branch she feels, reassuringly, and with some small inalienable joy, beneath the claws that were made to do this precise and important thing.

For Lennon, our ability to think is limited by our connection to our environment. The structure of the family and the nature of our relationships with our spouses and our children is made difficult—and made worse—by our inability to match our actions with our thoughts. This disruption also leads to a difficult adjustment with our surroundings and our environment. Instead, living becomes a form of automation, a substitute for real individuality and the authentic self. This idea is explored most fully in the richest and most fully developed story in this collection, which also happens to be the longest story in the book.

“The Loop” is eighteen pages long, and it’s the one story where Lennon constructs a viable character with inner life and personality. It revolves around Bev who is announced as a protagonist with a declarative opening sentence: “Divorced, fired from adjunct teaching after a botched attempt to unionize, and her only child lost to college, Bev had, for the first time in decades, more freedom than she knew what to do with.” Most of Let Me Think narrates incidents from a male point of view, so the themes and ideas—midlife crisis, emasculation, bitter resentment—while explored with sharp observation and self-criticism, as well as considerable humor and satire, flirts with the air of self-pity. That’s not the case with “The Loop” which engages the same themes from the perspective of a woman. Divorce leads Bev into a state of poverty, which is heightened by her participation in a non-profit initiative called “Move On Up” that involves selling cast-off furniture and other bric-a-brac to poor residents. While working for this initiative, Bev meets Emily, who she considers to be a younger version of herself, and they engage in a relationship that seems to echo the one she’s just exited. Most of the story is a plotless collection of incidents from the narrative of her daily life in her current job. The repetitive nature of her life and routine becomes the point of the narrative. This leads to the most lyrical paragraph in the book:

It was as if there were two Bevs: the one that experienced the day for the first time, and this one, the one she regarded as herself, trapped inside the other. She could read the mind of her original, could see what she saw, could feel the body inhabiting her actions. But she couldn’t shout back, couldn’t compel the first Bev to change a single thing: not a movement or a perception, not a word or a thought.

We see in this paragraph an attitude that seems to express Lennon’s approach to writing these stories: “It was clearly one of the rules of whatever was happening: nothing could change. She could only observe.” The short story-as-observation approach often presents and immortalizes a segment of life as inherently valuable and filled with meaning. At times, this can be somewhat conservative, even sentimental, in its attempt to paper over the difficulties of coping with the numbing rhythm of the everyday, but in “The Loop,” the repetitive nature of daily life is presented as a daily difficulty. The transience of everyday life makes even the moments where one can truly think and achieve a degree of clarity fleeting and ephemeral. One more distraction among others:

At least that’s how she felt in the beginning, or, rather, in what turned out to be the beginning: her enthusiasm for the task before her was motivated only by the promise of release. Then, gradually, she began to forget. First her memories of life before the loop faded, and were supplanted by memories of earlier cycles: particularly rewarding runs of observation and perception that resulted, initially, in extraordinary feats of deduction; and, later on, in the epiphany that it was not necessary to reach conclusions, only to observe and catalog…She wondered, while it was still possible to care about such things, why she couldn’t have performed this alchemy during her life before the loop, transforming her shortcomings as a mother, a mate, a teacher into this magisterial indifference. 

In sum, J. Robert Lennon’s Let Me Think demonstrates the scope and potential of the short story collection, where one story becomes part of the next, and each story is read in relation to other stories in the same collection, which heightens and distributes meaning for maximum effect. Lennon’s careful subtraction allows his collection to reflect the richness and depth of the short story as narrative form, as a survey of the nature of the thought process and its contingent relationship to its environment. In doing so, Lennon shines a light on the fundamentally unstable nature of our world today: the compromise with our selves, our relationships, and our families that, in fact, defines our relationship to reality. 

Sudarshan Ramani spent most of his life in Mumbai, India. Then, in 2016, he was accepted in San Francisco State University where he received an MA in English Literature, graduating in 2018. Back in India, he had worked for years as a film critic, writer, and editor of Projectorhead, an Indian, scholarly film magazine, where he composed book reviews, interviews, festival reports. His articles have been published at La Furia Umana, Economic & Political Weekly, and Routledge Publications. He’s currently a second-year Ph.D. student at SUNY Albany where he is also the current President of the EGSO and an English instructor. When he’s not burdened by keeping up with coursework, he enjoys watching movies (now for pleasure rather than for a living) and reading about history (antiquity, the French Revolution, postwar Europe), economics, and obscure artists (from the ancient to the modern era). His main interest is the breaking down of periodization – the way the contemporary era is the most literate era in human history and yet the most adrift from tradition – and the increasing homogenization of contemporary society in the hypercapitalist world of the 21st Century.