The Doggie Surprise in "Pending Vegan"
Catching up on the fiction in The New Yorker , and so just read Jonathan Lethem's story from April 7, "Pending Vegan." Have I read any of his novels before? I have a vision in my head that he has a book with fat stars on the cover or am worried that he might be the guy who wrote Incredibly Loud and Too Close, or whatever that title is for the book about people trapped in elevators (I am joking, of course! I know that it's about 911. I have zero interest in reading it, even though it might change my life. I feel weirdly resistant to reading books from a kid's point of view, as I think it's really hard to do well without sounding saccharine. There are exceptions, like Mark Haddon and Ian McEwan in Atonement and Dorothy Allison, but get off my back, will you?). Okay, I just Googled him and he's written nothing else that I've ever read, though he is a prolific and successful writer. This story is about an anxious taking his twin girls to Sea World. T...