"Men and cartoons" by Jonathan Lethem (faber and faber, 2005)

In these stories people often meet after a gap of ten years - boys have become men, their boyhood dreams their weak point.

• The vision - Years after school, the narrator finds that a classmate who used to dress as a minor Marvel hero has become a Columbia lecturer, and has moved in next door with a 6ft-plus woman. He's invited to their party. The party games involve confessions.
• Access fantasy - There's a permanent road jam. People live in their cars, watch appartment porn (videos of the inside of homes), get hassled by ads and street vendors. On one video the protagonist sees a murder. He decides to investigate, with unfortunate consequences.
• The spray - When police investigate a burglary at a couple's place they leave behind a spray that reveals absent objects. The couple try it on each other, revealing lovers clinging to them.
• Vivian Relf - At a party 2 people are sure they've seen each other before, spending pages trying to work out where. They meet again 2 years later. Then briefly on a plane. Finally she's become a wife of a client.
• Planet big zero - 2 schoolfriends - one who went to Yale then has a promising career in comics, the other, Matthew, who globe-trotted for drugs and ancient wonders - meet after a decade or so. Matthew fades so much into significance that people, even the narrator, forget he's still around.
• The glasses - A man complains at the opticians about his glasses which keep getting smudged. Is he doing it himself without realising? The weakest story so far.
• The dystopianist ... - A professional dystopian realises that his rival (an optimist whose mood is subtlely embedded in realism) is his old schoolmate. He realises that he has to up his game - genetically modifying roadside cabbages to be airbags won't work. He invents the idea of "Plath Sheep" - suicidal sheep with the gift of communicating its despair, making other sheep (and maybe other species) kill themselves too. A sheep knocks at his door to discuss the idea - sent by his rival? His rival in disguise? Maybe the best story so far, though I'm unsure about the ending.
• Super goat man - a minor comic hero who only lasted 5 issues moves into the neighbourhood of the 13 y.o. narrator - into a hippie/dropout commune, attracting little attention. When the narrator goes to college, Super goat man becomes a humanities lecturer there. He's the star of evening Salons. The narrator meets him and finds that he was matey with the narrator's father. 2 students climb the college tower and threaten to jump, daring Super Goat Man to save them. He saves the art piece one of them's carrying. The student falls and is paralysed from the waist down. A decade later, married, the narrator returns as a lecturer. Super Goat Man is an aged wreck. The narrator's wife says she had an affair with Super Goat Man before she met the narrator. The narrator mocks him for saving the art piece - a giant paperclip.
  Not too bad.
• The national anthem - A letter written by a 28 year old in the e-mail age about relationships - affairs, marriages, and schoolhood crushes.

Other reviews

• Alfred Hickling (The best of the stories, "Super Goat Man" ... Lethem's strongest suit is the way in which he manages to capture the excruciating self-consciousness of being poised on the cusp between childhood and adolescence. )
• speculition (Like an idea dragged from a drawer and never polished, “The Spray” is an indulgent idea that thankfully ends quickly. ... The majority of stories about a contrast between youthful (i.e. cartoonish) mindset and something more adult and mature (i.e. men), Lethem seeks to highlight that each feed into one another, giving rise to adults who are not quite mature and young people who have the rudiments of maturity in them.)
• Kirkus review (Perennial Lethem themes abound, from failed love affairs to the disintegration of childhood friendships. No story is less than intelligent, though the author’s fans will miss the deeper explorations he makes in his longer works. A marking-time-between-novels book: pleasant enough)
• Goodreads