More about this book/
check for other copies

A Review by Marcus Estes

For the contemporary novelist, the publication of a book of essays is a pretty sweet deal. Often these short pieces have already been published in cultural rags such as Harper's, The New Yorker, et al.; having your publisher agree to collect them as a book is a particularly easy way of padding your bibliography. Very few authors carry the combination of cultural clout and success at the bookstands needed to pull this off, but after the publication of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Jonathan Lethem has moved beyond his postmodern-sci-fi niche and developed a fan base large and rabid enough to ensure the success of The Disappointment Artist, his first book of non-fiction.

For a book not necessarily conceived as a collection, The Disappointment Artist works surprisingly well as a treatise on a single subject: cultural obsession. In these essays Lethem reveals himself as the model for his novels' culture-buff, shoulder-chipped protagonists, beginning with "Defending The Searchers," an essay recalling his history with John Ford's classic Hollywood western.

The young Lethem, black-bespectacled and president of the student film club, is an archetype that needs little introduction. During his first viewing of the movie, his classmates camp it up, jeering at the antiquated conventions of Hollywood's golden era, and Lethem seethes at their disrespect. He writes, "These were jaded twenty-year-old sophisticates, whose idea of a film to ponder was something sultry and pretentious -- Liquid Sky, The Draughtsman's Contract....The open, colorful manner of The Searchers didn't stand a chance."

When the film is interrupted by projection difficulties, the young Lethem stands and loudly upbraids the crowd of philistines for not sufficiently appreciating the film. With this, Lethem fills in a detail that shades his features more sharply than his horn-rimmed glasses. We watch the older Lethem shake his head at his own early attempts to create an identity for himself, while at the same time we note his unwillingness to divorce himself fully from the passion of his youth's convictions. All of a sudden this cultural essay on the western genre has become a personal one as well. These two concepts play hide and seek with one another throughout the book.

The remaining essays continue cataloguing his admirably diverse -- and, well, let's say it, terribly cool -- obsessions with film, music, and literature. As cultural criticism, the roll-call is reason enough for many to pick up this book: Lethem's riffs on Philip K. Dick, John Cassavetes, Talking Heads, Stanley Kubrick, Brian Eno, David Bowie, and Chet Baker are a delight, and if you think that's middle-brow, he also goes to bat for Star Wars, Jack Kirby, and Pink Floyd. (And this from a recipient of the National Book Award? The nerve!)

But his personal approach to each of these subjects elevates his criticism beyond that of the average Village Voice piece. As the book progresses, judgment of the media itself is eclipsed by an increasingly confessional tone, and it becomes clear that what separates Lethem from your average cultural critic is that he's interested in plumbing this particular aspect of his psyche for a deeper significance.

He writes of his love of Talking Heads as a devotion "so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me." When the band goes calypso and breaks his heart, they fall hard from his favor. But the resulting insight is illuminating: "No band is as good as I'd claimed Talking Heads were in the years I adored them."

Lethem finds that these surrogates for his identity and affection are bound to disappoint him eventually. His preoccupations are psychologically driven, and as the subject matter shifts from his cultural totems to the decoding of his tendency to collect them, the book becomes warmer and even more interesting.

The final essay, a duet between the narrative of his latest obsessions and thoughts on the death of his mother, clarifies the book's emergent theme. When he writes, "John Lennon recorded a song, for his first album after his breakup with the Beatles...called 'My Mummy's Dead.' I suppose this is my version of that song....I find myself speaking about my mother's death everywhere I go in this world," the beautiful noise of his personal obsessions with art is turned down, and you can clearly hear the more fundamental melody that was quietly carrying the whole piece.