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The Disappointment Artist
In a volume he describes as "a series of covert and not-so-covert autobiographical pieces," Jonathan Lethem explores the nature of cultural obsession—from western films and comic books, to the music of Pink Floyd and the New York City subway. Along the way, he shows how each of these "voyages out from himself" has led him to the source of his beginnings as a writer. The Disappointment Artist is a series of windows onto the collisions of art, landscape, and personal history that formed Lethem’s richly imaginative, searingly honest perspective on life. A touching, deeply perceptive portrait of a writer in the making.
149 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
39 people are currently reading
1812 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Lethem
238 books2,680 followersJonathan Allen Lethem (born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer.
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller.
In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 179 reviews
August 25, 2013
I rate this book five stars because it's the only sustained, accurate description I've ever read of the kind of engagement I've been having with art and artists for as long as I can remember. It gave me that special kind of surprise: I'm just used to the idea that no one ever talks about this, and yet here is someone talking about it, unashamedly, at length!
The types of engagement with art that I see most frequently fall into two very distinct bins: the engagement of Fans and the engagement of Critics. (Capital letters because the way I'm using these words here is a little more specific than their ordinary definitions would suggest.) The Fan treats the world depicted by the work of art as a real place, and engages with the characters as real people. This can be very fulfilling, but it necessitates a certain distance from the artist, since to engage with the artist as a person you need to remind yourself that the characters originated in someone's head. To a Fan, the artist is like a God: revered but distant, nothing like a friend or colleague. To the Critic, on the other hand, the artist is a craftsman whose work can be evaluated as though it were a machine. Does it perform its intended function? How efficient, sturdy, innovative is it? (Note the popularity of "this works" / "this doesn't work" as a critical term.) To the Critic, emotional engagement with the artist is precluded not because they're distant, but because their qualities as a person are irrelevant to the evaluation of their creation. To a Critic, developing an emotional relationship with an artist would be like developing one with the people who designed your toaster (and consequently forgiving the toaster when it sets your kitchen on fire).
What both of these exclude is any kind of feeling toward an artist as a fellow human, any kind of persistent interest in an artist's creative trajectory that mirrors our interests in the life trajectories of, say, our friends. We treat our human relationships very differently from our relationships with impersonal providers of goods and services. In human relationships, we're more accepting of failure -- not just out of some general tendency towards forgiveness, but out of a sense that a friend's flaws are part and parcel of the friendship. Imagine being presented with the option of replacing one of your friendships with a "highlight reel" version of itself -- one that excludes the awkwarder moments, the less inspired injokes, the least fun hangouts. To most of us, this idea would seem straightforwardly unappealing and indeed sort of grotesque; we'd reject it in a heartbeat. Yet this willingness to grant importance to flaws and missteps is inimical to the Critic's style. The Critic says: when there's so much stuff out there, why waste time with the bad? Why listen to a musician's lower-quality albums when you could be discovering someone new? Why read a flawed masterpiece when there are perfect masterpieces out there that you haven't touched? (Compare "flawed masterpiece as flawed friend" to "flawed masterpiece as hazardous toaster.") The Fan, on the other hand, can only see an artist's missteps as "acts of God," calamities that distort their beloved universe -- and to relate to the artist who made these choices would be as strange as relating to a God who sends floods and plagues, rather than praising or beseeching or raging against Him.
Jonathan Lethem, like me, is a guy whose engagement with art is primarily an engagement with artists as people. An artist's flaws and follies are not just defects -- they're interesting, even when they're lamentable, because they form part of the texture of the artist's human and dramatic struggle to improve and innovate and express. The Critic/Fan dichotomy shows its inadequacy when confronted with something like this:
I'd stumbled into each of these loves [for Bob Dylan and Philip K. Dick] against my teenage tendencies in hero selection. Rather than arranging to be disappointment by a figure of authority, these guys were like fraternal companions, stumbling through their own ups and downs. Dylan and Dick created bodies of work so contradictory and erratic that they never seemed to have promised me perfection, so they could never disappoint me the way a parent can let let down a child who has idolized them. Here were artists who hung themselves emotionally out to dry, who risked rage and self-pity in their work, and were sometimes overwhelmed by those feelings and blew it. As figures of identification they were riskier for me but also, in the long run, more nourishing.
Bob Dylan and Philip K. Dick (and, eventually, others who resembled them in this way) also led me back to my father. For he was of course the artist from whose imperfections, and reveled vulnerabilities, I'd originally flinched. For years I'd chosen against my father by idolizing artists who hid their face behind glossy, impassive surfaces. Yet those figures had proved brittle -- inadequate against the untidy barrage of my feelings. They'd refused to meet me where I needed them most, at some emotional substratum down to which I'd excavated and found nobody home. Dylan and Dick, by their own unwillingness to hid their clumsiness and variability, or to protect me from an awareness of the fallible processes behind even their masterpieces, seduced me into sympathy for the artist whose process was, as I grew up, so naked to me. And, needless to say, I had to begin to forgive my father for being human before I could begin to work.
Notice how the treatment of flaws here -- "Dylan and Dick created bodies of work so contradictory and erratic that they never seemed to have promised me perfection" -- is immediately comprehensible on human terms, yet totally unassimilable to the mindset of the Critic ("why not just demand perfection?") or the Fan ("when I'm immersed in something I like, 'bodies of work' are the furthest things from my mind"). Lethem is a fan but not a Fan, and a critic but not a Critic -- he stands apart from the lotus-eating of the Fans and the Consumer Reports of the Critics and simply treats artists as human beings, which, after all, they are.
I know I'm probably making Lethem out to be unique in a way he really isn't. It's not as though no one else has written criticism in this mode. But this book feels almost like a manifesto for that mode, and that's a heartening thing in a world where engaging with artists as people will get you seen a mindless Fan by Critics and as a ruthless Critic by Fans. People in both categories -- and especially those in neither -- would do well to read it.
The types of engagement with art that I see most frequently fall into two very distinct bins: the engagement of Fans and the engagement of Critics. (Capital letters because the way I'm using these words here is a little more specific than their ordinary definitions would suggest.) The Fan treats the world depicted by the work of art as a real place, and engages with the characters as real people. This can be very fulfilling, but it necessitates a certain distance from the artist, since to engage with the artist as a person you need to remind yourself that the characters originated in someone's head. To a Fan, the artist is like a God: revered but distant, nothing like a friend or colleague. To the Critic, on the other hand, the artist is a craftsman whose work can be evaluated as though it were a machine. Does it perform its intended function? How efficient, sturdy, innovative is it? (Note the popularity of "this works" / "this doesn't work" as a critical term.) To the Critic, emotional engagement with the artist is precluded not because they're distant, but because their qualities as a person are irrelevant to the evaluation of their creation. To a Critic, developing an emotional relationship with an artist would be like developing one with the people who designed your toaster (and consequently forgiving the toaster when it sets your kitchen on fire).
What both of these exclude is any kind of feeling toward an artist as a fellow human, any kind of persistent interest in an artist's creative trajectory that mirrors our interests in the life trajectories of, say, our friends. We treat our human relationships very differently from our relationships with impersonal providers of goods and services. In human relationships, we're more accepting of failure -- not just out of some general tendency towards forgiveness, but out of a sense that a friend's flaws are part and parcel of the friendship. Imagine being presented with the option of replacing one of your friendships with a "highlight reel" version of itself -- one that excludes the awkwarder moments, the less inspired injokes, the least fun hangouts. To most of us, this idea would seem straightforwardly unappealing and indeed sort of grotesque; we'd reject it in a heartbeat. Yet this willingness to grant importance to flaws and missteps is inimical to the Critic's style. The Critic says: when there's so much stuff out there, why waste time with the bad? Why listen to a musician's lower-quality albums when you could be discovering someone new? Why read a flawed masterpiece when there are perfect masterpieces out there that you haven't touched? (Compare "flawed masterpiece as flawed friend" to "flawed masterpiece as hazardous toaster.") The Fan, on the other hand, can only see an artist's missteps as "acts of God," calamities that distort their beloved universe -- and to relate to the artist who made these choices would be as strange as relating to a God who sends floods and plagues, rather than praising or beseeching or raging against Him.
Jonathan Lethem, like me, is a guy whose engagement with art is primarily an engagement with artists as people. An artist's flaws and follies are not just defects -- they're interesting, even when they're lamentable, because they form part of the texture of the artist's human and dramatic struggle to improve and innovate and express. The Critic/Fan dichotomy shows its inadequacy when confronted with something like this:
I'd stumbled into each of these loves [for Bob Dylan and Philip K. Dick] against my teenage tendencies in hero selection. Rather than arranging to be disappointment by a figure of authority, these guys were like fraternal companions, stumbling through their own ups and downs. Dylan and Dick created bodies of work so contradictory and erratic that they never seemed to have promised me perfection, so they could never disappoint me the way a parent can let let down a child who has idolized them. Here were artists who hung themselves emotionally out to dry, who risked rage and self-pity in their work, and were sometimes overwhelmed by those feelings and blew it. As figures of identification they were riskier for me but also, in the long run, more nourishing.
Bob Dylan and Philip K. Dick (and, eventually, others who resembled them in this way) also led me back to my father. For he was of course the artist from whose imperfections, and reveled vulnerabilities, I'd originally flinched. For years I'd chosen against my father by idolizing artists who hid their face behind glossy, impassive surfaces. Yet those figures had proved brittle -- inadequate against the untidy barrage of my feelings. They'd refused to meet me where I needed them most, at some emotional substratum down to which I'd excavated and found nobody home. Dylan and Dick, by their own unwillingness to hid their clumsiness and variability, or to protect me from an awareness of the fallible processes behind even their masterpieces, seduced me into sympathy for the artist whose process was, as I grew up, so naked to me. And, needless to say, I had to begin to forgive my father for being human before I could begin to work.
Notice how the treatment of flaws here -- "Dylan and Dick created bodies of work so contradictory and erratic that they never seemed to have promised me perfection" -- is immediately comprehensible on human terms, yet totally unassimilable to the mindset of the Critic ("why not just demand perfection?") or the Fan ("when I'm immersed in something I like, 'bodies of work' are the furthest things from my mind"). Lethem is a fan but not a Fan, and a critic but not a Critic -- he stands apart from the lotus-eating of the Fans and the Consumer Reports of the Critics and simply treats artists as human beings, which, after all, they are.
I know I'm probably making Lethem out to be unique in a way he really isn't. It's not as though no one else has written criticism in this mode. But this book feels almost like a manifesto for that mode, and that's a heartening thing in a world where engaging with artists as people will get you seen a mindless Fan by Critics and as a ruthless Critic by Fans. People in both categories -- and especially those in neither -- would do well to read it.
September 24, 2018
Video review
When he was in high school, Jonathan Lethem read five books a week. Later, he grew up to become Jonathan Lethem. Is he very good at Guitar Hero though? Doubtful.
When he was in high school, Jonathan Lethem read five books a week. Later, he grew up to become Jonathan Lethem. Is he very good at Guitar Hero though? Doubtful.
December 27, 2021
4 stars if you are partial to Star Wars and/or the Marvel 'universe' and/or Gen-X-Author Künstlerismus... If not, not.
(Some fine writing on display here otherwise, especially on (i) 20C American author/writing-teacher-from-hell Edward Dahlberg [1900–1977] and (ii) Lethem's lifelong obsession with John Ford's The Searchers [1956, BFI100 #7])
((I often use essay collections to suss out whether I should venture out on a fictional date with an author...Should I swipe, right/left/or what, here, then [and which is which]? Dunno, dunno.))
(Some fine writing on display here otherwise, especially on (i) 20C American author/writing-teacher-from-hell Edward Dahlberg [1900–1977] and (ii) Lethem's lifelong obsession with John Ford's The Searchers [1956, BFI100 #7])
((I often use essay collections to suss out whether I should venture out on a fictional date with an author...Should I swipe, right/left/or what, here, then [and which is which]? Dunno, dunno.))
July 30, 2007
boys will be boys will be boys. you know how they love their marvel comics and their westerns and their star wars and their philip k dick. could a gal have written this collection? i think not, mon frere. i love cassavetes as much as the next lady writer, but the intensely myopic style here kind of made me feel like i was the kleenex mopping up after a lengthy, loving, extra-spoogey wank session. the thing is, i'm confused by my reaction, since his writing is wonderful, and i usually love the fervently personal perspective (only a writer knows the weird intricasies and pecadilloes of his/her own brain)... but the self-referencing here was almost blog-like. i did like the essays on his dad's paintings & his mom's death -- i think because they weren't only about HIM. he made his parents come alive, so that was cool.
and back to comics... i hate to gender-bait, but are there any contemp. female authors who are so obsessed with that kind of pop nostalgia? franzen (peanuts), chabon (superman), lethem (marvel)... even daniel handler got clowes to do his "adverbs" cover. what is it about the childhood superhero that's so compelling to talented male writers of a certain age?
and back to comics... i hate to gender-bait, but are there any contemp. female authors who are so obsessed with that kind of pop nostalgia? franzen (peanuts), chabon (superman), lethem (marvel)... even daniel handler got clowes to do his "adverbs" cover. what is it about the childhood superhero that's so compelling to talented male writers of a certain age?
April 17, 2009
Lethem's aesthetic interests are so far outside of my own realm of taste/knowledge that it was hard to respond to the essays, which leaned heavily on Cassevetes and Kubrick and Philip K. Dick, in any kind of objective way. So, what do we know about Jonathan Lethem at the end of this book, if we don't care that he watched Star Wars 21 times the summer it opened: we know that Lethem rebelled against his hippie commune-dwelling parents by becoming insular, obsessive, fanatical and extra-nerdy about things that bore no resemblance/relation to free love and Jimi Hendrix. (His teenaged inner monologue while watching Barry Lyndon: "THIS IS SO SO SO GREAT." Uh, okay. Who was he trying to convince? The Lethem doth protest too much.)
We know that he couched his memoir in the suspicious guise of "autobiographical essays" in order to further demonstrate the fact that Jonathan Lethem has spent his entire life becoming Smarter Than You at everything, and he knows he's always done this to feel less alone, but here, instead of an essay about what it was to be his father's son, which might demonstrate some emotional growth and might also demonstrate Lethem's willingness to risk vulnerability and trust his readers to love that, let's read a retrospective of 40 years of his father's paintings. De Chirico, you say? Redolent of Guston? FASCINATING.
Jonathan Lethem can't bring himself to write a memoir, so here: a big bundle of essays about his encyclopedic film knowledge with a few embarrassed and furtive reminiscences from childhood thrown in for topical measure.
Also, and more to the point: David Foster Wallace has permanently ruined me for nonfiction. Nothing will ever be as good, and I will resent everything else I read for not being A Supposedly Fun Thing... Sigh. I guess this wasn't as bad as Chuck Klosterman, but of course it doesn't hold a candle to the truly thorough and imaginative handling Wallace could give anything from David Lynch to Tennis. ALL MY HEROES HAVE TURNED HUMAN THIS YEAR.
We know that he couched his memoir in the suspicious guise of "autobiographical essays" in order to further demonstrate the fact that Jonathan Lethem has spent his entire life becoming Smarter Than You at everything, and he knows he's always done this to feel less alone, but here, instead of an essay about what it was to be his father's son, which might demonstrate some emotional growth and might also demonstrate Lethem's willingness to risk vulnerability and trust his readers to love that, let's read a retrospective of 40 years of his father's paintings. De Chirico, you say? Redolent of Guston? FASCINATING.
Jonathan Lethem can't bring himself to write a memoir, so here: a big bundle of essays about his encyclopedic film knowledge with a few embarrassed and furtive reminiscences from childhood thrown in for topical measure.
Also, and more to the point: David Foster Wallace has permanently ruined me for nonfiction. Nothing will ever be as good, and I will resent everything else I read for not being A Supposedly Fun Thing... Sigh. I guess this wasn't as bad as Chuck Klosterman, but of course it doesn't hold a candle to the truly thorough and imaginative handling Wallace could give anything from David Lynch to Tennis. ALL MY HEROES HAVE TURNED HUMAN THIS YEAR.
June 8, 2008
People like to shit on this book for being self-congratulatory and indulgent..however, since these essays effectively work as a memoir, and I think we all like to talk about ourselves sometimes..I really didn't have a problem with it. In fact I found most of it quite enjoyable.
Lethem has essentially compiled essays detailing his obsessions ranging from adolescence to present day (he's a little older than 40 now). You have an essay on "The Searchers" (John Wayne western), watching Star Wars 21 times in 4 months, acquiring every Philip K. Dick novel, riding the subway, Cassavetes films, Brian Eno, etc. Meanwhile, we learn a lot about Lethem's life growing up in Brooklyn with his hippie parents during the 1970s, and his coping with his mother's death at an early age.
I think people get turned off because they feel like Lethem is a pretentious asshole just trying to show what "hip" taste he has. Maybe I'm more into it because my tastes overlap his somewhat or perhaps I'm just more willing to listen to someone be excited/neurotic about something. Either way, I think the essays provide an interesting analysis of pop culture as well as a form for telling a life story without just telling it. While I think we are larger than the sum of what we watch, read, and listen to, I don't think that negates the influence that pop culture and art have on shaping our identities.
Lethem has essentially compiled essays detailing his obsessions ranging from adolescence to present day (he's a little older than 40 now). You have an essay on "The Searchers" (John Wayne western), watching Star Wars 21 times in 4 months, acquiring every Philip K. Dick novel, riding the subway, Cassavetes films, Brian Eno, etc. Meanwhile, we learn a lot about Lethem's life growing up in Brooklyn with his hippie parents during the 1970s, and his coping with his mother's death at an early age.
I think people get turned off because they feel like Lethem is a pretentious asshole just trying to show what "hip" taste he has. Maybe I'm more into it because my tastes overlap his somewhat or perhaps I'm just more willing to listen to someone be excited/neurotic about something. Either way, I think the essays provide an interesting analysis of pop culture as well as a form for telling a life story without just telling it. While I think we are larger than the sum of what we watch, read, and listen to, I don't think that negates the influence that pop culture and art have on shaping our identities.
August 25, 2013
A really marvelous book of essays titled, THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST, by Jonathan Lethem discovered me by way of my usual antic behavior which consists of this eternally obsessive need for always having in my possession something fresh, something new, and something more than chewable. In my usual literary and musical compulsive meanderings I came across online a Patti Smith video interview conducted by Lethem at I believe Cooper Union commissioned while they were both recently students at Pratt across the river in Brooklyn. I watched the interview on YouTube and enjoyed listening to the rock icon Patti Smith discuss her life fresh on the heals of the recent publication of her well-received memoir I forget the name of now. During the interview Lethem made me want to reconsider reading the Smith book which I had previously rejected as something I did not need in my life. The odds to me still feel pretty high that I won't need to read her memoir anytime soon. I love Patti but I admit I am a little tired of the whole Mapplethorpe/Andy Warhol/CBGB thing. But what I gathered from the chemistry of these two on stage at Cooper Union and the common ground met within the extremely interesting interview was my ever-growing interest in this Jonathan Lethem character. Anybody raised in a commune by hippies in Brooklyn had to be my cup of tea. But why hadn't I heard of him already?
In his first and only book of essays published in 2005 he drops the names of many writers I am enamored with, and he specifically invokes the names DeLillo and Carver, but where was the name of my beloved Lish? That got me even more interested. I wondered had Lethem been a student of Lish's and had a falling out or typically bad experience those prone to not having good feelings for Lish seem to harbor universally? Being the compulsive person I am my search began with a low fever and is currently raised to a high grade pitch as I write these words. Suffice for now to say I can find no record of any Fiction-Writing class-taking by Lethem taught by the great and re-emerging teacher Lish, but I did read of one Lethem-reported Lish Quarterly Magazine rejection of a story Lethem felt he had broken new ground on. But there were no harsh or vindictive words I could find from Lethem on the matter. At least not yet.
I love a good book of essays. They are not easy to find. When I finally discovered the writings of David Foster Wallace it was soon after he had hung himself dead. My stepson lovingly considers my literary, musical, and cinematic needs often so he sent me the now-famous Kenyon College commencement speech Wallace delivered and so many now have made too much of in a negative sense. If you read, or listen, to this speech it sets off a compelling desire to hear more from this man, and as I do with everything, I proceeded to devour him wholeheartedly. Not long after my great full-course meal of DFW I urgently and almost cold-heartedly looked for his replacement. I searched desperately and with great failure. Do yourself a favor and perform your own cross reference of sorts through the book site Amazon.com or google and there will be no lack of writers to choose from who are supposedly similar to DFW. Poppycock. But in my search never did Jonathan Lethem show up among the countless others compared to DFW. Perhaps he, Lethem, shows up now. And any suggested writers I actually did put my money on were nothing short of disappointing when compared to Wallace. I was sadly, almost gravely, convinced there would be no other writer to emerge from the ranks such as a David Foster Wallace sitting there considering lobsters or cruising on the open sea on a giant tourist ship. I ended up doing a complete study of Hunter S. Thompson in order to whet my appetite for well-written journalism and social commentary subject to the high-wire performances I was accustomed to wanting to hear and read. But I am so far past that Amazon-type search engine now I would not care anymore no matter who they suggested to me. But in my past state of mind, in the midst of my heightened compulsive search operation, there was no hint of any Jonathan Lethem being similar to my beloved David Foster Wallace. So the eventual link to Lethem had to karmically go through an old rock icon where I am happy to report I discovered my new grist, and my ravaging mill is forever grateful for Patti Smith for delivering him to me.
There are a scant nine essays scattered throughout THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST and all covered in a measly hundred and forty-nine pages. Topics range from great films, music, and literature by artists such as John Wayne, Philip K. Dick, John Cassavetes, and Bob Dylan, and dare I forget the long essay regarding Marvel Comics. The essays all weave through his own personal stories of growing up, Lethem's constant delving into his upbringing by these hippie parents who were artists in their own right, and all the different and unique characters throughout young Lethem's life who put their imprint on him including aunts, friends, his parents' multiple lovers, and young adult men he looked up to during his own coming of age. The book in some ways behaves as if it is a high-flying buzzard in that it always circles around the carcass of his dead mother and the reality of his father as artist, and the fact of his still being alive while his mother is not. Lethem admits in the book he will never get over the death of his mother and to this day relies on the power she provides him in his personal choice for a vocation as a serious and important writer.
The fact that Lethem loved books and collected them from an early age on, that he also loved music and film and spoke of many of the artists I have loved and been disturbed by as well, offered me a connection to him even though I know I have to be at least fifteen years his senior. But it was still satisfying to know there was another person out there like me, of course he being smarter than me, but still as devoted to getting his full measure of literature, art, and music as I have always been driven to get for myself.
Nine essays and not one of them boring or about something that Lethem can't get you interested in at least for your time there being on the page with him. That's not too shabby. I couldn't wait to finish the book, it was one of those god damn page turners, but I found my own tempo slowing near the end in order to savor the last few pages of the last essay titled, The Beards. It was so, so good. Not so unlike the other eight, just it being the last one, and the most intimate, and if I could take a personal stand here and declare something other than what I have been trying to say all along, and that is, Jonathan Lethem is my next living David Foster Wallace and I personally cannot wait to get my hands on his following book of essays. Meanwhile, while I impatiently wait for something probably years still in the making, I will begin to read his other books of which my next in line is a novel titled MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. Allow me another confession here in that I have already ordered an additional two first edition hardcover Lethem books online and it is hoped they are soon to be whisking themselves to me in order to be queued in the wings for when I get poised for another installment of him.
One interesting side note to this whole connecting affair between DFW and JL. Jonathan Lethem recently accepted the position of Roy Edward Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College, the same position that David Foster Wallace vacated when he hung himself from his porch rafters. The Disney professorship was endowed by Roy E. Disney, a graduate of the Pomona class of 1951. David Foster Wallace held the position from 2002 to 2008. It really is such a small world we live in, isn't it?
In his first and only book of essays published in 2005 he drops the names of many writers I am enamored with, and he specifically invokes the names DeLillo and Carver, but where was the name of my beloved Lish? That got me even more interested. I wondered had Lethem been a student of Lish's and had a falling out or typically bad experience those prone to not having good feelings for Lish seem to harbor universally? Being the compulsive person I am my search began with a low fever and is currently raised to a high grade pitch as I write these words. Suffice for now to say I can find no record of any Fiction-Writing class-taking by Lethem taught by the great and re-emerging teacher Lish, but I did read of one Lethem-reported Lish Quarterly Magazine rejection of a story Lethem felt he had broken new ground on. But there were no harsh or vindictive words I could find from Lethem on the matter. At least not yet.
I love a good book of essays. They are not easy to find. When I finally discovered the writings of David Foster Wallace it was soon after he had hung himself dead. My stepson lovingly considers my literary, musical, and cinematic needs often so he sent me the now-famous Kenyon College commencement speech Wallace delivered and so many now have made too much of in a negative sense. If you read, or listen, to this speech it sets off a compelling desire to hear more from this man, and as I do with everything, I proceeded to devour him wholeheartedly. Not long after my great full-course meal of DFW I urgently and almost cold-heartedly looked for his replacement. I searched desperately and with great failure. Do yourself a favor and perform your own cross reference of sorts through the book site Amazon.com or google and there will be no lack of writers to choose from who are supposedly similar to DFW. Poppycock. But in my search never did Jonathan Lethem show up among the countless others compared to DFW. Perhaps he, Lethem, shows up now. And any suggested writers I actually did put my money on were nothing short of disappointing when compared to Wallace. I was sadly, almost gravely, convinced there would be no other writer to emerge from the ranks such as a David Foster Wallace sitting there considering lobsters or cruising on the open sea on a giant tourist ship. I ended up doing a complete study of Hunter S. Thompson in order to whet my appetite for well-written journalism and social commentary subject to the high-wire performances I was accustomed to wanting to hear and read. But I am so far past that Amazon-type search engine now I would not care anymore no matter who they suggested to me. But in my past state of mind, in the midst of my heightened compulsive search operation, there was no hint of any Jonathan Lethem being similar to my beloved David Foster Wallace. So the eventual link to Lethem had to karmically go through an old rock icon where I am happy to report I discovered my new grist, and my ravaging mill is forever grateful for Patti Smith for delivering him to me.
There are a scant nine essays scattered throughout THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST and all covered in a measly hundred and forty-nine pages. Topics range from great films, music, and literature by artists such as John Wayne, Philip K. Dick, John Cassavetes, and Bob Dylan, and dare I forget the long essay regarding Marvel Comics. The essays all weave through his own personal stories of growing up, Lethem's constant delving into his upbringing by these hippie parents who were artists in their own right, and all the different and unique characters throughout young Lethem's life who put their imprint on him including aunts, friends, his parents' multiple lovers, and young adult men he looked up to during his own coming of age. The book in some ways behaves as if it is a high-flying buzzard in that it always circles around the carcass of his dead mother and the reality of his father as artist, and the fact of his still being alive while his mother is not. Lethem admits in the book he will never get over the death of his mother and to this day relies on the power she provides him in his personal choice for a vocation as a serious and important writer.
The fact that Lethem loved books and collected them from an early age on, that he also loved music and film and spoke of many of the artists I have loved and been disturbed by as well, offered me a connection to him even though I know I have to be at least fifteen years his senior. But it was still satisfying to know there was another person out there like me, of course he being smarter than me, but still as devoted to getting his full measure of literature, art, and music as I have always been driven to get for myself.
Nine essays and not one of them boring or about something that Lethem can't get you interested in at least for your time there being on the page with him. That's not too shabby. I couldn't wait to finish the book, it was one of those god damn page turners, but I found my own tempo slowing near the end in order to savor the last few pages of the last essay titled, The Beards. It was so, so good. Not so unlike the other eight, just it being the last one, and the most intimate, and if I could take a personal stand here and declare something other than what I have been trying to say all along, and that is, Jonathan Lethem is my next living David Foster Wallace and I personally cannot wait to get my hands on his following book of essays. Meanwhile, while I impatiently wait for something probably years still in the making, I will begin to read his other books of which my next in line is a novel titled MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN. Allow me another confession here in that I have already ordered an additional two first edition hardcover Lethem books online and it is hoped they are soon to be whisking themselves to me in order to be queued in the wings for when I get poised for another installment of him.
One interesting side note to this whole connecting affair between DFW and JL. Jonathan Lethem recently accepted the position of Roy Edward Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College, the same position that David Foster Wallace vacated when he hung himself from his porch rafters. The Disney professorship was endowed by Roy E. Disney, a graduate of the Pomona class of 1951. David Foster Wallace held the position from 2002 to 2008. It really is such a small world we live in, isn't it?
February 20, 2014
Slogging through this incredibly short book made me wonder if perhaps my problem with Motherless Brooklyn is not that I always tried to read it at a time when my life was too easily disrupted. Maybe I just don't like Lethem's writing when he's not writing fiction. Generally when I read a good piece of creative nonfiction, it can make me interested in a subject I was actively disinterested in, not to mention those I'd never known about or considered. The essays in The Disappointment Artist managed to make me *less* interested in topics I was quite interested in, as well as putting me off a few authors I'd never heard of and cementing my conclusion that I don't want to read much Philip K Dick. Disappointment indeed, especially since I really enjoy Lethem's fiction.
December 5, 2007
I felt guilty reading this collection of essays because for the most part they are about exactly the things I want to read about, and those things are pretty nerdy (Jack Kirby, Philip K. Dick, Robert Fripp).
I think generally people are attracted to authors who either think in a way that is opposite to the way they themselves think, and therefore it is thrilling to read something so alien, or authors who think exactly like they think, and so it is thrilling to read something that corroborates your own stupid thoughts and opinions. For me this falls pretty uncomfortably in the latter category.
I think generally people are attracted to authors who either think in a way that is opposite to the way they themselves think, and therefore it is thrilling to read something so alien, or authors who think exactly like they think, and so it is thrilling to read something that corroborates your own stupid thoughts and opinions. For me this falls pretty uncomfortably in the latter category.
January 9, 2020
I’ve read two of Letham’s SF exploits, and thought they were interesting, so this collection of essays on SF, music, film, comics and growing up with Bohemian parents looked promising. Turns out Letham is one of those people who needlessly overintellectualizes everything to the point of sucking all the joy out of it for everyone except those who are as obsessively passionate about the subject as he is. Disappointment artist, indeed.
September 16, 2011
As with any book of essays I'd be lying if I said I liked every one. Had to skip most of the Cassavetes essay for instance, as somehow I've never seen any of those movies. But it's interesting to read Lethem writing about his own life, especially if one's read his novels. And the P K Dick essay was right on - it's great to have someone who loves Dick admitting the unevenness of his oeuvre.
July 30, 2023
dear god please never confine me to a room with jonathan lethman.
reading this collection of essay's felt like being trapped with the most pedantic boy who has just watched his first wes anderson film. his work is derivative, mainly of the thesaurus.
reading this collection of essay's felt like being trapped with the most pedantic boy who has just watched his first wes anderson film. his work is derivative, mainly of the thesaurus.
February 7, 2022
Lethem is an unusual writer and this is an appropriately unusual set of essays. They range in subject matter from a look at the almost-forgotten author Edward Dahlberg to Star Wars to Phillip K. Dick to the subway station near where he grew up in Brooklyn. They are all well-written and informative, but for me the most enjoyable thing about the book was that it is in some ways Lethem's memoir. The piece on Dahlberg, for instance, ties nicely to his family story because his aunt was one of that cranky author's students. When he talks about Marvel and the silver age of comics, it's a great look into the world of teenage Jonathan Lethem and the sort of friendships we forge during those years. I feel I know a little bit more about him now, and the life and the enthusiasms that shape his novels. And I gained it in a more interesting fashion than I would have from a conventional memoir or autobiography.
That said, he's wrong about the The Searchers. It's a lousy movie.
That said, he's wrong about the The Searchers. It's a lousy movie.
August 22, 2018
Jonathan Lethem is clearly a very talented and dedicated writer. It is unmistakable to see how much effort he has invested in working his craft. He is genuinely passionate about the subjects in which he writes the essays about. That is where the connection was missed for me. I just didn't share the same passions for vintage comics, the New York subway, John Ford's "The Searchers", Talking Heads, Philip K. Dick, etc. Because of that, it was hard for me to really get jazzed up about this one. I will concede that if a few of the essays had been about the Boston Celtics, Sublime or the 90-00's skateboarding scene, this could have easily been 4 stars from me. I think it is easy to see a generational gap between those two groups of subjects that undoubtedly was a factor. I did very much enjoy the essays describing his bohemian upbringing. That was incredibly interesting from me.
November 14, 2017
I don't think I am the right target audience for this. I hadn't a clue who Jonathan Lethem was prior to reading which really made this a long book for me despite its short length.
September 8, 2023
John Cowper Powys, Colin Wilson, Thomas Berger.
February 10, 2015
The series of essays kept my attention, and their brevity made them a nice accompaniment for train rides.
Yet there wasn't anything really brilliant about the essays, though they were well written and had the vibe that the reader was somehow sneaking into a secret subculture of privileged insider knowledge. That's an interesting vibe to run with, but it does, in a sense, make Lethem a self-elected president of a"cool shit Lethem has pondered" club. Here are a few clips from the underground realities that only personages like Lethem have (apparently) harnessed to their fullness:
From Defending The Searchers (Scenes in the Life of an Obsession)
“I smoked a joint alone too, my usual preparation then for a Significant Moment. And I chose my heavy black-rimmed glasses, the once I wore when I wanted to appear nerdishly remote and intense, as though to decorate my outer self with a confession of inner reality.”
From The Disappointment Artist: Mrs. Neverbody vs. Edward Dahlberg
“I associated him with the agony of the rebuffed career, the refused book. In used bookselling one becomes a dowser of the underground river of refused books, and the dowsing rod [18] twitches like the second hand of a clock. Expertise is knowing which few, of the thousands flug to posterity by their flap cop, anyone would ever actually pay to read. So, Dahlberg: a guilty association, another titan I’d dissed by thinking him a drag on the retail flow.”
“That the writing workshop, the sort led by an established writer and populated by aspirants, is a site of human longing and despair is undeniable. Fear and loathing, the grosser undercurrents of hostility, fratricidal and [25] patro- or matri-cidal impulses, fox-in-the-henhouse-ish preying on one’s own potential successors, those are more like secret poxes—venereal flare-ups, to use a comparison beloved by Dahlberg.”
From Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn
“Undercover transit policemen are trained to watch for ‘loopers’—[43] that is, riders who switch from one train car to the next at each stop. Loopers are understood to be likely pickpockets, worthy of suspicion. Even before that, though, loopers are guilty of using the subway wrong. In truth, every subway rider is an undercover officer in a precinct house of the mind, noticing and cataloguing outré and dissident behavior in his fellows even while cultivating the outward indifference fo which New Yorkers are famous, above and below ground. It may only be safe to play at not noticing others because our noticing senses are sharpened to trigger-readiness. Jittery subway shooter Bernhard Goetz once ran for mayor. He may not have been electable, but he had a constituency.”
From Lives of Bohemians
“I don't mean to be flippant. Boerum Hill, like any zone ‘revived’ by white homeownership, was prey to cynical speculation. And, as many an enemies list or secret memo has shown, the paranoids were right. The idealisms of that hour actually now impress me as a gossamer lost world, Proustian in its delicacy. Those shades in the spectrum between radical and guilty liberal, parsed with such intensity at the time, strike me as poignant from this vantage.”
Yet there wasn't anything really brilliant about the essays, though they were well written and had the vibe that the reader was somehow sneaking into a secret subculture of privileged insider knowledge. That's an interesting vibe to run with, but it does, in a sense, make Lethem a self-elected president of a"cool shit Lethem has pondered" club. Here are a few clips from the underground realities that only personages like Lethem have (apparently) harnessed to their fullness:
From Defending The Searchers (Scenes in the Life of an Obsession)
“I smoked a joint alone too, my usual preparation then for a Significant Moment. And I chose my heavy black-rimmed glasses, the once I wore when I wanted to appear nerdishly remote and intense, as though to decorate my outer self with a confession of inner reality.”
From The Disappointment Artist: Mrs. Neverbody vs. Edward Dahlberg
“I associated him with the agony of the rebuffed career, the refused book. In used bookselling one becomes a dowser of the underground river of refused books, and the dowsing rod [18] twitches like the second hand of a clock. Expertise is knowing which few, of the thousands flug to posterity by their flap cop, anyone would ever actually pay to read. So, Dahlberg: a guilty association, another titan I’d dissed by thinking him a drag on the retail flow.”
“That the writing workshop, the sort led by an established writer and populated by aspirants, is a site of human longing and despair is undeniable. Fear and loathing, the grosser undercurrents of hostility, fratricidal and [25] patro- or matri-cidal impulses, fox-in-the-henhouse-ish preying on one’s own potential successors, those are more like secret poxes—venereal flare-ups, to use a comparison beloved by Dahlberg.”
From Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn
“Undercover transit policemen are trained to watch for ‘loopers’—[43] that is, riders who switch from one train car to the next at each stop. Loopers are understood to be likely pickpockets, worthy of suspicion. Even before that, though, loopers are guilty of using the subway wrong. In truth, every subway rider is an undercover officer in a precinct house of the mind, noticing and cataloguing outré and dissident behavior in his fellows even while cultivating the outward indifference fo which New Yorkers are famous, above and below ground. It may only be safe to play at not noticing others because our noticing senses are sharpened to trigger-readiness. Jittery subway shooter Bernhard Goetz once ran for mayor. He may not have been electable, but he had a constituency.”
From Lives of Bohemians
“I don't mean to be flippant. Boerum Hill, like any zone ‘revived’ by white homeownership, was prey to cynical speculation. And, as many an enemies list or secret memo has shown, the paranoids were right. The idealisms of that hour actually now impress me as a gossamer lost world, Proustian in its delicacy. Those shades in the spectrum between radical and guilty liberal, parsed with such intensity at the time, strike me as poignant from this vantage.”
October 31, 2009
It's funny how I feel about Lethem after reading this book. Some of the chapters are really interesting, and others are about subjects, movies, and bands that had come and gone by the time I was old enough to view them as part of the history of popular culture, not something of direct concern.
But there's this funny thing about Lethem's books.
In The Fortress of Solitude, toward the conclusion of the story the protagonist watches an artistic film created by his father featuring the unbelievable tension of a green dot. On screen. And the emotional pull of the description of the dot on the silver screen made the whole book fantastic for me.
So in The Disappointment Artist, one chapter: "The Beards", was so annoying it made me resent Lethem and sort of hate the book. Except that what I was hating about the book was how much I realized I would hate to sit down and have coffee with Lethem, because so much of the posturing in the story and the arrogance, and weakness would just make him intolerable for me...
and that's what was funny. "The Beards" ends up being a story about the fake accouterments we build around ourselves, of ourselves to survive the major catastrophes of our lives. For Lethem it was the death of his mother from brain tumors when he was just a young teenager. The beards we use as props to hide our true damages ends up being the focal point of the combined essays, to create one cohesive memoir, as Lethem ultimately admits the book is by the end.
Which made the book very good. The fact that I was loathing Lethem for his phony, snooty attitude about any number of writers, musicians, and movies we did not share opinions of. Because he struck me as so pompous. And then Lethem steps out from behind the curtain and apologizes and discusses the curtain and why he needed it, and still needs it a little and for that he is trying to forgive himself.
How can you not respect the narrative style, or writing ability, of someone who makes you unconsciously despise them without overtly telling you to do so. You feel your annoyance develops organically. Then, suddenly, he tells you how phony he is with an explanation he doesn't dump in your lap. Really great and sincere writing.
But there's this funny thing about Lethem's books.
In The Fortress of Solitude, toward the conclusion of the story the protagonist watches an artistic film created by his father featuring the unbelievable tension of a green dot. On screen. And the emotional pull of the description of the dot on the silver screen made the whole book fantastic for me.
So in The Disappointment Artist, one chapter: "The Beards", was so annoying it made me resent Lethem and sort of hate the book. Except that what I was hating about the book was how much I realized I would hate to sit down and have coffee with Lethem, because so much of the posturing in the story and the arrogance, and weakness would just make him intolerable for me...
and that's what was funny. "The Beards" ends up being a story about the fake accouterments we build around ourselves, of ourselves to survive the major catastrophes of our lives. For Lethem it was the death of his mother from brain tumors when he was just a young teenager. The beards we use as props to hide our true damages ends up being the focal point of the combined essays, to create one cohesive memoir, as Lethem ultimately admits the book is by the end.
Which made the book very good. The fact that I was loathing Lethem for his phony, snooty attitude about any number of writers, musicians, and movies we did not share opinions of. Because he struck me as so pompous. And then Lethem steps out from behind the curtain and apologizes and discusses the curtain and why he needed it, and still needs it a little and for that he is trying to forgive himself.
How can you not respect the narrative style, or writing ability, of someone who makes you unconsciously despise them without overtly telling you to do so. You feel your annoyance develops organically. Then, suddenly, he tells you how phony he is with an explanation he doesn't dump in your lap. Really great and sincere writing.
November 25, 2021
I recently re-read Jonathan Lethem's great 33 1/3 book about Talking Heads' "Fear of Music," which caused me to want to revisit this much-loved and much-re-read collection of essays that came out many years ago and which proves that the man is a delight when writing non-fiction (in addition to his fiction, which is great). Tackling issues like "The Searchers," "Star Wars," Philip K. Dick (it was Lethem's essay here that ultimately led me to revisit Dick's work and embrace his weird sci-fi books) and so on, Lethem shows how pop-culture can be something that we obsess over as a way to deal with real life (a theme running through the book is his parent's marriage and the death of his mother Judith when Lethem was a teenager). This is, as always, a fun re-read and I hope that Lethem does more non-fiction soon ("The Ecstasy of Influence" is a much longer essay collection which I may revisit sooner rather than later).
November 23, 2010
Lethem comes off as an effete who loves to talk about his unconventional parents who raised him in a communal environment in what was then-less-hip Brooklyn, his love of Sci Fi, French noir, and his prodigious intellect. This was the first and likely last thing I'll be reading by Lethem unless it's short and I'm desperate.
February 27, 2011
I have loved everything I've read by Jonathan Lethem. I love him even more after reading "The Disappointment Artist". I don't think that Lethem is the greatest writer of all time, but I relate to his work more than I relate to any other writer.
November 10, 2011
It was dull as dirt. I felt like I was on a very boring blind date listening to some guy who thinks the minutae of his life is interesting. The problem is that Mr Lethem couldn't see my eyes glaze over.
January 26, 2015
Lethem is that intelligent, self-obsessed friend who talks to much: mostly what he says is interesting, but sometimes you start yearning for an off switch.
Obviously he knows this about himself.
Obviously he knows this about himself.
January 2, 2026
The Disappointment Artist indeed. Lethem never fails to let me down. his short story collection WALL OF THE SKY, WALL OF THE EYE was astounding and bought a lot of goodwill from me - GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC was also an interesting outing - but everything else i've read by him has been a huge letdown. that includes MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN and CHRONIC CITY and that one about Lack (AS SHE CLIMBED ACROSS THE TABLE maybe?). this collection is no exception.
it starts strong actually, with a deep dive into a trash John Wayne western and his obsession with defending it - and by extension his own budding ideas of taste, subversion and identity. there's a particularly insightful passage where he seems to realize that it was never about the film, it was about him not being able to communicate clearly and engage with the world.
after that the collection nosedives into nerd pretension at truly cringe-inducing levels. the usual suspects rear their heads, Star Wars, "safe" punk music i.e. Talking Heads, Philip Dick and comic books chiefly among them, all erudite loner signifiers of one stripe or another. the issue here isn't that these topics have been exhaustively and much more eloquently written about, it's that, just like in CHRONIC CITY, Lethem seems uninterested in taking the reader with him into his obsessions. rather, he namedrops genre luminaries (or not - how are we to know?) and references and, at the nadir of this kind of navel-gazing blog ramble, recognizes that he's alienating the reader and even types it out more than once but barrels right along afterward. In the Dick essay (a very bad one) he takes the author to task for wildly inconsistent writing, "even within the same sentence", which is pretty rich.
throughout, and despite Lethem's attempts to stave it off, there's this overwhelming stench of smugness that's truly difficult to plow through. objectively he had a version of a rough childhood, growing up in various doomed hippie communes around irresponsible people, and dealing with the death of a parent can absolutely not be understated. but it really does scream entitled Manhattan kid (he's not from that part) on every page.
there's an essay on his father's artwork which skirts the father/son dynamic almost entirely, i mean, why else read something like this? why would i care about some middling painter in NY without any kind of personal connection? and i say this as an art history major. at least include some images (rather than your author portrait alone, something which i'm sure felt poignant but fails completely). and there's a late entry on Cassavetes that i just skipped because who cares. this is going to be more of the same signaling. a final essay attempting a connection between music and his upbringing tries but also fails to make much of an impact.
the structure is also flawed - many of the essays are just paragraph bullet points, some of them even numbered, talk about phoning it in. all told there's one good essay here (the first) with absolute therapy-session cutting floor drivel to pad it out. at 160 pages total you might suspect that, and you'd be right.
maybe he's just too old and too "New York" for me. i found the gen x (but felt boomer) nostalgia porn too much to bear and writing to be self-indulgent in the extreme. does this kind of thing even have an audience bigger than the writer?
(special shoutout to the atrocious cover on the edition i read)
it starts strong actually, with a deep dive into a trash John Wayne western and his obsession with defending it - and by extension his own budding ideas of taste, subversion and identity. there's a particularly insightful passage where he seems to realize that it was never about the film, it was about him not being able to communicate clearly and engage with the world.
after that the collection nosedives into nerd pretension at truly cringe-inducing levels. the usual suspects rear their heads, Star Wars, "safe" punk music i.e. Talking Heads, Philip Dick and comic books chiefly among them, all erudite loner signifiers of one stripe or another. the issue here isn't that these topics have been exhaustively and much more eloquently written about, it's that, just like in CHRONIC CITY, Lethem seems uninterested in taking the reader with him into his obsessions. rather, he namedrops genre luminaries (or not - how are we to know?) and references and, at the nadir of this kind of navel-gazing blog ramble, recognizes that he's alienating the reader and even types it out more than once but barrels right along afterward. In the Dick essay (a very bad one) he takes the author to task for wildly inconsistent writing, "even within the same sentence", which is pretty rich.
throughout, and despite Lethem's attempts to stave it off, there's this overwhelming stench of smugness that's truly difficult to plow through. objectively he had a version of a rough childhood, growing up in various doomed hippie communes around irresponsible people, and dealing with the death of a parent can absolutely not be understated. but it really does scream entitled Manhattan kid (he's not from that part) on every page.
there's an essay on his father's artwork which skirts the father/son dynamic almost entirely, i mean, why else read something like this? why would i care about some middling painter in NY without any kind of personal connection? and i say this as an art history major. at least include some images (rather than your author portrait alone, something which i'm sure felt poignant but fails completely). and there's a late entry on Cassavetes that i just skipped because who cares. this is going to be more of the same signaling. a final essay attempting a connection between music and his upbringing tries but also fails to make much of an impact.
the structure is also flawed - many of the essays are just paragraph bullet points, some of them even numbered, talk about phoning it in. all told there's one good essay here (the first) with absolute therapy-session cutting floor drivel to pad it out. at 160 pages total you might suspect that, and you'd be right.
maybe he's just too old and too "New York" for me. i found the gen x (but felt boomer) nostalgia porn too much to bear and writing to be self-indulgent in the extreme. does this kind of thing even have an audience bigger than the writer?
(special shoutout to the atrocious cover on the edition i read)
July 14, 2017
Near the end of The Disappointment Artist, Jonathan Lethem describes what it means to be an artist that underwhelms. When writing about seminal figures such as Stanley Kubrick, Don DeLillo, and Jean-Luc Godard, he explains, "It was as though in their coolness these artists had sensed my oversized needs and turned away, flinched from what I'd asked them to feel on my behalf. I blamed them, anyway. My declaring a writer or musician or director my favorite, it seemed, contained a kind of suicide pact for my enthusiasm. The disappointment artist was me" (142). Lethem articulates several interesting ideas about the risks of artistic creation and the reception of said creation. Lethem seemingly wants or needs the artist of his admiration to "feel" what their art provokes him into feeling.
This is precisely the problem. Paradoxically enough, by creating art that "stirred" him, these artists also immunized themselves from feeling what Lethem feels. By refusing to feel, the artists contradict what Lethem conceptualizes the artist to be. Lethem registers his disappointment earlier on page 142 by writing, "The artists who'd seemed to promise the most were the ones who'd created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk" (142). As this collection of essays illustrates, it is the emotional risk, not the conceptual risk that matters most. To a frustrating degree, the Kubricks and Godards of the world fail because they refuse to engage with the emotion of their art.
To Lethem's credit, he does not shrink from emotional engagement the way some artists do. He writes persuasively and with unapologetic pathos about his mother's premature death and his fraught but ultimately amicable relationship with his father.
It should be clear at this point that The Disappointment Artist is preoccupied with fandom and reception. The first essay, "Defending The Searchers," is a whimsical exposition on his ambivalent relationship with the deeply problematic Western, The Searchers. Like many of the essays in The Disappointment Artist, "Defending The Searchers" is about how fans perpetually overestimate the quality of a particular piece of art, only to then over-compensate once they course-correct. Therefore, fandom is an exercise in weathering the tides of shifting sensibilities, whether those shifting sensibilities are cultural, personal, or both. This suggests that fandom is flux, an endeavor of ever-changing recalibrations where we realize we have asked too much of the art we adore. While this is not a new idea, Lethem's direct and playful approach makes this collection utterly invaluable.
This is precisely the problem. Paradoxically enough, by creating art that "stirred" him, these artists also immunized themselves from feeling what Lethem feels. By refusing to feel, the artists contradict what Lethem conceptualizes the artist to be. Lethem registers his disappointment earlier on page 142 by writing, "The artists who'd seemed to promise the most were the ones who'd created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk" (142). As this collection of essays illustrates, it is the emotional risk, not the conceptual risk that matters most. To a frustrating degree, the Kubricks and Godards of the world fail because they refuse to engage with the emotion of their art.
To Lethem's credit, he does not shrink from emotional engagement the way some artists do. He writes persuasively and with unapologetic pathos about his mother's premature death and his fraught but ultimately amicable relationship with his father.
It should be clear at this point that The Disappointment Artist is preoccupied with fandom and reception. The first essay, "Defending The Searchers," is a whimsical exposition on his ambivalent relationship with the deeply problematic Western, The Searchers. Like many of the essays in The Disappointment Artist, "Defending The Searchers" is about how fans perpetually overestimate the quality of a particular piece of art, only to then over-compensate once they course-correct. Therefore, fandom is an exercise in weathering the tides of shifting sensibilities, whether those shifting sensibilities are cultural, personal, or both. This suggests that fandom is flux, an endeavor of ever-changing recalibrations where we realize we have asked too much of the art we adore. While this is not a new idea, Lethem's direct and playful approach makes this collection utterly invaluable.
September 22, 2024
A random pick discovered while searching for essay collections at my local library, The Disappointment Artist is my first reading by Lethem, and a delightful reminder of the power engagement with creativity allows as one matures. Indeed, I find Lethem’s exuberant expression of artistic, literary, and cinematic influences inspirational, particularly as reading about them constantly forced me to think of my own teenage years – as well as my early twenties – when consumption of art, film, and literature were the only friends that helped me connect with myself, rather than feeling that all-too-persistent need to present a socially acceptable version of myself.
The essays I most connected with are:
“You Don’t Know Dick” - its poignant emphasis upon obsession, combined with a subtle criticism of various elements of Dick’s oeuvre, and Lethem’s ultimate realisation that even our greatest literary heroes likely have something within them that we despise. Need that take away from the enjoyment of the work? Both Lethem and I think not.
“The Beards” - which effectively sums up all the key influences discussed in depth in the preceding essays. It concludes the series of essays with a reflection of self-creation that aligns around the vortex of his mother’s death, his family’s openness to the “life of the artist,” and the multiple directions his outward consumption of culture took. As a culmination of the collection, it works well.
3 (more like 3.5) stars. Reading this book gave me outright permission to examine my own cultural influences and how they colour my worldview, reading and writing styles, as well as the memories of how cultural influences eked their way into my life, either through curiosity or outright rejection of the responses of family and friends who never quite got my consumptive cultural habits. As a memoir, the text is eminently readable; the only conflict that arose was my tremendous unfamiliarity with most of his influences. Still, that didn’t prohibit the ability to take inspiration in how he lovingly presented the powerful connection to the creative that beats at the heart of each essay. Reasonably enjoyable.
The essays I most connected with are:
“You Don’t Know Dick” - its poignant emphasis upon obsession, combined with a subtle criticism of various elements of Dick’s oeuvre, and Lethem’s ultimate realisation that even our greatest literary heroes likely have something within them that we despise. Need that take away from the enjoyment of the work? Both Lethem and I think not.
“The Beards” - which effectively sums up all the key influences discussed in depth in the preceding essays. It concludes the series of essays with a reflection of self-creation that aligns around the vortex of his mother’s death, his family’s openness to the “life of the artist,” and the multiple directions his outward consumption of culture took. As a culmination of the collection, it works well.
3 (more like 3.5) stars. Reading this book gave me outright permission to examine my own cultural influences and how they colour my worldview, reading and writing styles, as well as the memories of how cultural influences eked their way into my life, either through curiosity or outright rejection of the responses of family and friends who never quite got my consumptive cultural habits. As a memoir, the text is eminently readable; the only conflict that arose was my tremendous unfamiliarity with most of his influences. Still, that didn’t prohibit the ability to take inspiration in how he lovingly presented the powerful connection to the creative that beats at the heart of each essay. Reasonably enjoyable.
January 17, 2022
The title essay is about forgotten American author Edward Dahlberg, who Lethem judges as having written "one towering book" and of being more intelligent, perhaps, than he was talented or wise.
Midway through this collection I wondered if Lethem identified with Dahlberg, and then there it was in the final piece: "My declaring a writer or musician or director my favorite, it seemed, contained a kind of suicide pact for my enthusiasm. The disappointment artist was me."
Judging by this book, the first I've read by him, Lethem is better at cultural criticism than memoir, and better at both than his attempts to combine the two. (An essay about seeing Star Wars 21 times when his mother was dying never transcends description of the experience.)
In the best piece, "Lives of the Bohemians," Lethem anchors his searching nostalgia to his father's life as an artist/carpenter. He remembers altering a line in one of his paintings, confessing "the wish to climb inside my father's hand, inside his eye and hand and brush."
I'm allergic to nostalgia for '70s NYC, so I'm far from Lethem's ideal reader, but mostly I just wanted more insight or moral clarity or evidence of his maturation beyond the younger version of himself that he's describing. To be fair, Lethem seems conscious of this weakness.
Midway through this collection I wondered if Lethem identified with Dahlberg, and then there it was in the final piece: "My declaring a writer or musician or director my favorite, it seemed, contained a kind of suicide pact for my enthusiasm. The disappointment artist was me."
Judging by this book, the first I've read by him, Lethem is better at cultural criticism than memoir, and better at both than his attempts to combine the two. (An essay about seeing Star Wars 21 times when his mother was dying never transcends description of the experience.)
In the best piece, "Lives of the Bohemians," Lethem anchors his searching nostalgia to his father's life as an artist/carpenter. He remembers altering a line in one of his paintings, confessing "the wish to climb inside my father's hand, inside his eye and hand and brush."
I'm allergic to nostalgia for '70s NYC, so I'm far from Lethem's ideal reader, but mostly I just wanted more insight or moral clarity or evidence of his maturation beyond the younger version of himself that he's describing. To be fair, Lethem seems conscious of this weakness.
April 2, 2021
The small book contains some amazing, autobiographical essays by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. My favorite is the title essay in which Lethem shares his fascination with the world class misanthrope and crank, Edward Dahlberg. A sometime proletarian novelist and author of one decent memoir, Dahlberg spent his life deriding every other truly great writer of his own and previous ages, when not mocking the hopes and dreams of those poor souls who came to his writing classes. Another favorite essay of mine is devoted to Lethem's fascination with the extremely uneven achievements of the Sci Fi master, Philip K. Dick. Evidently, much of what he wrote is simply terrible. Then Lethem takes on his father, the painter Richard Lethem, but with a kinder touch. I don't want to forget Lethem's fascination with Star Wars, leading him too watch the first movie 21 times. And don't miss his piece on the renowned subway stop at Hoyt-Schermerhorn.
December 28, 2018
I had a hard time getting into this book of essays initially, in part because much of it centers on Lethem's experience as a teenage boy (something that's inherently difficult for me to relate to). However, I was really fascinated by his relationship with his father, and his father's own artistic practice, both of which weave through the book. I also appreciated some of the film and music criticism (as someone who writes about film and media myself). Like everything else I've read by Lethem, it's smart and thought-provoking, if not always (for this reader) entirely engaging. And, for any Lethem superfans like myself out there, it's also fun to see how some of his own experiences have found their way into his novels.
November 8, 2017
It is depressing to realize that there are guys on this planet even crazier than yourself. Lethem loves to love. And when he finds an object to love he loves it without constraints. Every book by Dick (and he does include a list of his favorites), The Searchers, Star Wars, Stanley Kubrick, King Kirby, Talking Heads to name just a few.
The essay on Kirby is full of wonderful insights into the soul of a young comic fan aiming to be a real intellectual artist. I did not care that much about the piece on Cassavetes (though I do will try to watch one or two of his movies now) and on his father. But everything else shines beautifully.
The essay on Kirby is full of wonderful insights into the soul of a young comic fan aiming to be a real intellectual artist. I did not care that much about the piece on Cassavetes (though I do will try to watch one or two of his movies now) and on his father. But everything else shines beautifully.
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