Since publishing his debut novel, “Gun With Occasional Music,’ and several follow-up books, including “The Fortress of Solitude’ and National Book Critics Circle Award-winner “Motherless Brooklyn,” Jonathan Lethem has proved that he is a gifted novelist.
And two collections of stories, including the recent, “Men & Cartoons,’ have proved his facility with short fiction. So it comes as no surprise to learn that Lethem is equally adept when working in essay form.
At first blush, his new collection, “The Disappointment Artist,’ may seem to be a collection of essays about inconsequential things like John Wayne flicks, comic books, “Star Wars’ and Philip K. Dick. But like a good fisherman, Lethem is trolling deeper waters, seeking out leviathans of the sort that haunt and obsess us all our lives.
“Defending the Searchers,’ which details a lifelong obsession with trying to set up the perfect screening for that John Ford movie classic, is, in truth, the struggle for perfection in art and the perception that perfection. And Lethem’s need to recount the summer he watched “Star Wars’ 21 times in a row is merely the over-exuberant story lover’s desire to share something good. Of course Lethem is, like all good essayists working with highly personal matter, exploring his past and, in doing so, allowing the reader to contemplate his or her own family secrets.
For Lethem, the darkest secrets are those only touched upon in most of these essays – death and art – but fully explored in the three gems of this collection: the title essay, “Lives of the Bohemians,’ and “The Beards.’
In “The Disappointment Artist,’ Lethem writes of a long-dead, highly revered writer from Kansas, Edward Dahlberg, but the revelations about Dahlberg (that he was a bitter man and writer who most likely turned out one truly good piece of work) are almost overshadowed by the insights into the mind of Lethem’s grandmother, Wilma Yeo, a writer of children’s books. But the work is even more telling, eventually dovetailing with the author’s own thoughts on creativity. And if the reader hasn’t yet figured it out by the end of this book, Lethem happily spells out his other obsession when he writes, “I find myself speaking about my mother’s death everywhere I go in this world.’
For those interested in the secrets that lie within the intersection of art and life, “The Disappointment Artist’ is a revealing glimpse into the soul of one of America’s most interesting young writers.
Dorman T. Shindler, a freelancer from Missouri, is a regular contributor to several magazines and newspapers.
