The Disappointment Artist & Other Essays

One of modern literature's great talents sounds off on his various obsessions.
In "Defending the Searchers," the opening essay of The Disappointment Artist, Lethem dons a pair of glasses in order to "appear nerdishly remote and intense," decorating his "outer self with a confession of inner reality." His recorded voice achieves the same effect — as though by reading with the cool detachment of a film-studies professor or a psychoanalyst, his inner reality will be laid bare. And it is. "The Disappointment Artist" seems meant for headphones.

The Disappointment Artist collects essays confessing obsessions with everything from the John Wayne western The Searchers to the "Heavenly Music Corporation" side of Fripp & Eno's No Pussyfooting album. Ultimately, Lethem admits to using his fixations to escape the central, defining tragedy in his life: the death of his mother. But it runs much deeper than this. "I learned to think by watching my father paint," Lethem reflects in "The Lives of the Bohemians," revealing how profoundly personally he takes art, and how this autodidact came to be.

By the time I arrived at "The Beards," which Lethem calls a "coda" for the collection because it “pulls threads out of all” the preceding essays in order “to account for them,” I realized that this book had achieved a similar kind of accounting for Lethem’s entire body of fiction. It was not just the words in the essays, but his voice as well — its remoteness a confession all its own.