Novelists' essay collections tend to read like annotations to their fiction, and that's certainly the case with Jonathan Lethem's The Disappointment Artist. Across Disappointment's nine essays, Lethem visits themes and bits of autobiography his readers will recognize as the real-life analogs to his narrative work, particularly his mammoth, semi-autobiographical novel The Fortress Of Solitude. For stretches, it feels like a non-fiction remix of that book: Lethem's pop-culture obsessions and personal history conspire to create a sense of a past that won't quite abandon its grip on the author.
Here as elsewhere, Lethem's work gives the lie to the notion that the art people love and the lives they lead can be separated. In the collection-opening essay "Defending The Searchers," Lethem traces his relationship with the John Ford classic across several decades of repeat viewings. In each case, the circumstances of the screening and the events of Lethem's life change how he sees it. That's bound to happen, of course, but Lethem—who drew heavily from the film for his novel Girl In Landscape—digs beneath this to ponder whether something about the film itself keeps its story of obsession elusive to even the most obsessive admirers. Then again, any work that inspires obsession might by definition have to remain elusive. In "Identifying With Your Parents," Lethem uses Jack Kirby's inglorious mid-'70s return to Marvel Comics to focus his thoughts on how his parents' tastes informed his own, and how creators and consumers alike engage in an ongoing process of embracing and denying what's come before.
The best essays in The Disappointment Artist, however, erase boundaries separating the personal world from the world at large. After claiming "I learned to think by watching my father paint" at the opening of "Lives Of The Bohemians," Lethem proves the point with an account of his development as informed by his father's career, including Lethem's efforts to find inspiration in sources antithetical to his father's work. In "13, 1977, 21," Lethem recounts how, at age 13, he took in Star Wars 21 times during the summer when his mother's health was declining; he would later use that entry into a "world of cinema and stories and obsessive identification" to survive her death. "The Beards" closes the book by continuing that theme, recalling the music, films, and role models—from Brian Eno to Stanley Kubrick to bookshop owners-turned-friends—with whom he tried to confront that void. "I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe, they are and do," Lethem writes before concluding, "But still, I asked too much of them." If a theme unifies The Disappointment Artist, it's the idea that finding those limits creates its own kind of understanding.