The Disappointment Artist, Jonathan Lethem
The Disappointment Artist, Jonathan Lethem
List: $8.48 | Sale: $5.94
Club: $4.24

The Disappointment Artist
Selected Unabridged Essays

Author: Jonathan Lethem

Narrator: Jonathan Lethem

Abridged: 3 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/15/2005


Synopsis

In a volume he describes as “a series of covert and no-so-covert autobiographical pieces,” Jonathan Lethem explores the nature of cultural obsession—in his case, with examples as diverse as western films, comic books, the music of Talking Heads and Pink Floyd, and the New York City subway. Along the way, he shows how each of these “voyages out from himself” have led him home—home to his father's life as a painter, and 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 as a human creature in the jungle of culture at the end of the twentieth century.

From a confession of the sadness of a “Star Wars nerd” to an investigation into the legacy of a would-be literary titan, Lethem illuminates the process by which a child invents himself as a writer, and as a human being, through a series of approaches to the culture around him. In “The Disappointment Artist,” a letter from his aunt, a children’s book author, spurs a meditation on the value of writing workshops, and the uncomfortable fraternity of writers. In “Defending The Searchers” Lethem explains how a passion for the classic John Wayne Western became occasion for a series of minor humiliations. In “Identifying with Your Parents,” an excavation of childhood love for superhero comics expands to cover a whole range of nostalgia for a previous generation’s cultural artifacts. And “13/1977/21,” which begins by recounting the summer he saw Star Wars twenty-one times, “slipping past ushers who’d begun to recognize me . . . occult as a porn customer,” becomes a meditation on the sorrow and solace of the solitary movie-goer.

THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST confirms Lethem's unique ability to illuminate the way life, his and ours, can be read between the lines of art and culture.

About The Author

Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of two short story collections, Men and Cartoons and The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye, and the editor of The Vintage Book of Amnesia. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Granta, and Harper’s. He lives in Brooklyn and Maine.


Reviews

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 y......more

Goodreads review by Mattia

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.......more

Goodreads review by W.D.

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 Jo......more

Goodreads review by Jan

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......more

Goodreads review by Farren

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'......more


Quotes

"Lethem is one of our most perceptive cultural critics, conversant in both the high and low realms, his insights buffeted by his descriptive imagination."
Los Angeles Times Book Review

"He fearlessly analyzes his influences--movies, books, artists, friends, parents--and his insights are highly personal, but also often universal, and thus these essays reach the highest goal of the memoir form."
The Seattle Times

"This is a gem of a book. . . . Heartbreaking. . . . Mesmerizing. . . . A form of smuggled autobiography. . . . With a few deft strokes, the reader is left with a vivid image of Lethem’s childhood." —The New York Observer

"Moving. . . . Absolutely fascinating. . . . Dense with allusion and insight." —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“These marvelous explorations take us into the hiding places of the psyche, where second thoughts are assessed, secret-sharer sins confessed, and grief and loss redressed. In a collection as warmly engaging as it is ruminative, Jonathan Lethem shows himself to be as much a master of the personal essay as he is of contemporary fiction.”
—Phillip Lopate