THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST

This book shows the development of Jonathan Lethem''s imagination through the movies, comics and books he read as a child - it is a rich mixture of personal memories and cultural commentaries. In the title piece, a letter from his aunt (a children''s book author) spurs a meditation on the value of writing workshops, the role and influence of reviews, 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 artefacts. 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...'', becomes a meditation on the sorrow and solace of the solitary moviegoer. Novelist Lethem''s new collection of essays starts with an intriguing, if emotionally distant, consideration of his lifelong relationship with popular culture and develops into a moving memoir that transcends those references altogether. As the essays make clear, Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude) has always been obsessive: he watched Star Wars 21 times the summer it was released, then followed that with 21 viewings of 2001 a few years later; the novels of Philip K. Dick played as large a role in his growing artistic vision as did the canvases of his father, painter Richard Lethem. But the collection doesn''t find its purpose until the author strips away the pop culture references to get at what really drives him: the childhood his hippie parents provided for him, his father''s artistic influence on him, his mother''s early death. The book picks up steam especially in the essay ''Lives of the Bohemians,'' a simple and direct family history in which, for the first time here, Lethem''s depiction of himself as a child feels genuine rather than theorized, lived rather than considered. By the end, Lethem fully and beautifully bares himself, admitting that he, like so many, is driven by loss. Only then does he write the truest sentence possible: ''I find myself speaking about my mother''s death everywhere I go in this world.''