Accismus

The essays in Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist are all very well written, and interesting, more or less. But yet, something about them bothered me, and I think I put my finger on it right around the time Lethem mentioned that when he was a kid in Brooklyn, he used to ride the subway every day to his performing arts school, with his friend and classmate, Lynn Nottage. Many of the essays in this book concern New York City, and life in New York City. The rest are meditations on books and movies.

Lethem was raised by a well-known painter. His mother died when he was 13. He lived in a commune for part of his upbringing. He spent his childhood surrounded by his parents’ Bohemian friends, and went to an arts high school in New York with a bunch of other students who have gone on to be known names. They were raised in an interesting place by interesting people, and taught from a young age that they were bound to be interesting themselves. In the same way as some people are raised in wealth, others are raised in art, and all these writers, playwrights, actors, etc. were to the manor born. There’s nothing wrong with Lethem’s writing or what he’s writing about, and it’s not like he’s never left New York – why, he went to Bennington, then lived in California! – but yet, I was bored by his well-written meditations on the various movies, writers and filmmakers that shaped him, as well as his experiences in a Brooklyn not sufficiently long gone to be so nostalgic about (Lethem was only about 40 when this essay collection was published).

You do not have to live an interesting life in order to be an interesting writer. Perhaps you have to live an interesting life to be an interesting personal essayist, however, or, barring that, at least be really funny. Certainly, you can write great fiction no matter how narrow and dull your circle, and Lethem has mostly been feted for his novels, none of which I’ve read, although I plan to at some point. Reading these essays, however, made me feel like I was sitting in a grad school MFA workshop listening to everyone read essays about being graduate MFA students, and reminiscing fondly about those long-ago days when they were but callow undergrads.

John Leonard in the New York Review of Books:

I’m glad to learn from The Disappointment Artist that Lethem’s father is more interesting than Dylan’s was; that his mother, unlike Dylan’s, didn’t abandon her boy out of narcissism; that Jonathan, unlike Dylan, has siblings. And I am sorry that none of us can fly, besides which we’re opaque. But it is time this gifted writer closed his comic books for good. Superpowers are not what magic realism was about in Bulgakov, Kobo Abe, Salman Rushdie, or the Latin American flying carpets. That Michael Chabon and Paul Auster have gone graphic, that one Jonathan, Lethem, writes on and on about John Ford, while another Jonathan, Franzen, writes on and on about “Peanuts,” even as Rick Moody confides to the Times Book Review that “comics are currently better at the sociology of the intimate gesture than literary fiction is,” may just mean that the slick magazines with the scratch and sniff ads for vodka and opium are willing to pay a bundle for bombast about ephemera.

But all of it makes me itch. Welcome to New Dork! We have been airpopped and multimediated unto inanity and pastiche.