Young at heart Jonathan Lethem's life of Disappointment BY SAM PFEIFLE
	THE DISAPPOINTMENT ARTIST By Jonathan Lethem | Doubleday | 149 pages | $22.95

Many writers move from the personal to the detached in their writing careers, debuting with a thinly veiled autobiography, moving toward stronger and more creative mature fiction, then maybe eventually coming back ’round to a memoir, or semi-autobiographical book about their childhoods, in their declining years. Jonathan Lethem has done just the opposite.

His first novel, 1995’s Gun, With Occasional Music, was as disparate from his real life, or anyone’s, as could be, full of walking, talking animals in a future full of "babyheads" (infants who’ve had their intellectual maturation sped up freakishly) and karma points that mustn’t run down. It’s post-modern genre fiction at its finest, aware of and enamored by all of science fiction’s and mystery’s conventions. You’re hard-pressed to put it down.

Throughout the 1990s, Lethem continued with these quirky and sometimes brilliant psuedo-genre pieces — Girl in Landscape, She Climbed Across the Table, Amnesia Moon — before breaking into the public consciousness with Motherless Brooklyn, his first novel to seem to inhabit our actual world. I won’t be cynical and suggest that this most normal of his novels finally got him the recognition he deserved only because his science-fictiony stuff was too scary for dumbed-down Oprah America . . . well, maybe I will. But it’s unimportant.

What’s important is that this book also resides in the Brooklyn where Lethem grew up; it’s full of Brooklyn’s accents and locations. Sure, it’s still a mystery, but in the context of Lethem’s career, it’s clearly a homecoming. Then arrived Fortress of Solitude, a novel that made Lethem hugely popular, and a novel that his new collection of essays, The Disappointment Artist, confirms is intensely autobiographical.

Solitude’s Dylan Ebdus is thinly veiled Lethem. His father’s an artist (Lethem’s father, Richard Brown Lethem, is a visual artist who teaches at USM), his mother’s gone (Lethem’s mother died of cancer), and he grows up in the rough-and-tumble world of a not-quite-gentrified 1970s Brooklyn (uh, just like Lethem). All of this anyone can gather from Lethem’s bio blurbs, but (for the formalist, anyway) The Disappointment Artist adds much color to the world of Solitude and Lethem’s other novels.

The essay collection’s title ostensibly refers to the impossible Edward Dahlberg, a now semi-famous literary figure who taught Lethem’s aunt and about whom Lethem wrote an essay for Harper’s, but it easily morphs into a title Lethem might adopt for himself. His sweet prose is wedded to an air of nostalgia, a looking back that never brings with it a happiness or satisfaction. Right from the beginning, in "Defending The Searchers," Lethem paints for us a self ruthlessly deprecated: To see that John Wayne film for the first time, "I chose my heavy black-rimmed glasses, the ones I wore when I wanted to appear nerdishly remote and intense, as though to decorate my outer self with a confession of inner reality."

In all of these very personal essays, Lethem has pinned his younger self under glass to examine that specimen without ego. Possibly, by telling the world, "I wished to be an adult in order to be forever spared sympathy or condescension, which reminded me too starkly of my helplessness," and identifying himself and his friend as "paltry new teenagers," he can further emphasize his current distance from that state.

Originally written for Modern Painters about his father’s career, in "Lives of the Bohemians" (which can be somewhat of a grind to get through) Lethem paints himself as something of a dick for the first 18 pages, once even "correcting" a painting of his father’s, before "my father allowed me to play prodigal." In the end, he smartens up, matures. He is commenting on his own father’s art, after all, even going so far as to write, "My father had learned a lot . . . The results are some of the least rarified artworks I’ve had the privilege to know."

But does that sound a little too mature? Lethem quickly backtracks into self-deprecation: "All this may be no better than a cartoon rendering, a pass with my ape’s bone of language over the impossible intersection of Richard Lethem’s painting and my wishful thinking." Of course, just using a metaphor like "ape’s bone" shows the reader what Lethem can do (and knows he can do) with language.

They’re the same incredible things he can do with popular culture — and sometimes not-so-popular culture, like the music of Brian Eno. He crushes us with his 21 viewings each of Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey, hiding in the summer of Star Wars from the oncoming death of his mother; escaping that young, scared boy in the "suitably noble and alienated choice" of 2001. And, in "Beards," original to this collection, he separates thoughts with movies and albums, and dates them in reference to his mother: "(1976, mom out of hospital)" or "(1979 or 1980, mom dead)."

The piece tore me apart. In its final pages, Lethem reconnects with his younger self, finding himself "pathetic as that kid." Even if it’s a subconscious ploy to get us devoted readers of his work to call back, "No, you’re not," it’s still incredibly touching.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com