Memoir: Jonathan Lethem's most recent novel, the Impac Award-shortlisted The Fortress of Solitude, featured a New York kid struggling without his mother, negotiating the complex rules of adolescence while finding sanctuary in comic book heroes, and all to a contemporary soundtrack.
The Disappointment Artist features the same, but isn't fiction. Through a series of essays Lethem charts his various cultural obsessions from childhood into early adulthood, how they shaped him as a writer and how they related to his sense of loss after the death of his mother.
These memoirs, then, work on two levels: as either a personal journey or as a trawl through recent culture that appeals to intellect and nostalgia. There is no need to have read any of Lethem's novels - Motherless Brooklyn is perhaps his best known - to enjoy this collection, although if you happen to be a male child of the 1970s you'll find particular thrills.
For the most part, his obsessions were marketable ones, speaking to thirtysomethings who grew up to find their childhood interests had become cultural landmarks. He writes about the summer he watched Star Wars 21 times, or how he read everything by Philip K Dick - the crummy and the great.
Intelligent and perceptive, when Lethem writes of Marvel Comics artist Jack Kirby's ambitious late work he can say that "it's as though Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Wolfi, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes" because he has created a valid context in which to back up the claim. Although it also allows him the safety hatch of looking back at it from an adolescent perspective.
It is a handy guide to his development as a writer, but more so to a young man who was searching for "depopulated art, for images of sublime alienation. I held out hope of cultivating a discrete and unaffiliated, even solipsistic persona".
He finds great solace, then, in Nicholas Roeg's hallucinatory sci-fi The Man Who Fell To Earth. But Lethem's obsessions often attract humiliation, most notably when his immediate appreciation for John Ford's western The Searchers is not matched by peers who view it as dangerously anachronistic. The excellent title essay on the crabby critic, Edward Dahlberg, is a somewhat melancholy piece about another man's humiliations, a writer whose "failure is immortal". Moreover, it introduces a lost figure of popular culture, not venerated and picked over in the way that Philip K. Dick or John Cassavetes was before Lethem got there.
As is a feature of his fiction, Lethem's prose often over-heats. For instance, he says that when he is switching seats during a movie "the rupture of the spectator's contract with perspective feels as transgressive as wife swapping". This is plainly ridiculous, of course. But there are far more occasions when the writing and rhetoric flow, and Lethem's ransacking of his obsessions not only illuminates his life through the subjects, but sends you in search of them yourself.
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Times journalist
The Disappointment Artist and Other Essays By Jonathan Lethem Faber, 149pp. £10.99
