The disappointment artist

Summary: 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.