A review by colin_cox
The Disappointment Artist: Essays by Jonathan Lethem
5.0
Near the end of The Disappointment Artist, Jonathan Lethem describes what it means to be an artist that underwhelms. When writing about seminal figures such as Stanley Kubrick, Don DeLillo, and Jean-Luc Godard, he explains, "It was as though in their coolness these artists had sensed my oversized needs and turned away, flinched from what I'd asked them to feel on my behalf. I blamed them, anyway. My declaring a writer or musician or director my favorite, it seemed, contained a kind of suicide pact for my enthusiasm. The disappointment artist was me" (142). Lethem articulates several interesting ideas about the risks of artistic creation and the reception of said creation. Lethem seemingly wants or needs the artist of his admiration to "feel" what their art provokes him into feeling.
This is precisely the problem. Paradoxically enough, by creating art that "stirred" him, these artists also immunized themselves from feeling what Lethem feels. By refusing to feel, the artists contradict what Lethem conceptualizes the artist to be. Lethem registers his disappointment earlier on page 142 by writing, "The artists who'd seemed to promise the most were the ones who'd created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk" (142). As this collection of essays illustrates, it is the emotional risk, not the conceptual risk that matters most. To a frustrating degree, the Kubricks and Godards of the world fail because they refuse to engage with the emotion of their art.
To Lethem's credit, he does not shrink from emotional engagement the way some artists do. He writes persuasively and with unapologetic pathos about his mother's premature death and his fraught but ultimately amicable relationship with his father.
It should be clear at this point that The Disappointment Artist is preoccupied with fandom and reception. The first essay, "Defending The Searchers," is a whimsical exposition on his ambivalent relationship with the deeply problematic Western, The Searchers. Like many of the essays in The Disappointment Artist, "Defending The Searchers" is about how fans perpetually overestimate the quality of a particular piece of art, only to then over-compensate once they course-correct. Therefore, fandom is an exercise in weathering the tides of shifting sensibilities, whether those shifting sensibilities are cultural, personal, or both. This suggests that fandom is flux, an endeavor of ever-changing recalibrations where we realize we have asked too much of the art we adore. While this is not a new idea, Lethem's direct and playful approach makes this collection utterly invaluable.
This is precisely the problem. Paradoxically enough, by creating art that "stirred" him, these artists also immunized themselves from feeling what Lethem feels. By refusing to feel, the artists contradict what Lethem conceptualizes the artist to be. Lethem registers his disappointment earlier on page 142 by writing, "The artists who'd seemed to promise the most were the ones who'd created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk" (142). As this collection of essays illustrates, it is the emotional risk, not the conceptual risk that matters most. To a frustrating degree, the Kubricks and Godards of the world fail because they refuse to engage with the emotion of their art.
To Lethem's credit, he does not shrink from emotional engagement the way some artists do. He writes persuasively and with unapologetic pathos about his mother's premature death and his fraught but ultimately amicable relationship with his father.
It should be clear at this point that The Disappointment Artist is preoccupied with fandom and reception. The first essay, "Defending The Searchers," is a whimsical exposition on his ambivalent relationship with the deeply problematic Western, The Searchers. Like many of the essays in The Disappointment Artist, "Defending The Searchers" is about how fans perpetually overestimate the quality of a particular piece of art, only to then over-compensate once they course-correct. Therefore, fandom is an exercise in weathering the tides of shifting sensibilities, whether those shifting sensibilities are cultural, personal, or both. This suggests that fandom is flux, an endeavor of ever-changing recalibrations where we realize we have asked too much of the art we adore. While this is not a new idea, Lethem's direct and playful approach makes this collection utterly invaluable.