I enjoyed this short novel. It has physicists and anthrolpologists, blind men, grad students, a psychiatrist, oh and a creature composed of nothingness (entirely made of the absence of anything) that has its own personality and is picky. It is a darkly funny and sarcastic story about love and obsession, while at the same time we are pulled through an academic discussion of what it is to have, and to lack.

“Ah love.
L
O
V
E
love.
L is for life. I mean what is life without love?
O for OH WOW!
V is for this very surprising turn of events which i am still fine with by the way.
E is for how extreeemeely normal I find it that you two are together and that one day you might get married… and have children of your own…”

I believe Ross (from Friends) best describes this book.

After Middlemarch, Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist was a much needed change of pace. Through his essays which are mostly autobiographical/memoir, we learn about the incredibly obsessive adolescence of the author. Which is really the best descriptor of what he was, really really obsessive.

The essays lead us through his influences, his influence largely having driven his young life: collecting all of Philip K. Dick’s work (and reading the “irv” twice), seeing Star Wars twenty-one times in a single summer, matching that number with 2001, jumping from author to author, compulsively digesting their style before moving on to the next.

The focus mostly stays on reading and film-viewing, with some nods to music-listening, and a reasonably thorough description of his parents and their nyc-hippie lifestyle. Most interestingly to me though is so clearly being able to state who his influences are, and each with an associated time period. This is something I simply cannot do; I know generally who and what I have read, but never anyone so many times or so completely sit in my mind with a period of my life. I am too scattered for such determined focus.