The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem

Remember everything I said about how dumb it is when writers just publish a bunch of their essays and it’s mad boring and I hate it?

SYKE. I totally love it.

Or, ok, well, Jonathan Franzen is a writer I like, but I don’t love him. He doesn’t make my heart flutter or anything like that. Jonathan Lethem on the other hand, is amazing. Motherless Brooklyn?! As She Crawled Across the Table?! The first half of Fortress of Solitude?

This guy is the new Chabon. And by “new” I mean “contemporary,” which works, right?

Anyway, the Disappointment Artist is half autobiographical and half sort of a collection on what it means to be an artist, if by artist you mean Jonathan Lethem. But really what it is a dedication to the obsessive cultural behaviors that have come to define a lot of male American novelists.

Lethem talks about his passion for comic books, for a movie no one else seems to like, for music, for trying to seem like a grown up when he’s just a kid, for subway trips — basically, for being completely ashamed and overwhelmingly proud of being a big nerd, all while handling the loss of his mom. Lethem is Lethem’s characters. Hell, Lethem is Oscar Wao, Lethem is Chabon’s audience. He’s the embodiment of the new American (hip) canon, and The Disappointment Artist defines what that means.

Not that there isn’t a heck of a lot of nasty stuff you could say about that — big social critiques, etc. — but screw that. This stuff is readable and interesting if you’re also a big middle-class urban nerd. I’ll leave the cannibalism and attacks to n+1 and/or Franzen. For now, anyway.

How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

You remember Jonathan Franzen, right? He’s the badass writer who was all like, “Screw you, Oprah,” when she wanted to make his massive (and fantastic) novel The Corrections part of her book club.

Also, you may remember when I complained about Mythical Jews on a Hike or whatever that Chabon book was. See, How to Be Alone is like that. Sometimes writers who are good write things that are bad. It’s a lot easier to deal with when the writers are dead — a guy like Philip K. Dick, for instance, wrote a lot of shit — but when they’re alive there’s all this money spent trying to convince you to buy these books, these horrible boring books, full of essays for which a writer has already gotten paid by a magazine and is now looking to fulfill a contract or line his pockets or not be forgotten by binding all this shit together and sending it back out into the world.

See, Franzen is nearly humorless in these essays. My housemate, who liked the book, says he is just dry, and that I’m not getting it, but I think the guy is a bore. If you’re going to write about yourself, you’ve got to make it funny. Or sincere. Anything but earnest. And these essays are horribly, butt-numbingly earnest. Shouldn’t a writer just save that kind of crap for letters home to the wife or something?

And here’s the deal — Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is funny and sad and compelling. Notice I say memoir. Maybe Franzen hears the word “essay” and he assumes that means it’s gotta be lame — some kind of PTSD to high school. Who knows?

That said, as a former Chicago resident who didn’t get her college acceptance letter until two months after she received housing information, I can say that the essay on the particularly nasty mail service in the city was a nice piece of reporting.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders

I usually don’t like taking from other folks’ reviews, because why would I write one if there are enough out there already, but since this quote printed on the inner flap I figure I’ll just treat it like the rest of the text:

“Imagine Lewis’s Babbitt thrown into the backseat of a car going cross-country, driven by R. Crumb, Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Harvey Pekar or Spike Jonze. That’d be a story Saunders could tell.” –New York Times

While I don’t entirely know what that means, I do like the idea of all those people in the car together, maybe driving through the Midwest down to Florida, but not in that whole “exploring the real America stopping in small towns way,” because that is a long, boring drive if you do that. Instead maybe they’re just collecting all the pressed pennies at all the truck stops before getting to Disney World. I think that’d be a fun trip.

But it has nothing to do with George Saunders or Reign of Phil (which has a great site with some delightful tossed sections from the book, btw). The rest of the reviews compare this jaunty little parable from the author of Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline like the second coming of Animal Farm. Because book reviewers are lazy.

Reign of Phil is dark without being menacing (Animal Farm is menacing); it’s story of the eventual rise of a despot doesn’t really show how a despot comes to power. It’s way more like Abbot’s Flatland + the Bush years + nitrous oxide.

And here’s the deal — anyone who picks out this weirdly orange illustrated book by George Saunders, humorist, short story writer, New Yorker contributer,  is not being shocked by this book. As an anti-Bush satire, it’s like, “uh, ok, sure.” As an analysis of human behavior, it’s like, “Yeah, ok.”

But there’s a reason that people fall all over themselves to compliment Saunders — he can put substance into giddy writing. He can make reading something fun. And as more and more funny people focus on writing collections of personal essays, it’s a precious and valuable thing.