Cellophane bricks A life in visual culture

Novelist Lethem (Brooklyn Crime Novel)shares an entrancing collection of stories and essays celebrating visual art. The author, who flirted with painting in college before "plung into the etheric realm of language," opens the volume with 12 short stories informed by artists and artworks, including a trippy meditation inspired by an abstract painting by Julian Hoeber, in which Lethem personifies a "Subjective Fog"--loosely, a liminal space "where one margin encounters another." Another story, which draws from the work of multimedia artist Fred Tomaselli, examines the frenetic impulse, and inherent impossibility, of collection ("A 'real' collector tolerated the slippage, the loose and therefore implicitly temporary nature of his hoard... You glued shit to backgrounds like a maniac," says the unnamed narrator). Elsewhere, Lethem pays tribute to the graffiti of his 1970s and '80s New York City youth and sings the praises of comics artist Chester Brown. Combining mind-bending intellectual meditations with a visceral delight in his subject, Lethem's electric prose animates the proceedings (of artist Katie Merz, he notes that she paints on buildings, "though it might appear more as though she's peeled off their skin, to reveal networks of information agitating beneath"). The result is a transfixing look at what it means to make, and admire, art. Illus. (July)

An acclaimed author celebrates creativity. Prolific fiction writer and essayist Lethem gathers his writings on art, most of which were published in catalogs, monographs, or exhibition materials, into a sometimes lyrical, sometimes surreal, always surprising volume, profusely illustrated with images of paintings (including a few of his own early works), sculpture, collages, movie stills, graffiti, book jackets, photographs, and comics. Many are from the author's abundant collection. When artists asked him to write something to accompany their works or exhibitions--writing he saw as "language-cellophane" that "teases at being a transparent window"--he preferred payment in artworks. Lethem grew up in a world of paintings and books: "My father made the paintings and my mother handed me the books, and talked about them, and read them herself. I began wanting to make the paintings before I can remember….I began wanting to make the books too, soon enough." With his father or on class trips, he was a frequent visitor to most of New York's museums, going so often, he recalls, "that I couldn't remember a time before I knew those rooms and some of the furniture inside them." In high school, he would drop in at the Met's Chinese Garden to take an afternoon nap. He pursued the dream of being a painter as a student at the High School of Music and Art, but once he went to college, he put away his "fantasies of becoming a painter, sculptor, cartoonist, or film director" and turned exclusively "to text, to narrative." As this collection of stories, essays, dialogues, and reminiscences reveals, though, Lethem still feels a visceral connection to art: "By identifying with visual artists," he writes, "I'm searching for a lost self" as well as "a continuation, not an interruption" of his father's enduring influence. Astute, often idiosyncratic responses to works of art. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.