“I grew up in a house full of paintings and books,” Jonathan Lethem writes in his introduction to Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visible Tradition (2024). “My father made the paintings and my mother handed me the books.” From that artistic-literary background, Lethem went on to turn out to be an acclaimed novelist, essayist, and brief story author — and, because the texts on this guide show, an out-of-the-ordinary aficionado of artwork.
The “Fictions of Art” part of the guide, the primary of 5, options examples of Lethem writing parallel to, somewhat than instantly about, an artist’s work. “I couldn’t do art writing, or perhaps I wanted to invent another version of what art writing would be,” he explains, “so, I wrote what I always wrote: scenes and situations and voices, characters and set pieces, sprung from my response to the art.”
The ensuing textual content shouldn’t be ekphrastic writing, neither is it the type of easy fiction of the type Ann Patchett, Louise Erdrich, Richard Russo, and firm penned in response to Linden Frederick’s darkish work of Maine. Lethem’s piece on Fred Tomaselli, for instance, takes the type of a letter to a buddy describing a go to to the artist’s studio in Brooklyn. In the midst of relating their interactions, he does provide some essential studying. “His work is celebratory,” Lethem states, “and I find it explosively happy even when the drugs or some of the other imagery takes on a somewhat ominous overtone.” However the remainder of the piece is extra entertaining than incisive, an account of their day in Williamsburg that features lunch at Peter Luger’s.
E-book cowl of Jonathan Lethem, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visible Tradition (2024), revealed by ZE Books
Lethem’s texts are sometimes splendidly absurdist, echoing his fiction, akin to his surreal detective story, Gun, With Occasional Music (1994). In an homage to Perry Hoberman, a brand new media artist who typically incorporates machines in his installations, he affords a sequence of droll vignettes. Right here’s one: “You call Missing Persons, and get your own answering machine. You wait to leave a message, but the beep never comes. The beep never comes. The beep never comes. Beep.” This amusing little bit of farce aligns with Hoberman’s deal with folks and expertise.
A part of the pleasure of this assortment is the variety of artwork practices Lethem covers. In a single part he pays tribute to graffiti, which, he writes, “inserts itself like the blade of a knife between creation and destruction, between publicity and furtiveness, between word and image, cartoon, icon and hieroglyph” — an eloquent solution to describe this fugitive artwork type. He additionally highlights his love of comics and cartoons, “objectified books,” and the Italian verbo-visual artist Mirella Bentivoglio’s stone typewriter, amongst many different topics.
The gathering ends with two essays associated to the creator’s father. Within the first, “My Father Has Started a Painting” (which additionally serves because the foreword to a brand new guide of Richard Brown Lethem’s poems, Roots, Stones & Baggage (2023)), he shares reminiscences of how the aforementioned childhood family with its studio and library formed his worldview.
Lethem admits up entrance to struggling some artist envy. “I’m sure I’m not the first writer,” he muses, “to yearn for the seemingly more grounded and absolute situation of the painter or sculptor, who dwells in what looks to be an enviable realm of craft, routine, and expertise.” As a once-upon-a-time painter himself, in figuring out with visible artists, Lethem is “searching for a lost self,” as he places it. With this assortment of sundry tributes to painters, sculptors, and the like, he’s nicely on his solution to discovering it.
Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visible Tradition (2024) by Jonathan Lethem, revealed by ZE Books, is on the market for buy on-line and in bookstores.
