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[ing] 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... [but] 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)